Resistance Equals Pain

If there is suffering or discomfort, there is resistance. Addictions or attachments to people and circumstances being different than they are needs to be upgraded to a preferences, so when "what is" is not what you want, you do not suffer over it, and your happiness and peace are therefore not controlled by forces outside of you.

People who have many rules about how the way things are suppose to be in life suffer more because no matter how much care they take to protect their rules and see that they are followed by themselves and the world, these rules are often violated. This does not mean a person cannot be goal oriented and work toward making things the way they want; the emotionally healthy person prefers the outcome they seek rather than being attached to them.

The key to handling challenging situations, thoughts, and feelings is not in resisting them, but rather becoming as fully accepting of them as possible. Accept what you think and feel, even if what you think and feel is uncomfortable (or seems unacceptable). Though it looks as if the discomfort is created by the thing we are resisting, in actual fact the discomfort we feel is mostly from our resistance to it and only a fraction from the thing itself.

When we stop resisting, the discomfort stops because there is no block in the flow of energy. Through acceptance, you empower yourself to heal, transform, or release any unresolved mental or emotional material. Unless and until you can accept what you think and feel as a manifestation of reality, you will remain attached to toxic attitudes and beliefs. But by being fully present to and accepting of, situations, thoughts, and feelings you allow yourself to reorganize at progressively higher levels of functioning. When you experience discomfort you are sensing resistance. When you sense resistance, meet it with acceptance. Interestingly, once you stop resisting, you are much more effective in creating any external change you may have a preference for.

Every person has a personal threshold for what they can handle coming at them from their environment, based on their personal map of reality. When a person's map (their concept of who they are and how they relate to the rest of the universe) cannot handle the environment for which it was created, stress is created and the person begins to deal with that stress by exhibiting various coping mechanisms learned during childhood. These include anger, depression, anxiety, fear (and greater and lesser degrees of these), substance abuse, overeating, plus a number of other coping mechanisms considered more "healthy", such as exercising, talking with friends or counselors, isolation, and thousands of others.

Dysfunctional feelings and behaviors are not caused by the environment, or by other people, regardless of how it seems. People with a high threshold for what they can handle coming at them from the world remain happy, peaceful, and centered even when they are around difficult people or in difficult situations.

These coping mechanisms (dysfunctional feelings and behaviors) are really an attempt to keep one's internal map of reality (which is really what is being stressed when one's personal threshold is exceeded) from falling apart, i.e., from going through the natural process that happens when our map of reality cannot handle its environment.

This natural process, based on Nobel Prize-winning research involves the old map going into temporary chaos in response to too much input, finally falling apart when the chaos becomes too much for the map to hold itself together, and then reforming itself at a higher level that can handle the environment that was previously too much for it. This reorganization is a natural process, and always results in a new system/map that can handle what the old system/map could not handle.

It is helpful in this process to recognize when you are in the initial chaos state, and to remind yourself that this is the prelude to positive change if you know how to get out of the way and let it happen.