Meeting Resistance In Your Heart

Before I began my journey of awakening, I experienced a deep sea of darkness (including dread, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and ultimately deep despair) because I did not know how to meet what I was experiencing. As a young adult, I was admitted to psychiatric hospitals and tried to take my own life three times. Then I met Stephen Levine, and through his powerful teachings, I began to investigate my darkness with curiosity and compassion rather than always trying to numb it, fix it, get rid of it, or push it down.  What a relief! Stephen taught me how to go deep and look inside myself rather than bouncing around on the surface. He showed me how to integrate my body and mind into my heart. 

When you resist what you are experiencing, the mind thinks it will be able to make it go away, but any relief this brings is just temporary. When you try to run away from something, it follows you and is amplified. If you turn toward it, however, something opens and that something is your heart. As you bring awareness into that which you have turned away from your whole life, you can explore your blockages, bringing mercy and awareness into the areas of your pain and discomfort that have been frozen inside for so many years. 

Many people experience deep healing at the end of their lives on their deathbeds. Why? Because death has a way of tearing our hearts wide open. As you open to the journey of awakening, you come to realize that you don’t have to wait until you are on your deathbed. You can begin the process of healing now by opening your heart to all of the scary, unacceptable parts of yourself. Opening to all of it will reveal the pathway back to a connection with Life!

So much of this work is about coming home to your heart. Your heart is the doorway. You were so innocent and so open and alive when you were young. But, you were raised in the land of “unconscious giants” (i.e. your parents did the best they could, but they too were raised by unconscious parents) who said and did things that scared you and even hurt you. So you quickly learned that it wasn’t safe to keep your heart open and you escaped into your mind, trying to make things be different than they were. When you came across something you couldn’t control, it woke up the core of your separate self, including your despair, confusion, doubt, anger, resistance – all this deep stuff that felt too painful to experience. 

As I am re-reading Stephen Levine’s brilliant book, Healing into Life and Death, I came across a story that describes so succinctly the healing that has been happening to me for years. In Chapter 6, “A Resistant Strain,” Stephen speaks to the heart of what healing is. While attending a 10-day meditation retreat, he noticed that he was letting everything arise and pass through and he thought he was “at last above it all.” Suddenly an image came to him of his 6-year-old daughter lying face down in a swimming pool, drowned. Then came another vision of his 3-year-old son about to have his head crushed by the wheel of a large piece of machinery. His previous moments of peace dissolved and deep fear arose. The more he insisted that these images go away, the more painful the imagery. He tells us, “My pushing it away was causing it to continue. All of the spaciousness was lost in the density of my resistance.” Slowly, Stephen was able to allow the images to just be there and and it all became what he calls “an object of investigation.” As he brought his awareness to the pain in his body, mind and emotions, it began to melt and “the fever broke.” In other words, the more you awaken, the more you don’t resist what you are experiencing and eventually you aren’t even interested in resisting your resistance to what you are experiencing. This is where you can meet what is going on inside of you with the healing of your heart. 

Think about something in your life right now that you don’t want to experience and recognize how you keep feeding it through your resistance. Know that this resistance is something inside of you that wants to be seen and heard. It is not the enemy, even if it is a compulsion that is causing you to turn away from yourself over and over again. Can you bring awareness and mercy into not only your resistance, but also to the deep feelings that the resistance is trying to take care of? This is consciousness. This is true freedom.

Image – “In the Depths of Atlantis” by Artist Sharon Craft   http://www.sharoncraft.com/