Dealing with Despair in a Troubled World, Part 3: Dealing with Mental Resistance

What is Mental Resistance?  

            Yet another way in which we bring about our own despair is through mental resistance.  In the Buddhist tradition, mental resistance is rebelling against the fact that reality is the way that it is.  It is a failure to accept the fact that this is the way things are right now.  When we engage in mental resistance we create suffering for ourselves and we often drift into a state of despair that prevents us from taking positive action.  The antidote to mental resistance is something called surrender.

            Buddhist teachings about mental resistance and surrender are new and foreign to most of us. Taking a close look at the teachings will show how they can help to us.

            Suppose I have a cold.  In addition to my cold symptoms, I may also be thinking or saying “I shouldn’t be feeling sick right now, I take good care of myself, and I can’t afford to be sick with that big presentation coming up that I have to give. This is just so unfair.”  Essentially, I am saying that things shouldn’t be this way, I don’t want this, I don’t deserve this. But the fact is that this is the way things are right now—I have a cold.  My thinking that things shouldn’t be this way or that I don’t deserve this does not change a thing. I am spending large amounts of my energy railing against the universe for being the way it is.  This is mental resistance.

            I can get mad at an illness or I can see it as just a part of life that people sometimes get sick.  If I am sick I can still do the things available to me to improve my health, but when I get mad at God or the universe for the existence of my illness, I create unnecessary suffering.  It’s the same thing if I get furious with an elected  government official for doing things that cause great harm:  it doesn’t make him or her behave any better, and all that fury and hatred I’m carrying around inside is destructive of my physical health and emotional well being. A useful practice here is to check in with myself and very carefully observe how I feel when I am railing against the universe. I can then ask myself if this doesn’t seem like suffering.  And when I suffer in this way, I tend to lose heart and feel anxious and depressed.

            It is possible to mentally resist almost anything:  a thought or emotion arising inside us, a bodily sensation, another person, a small local event, or a large event at the global level.  In each case, however, the process is exactly the same:   we are rebelling mentally against what is true in that moment, and then we suffer, and our vital energy is depleted.

            In regard to the larger issue of climate change, the facts are that the climate is changing and we’re not doing enough to halt it.  But in addition, I may be saying to myself “People are so stupid, can’t they see that we are all in danger, there is no reason to let it all just happen, it all just makes me so angry that people won’t change.” Again, railing against people for being stupid or not taking action does not get them to take action and it exhausts my energy.

            Instead of doing this, I can notice my suffering and the futility and the wastefulness of what I am doing and ask “What can I actually do to help mitigate climate change?”—and then just do the things that I can do.  When there is acceptance of the various facts about climate change, then we can operate from a focused place of clarity and wisdom, and put all our energy into doing the things we can do to help.  And we will not suffer over what we cannot do, such as making the whole problem go away quickly.  

            And it is important to note here that resignation is not the same as acceptance.  Suppose I say “Well, I accept it, but I hate it!” That is not acceptance. I am still bearing some sort of a grudge against reality for being the way it is. 

The Practice of Surrender 

            In Buddhism, the opposite of wallowing in complaining and saying the world shouldn’t be this way is called surrender.  Surrender is a practice and it doesn’t mean what our upbringing has taught us to think it means.

            The word “surrender” actually has many negative connotations for most Westerners:  it suggests giving up, quitting, and not trying to do anything about a bad situation.   But surrender means something different here.  Surrender means total acceptance of what is real in this moment.  It is surrender to the truth.  In surrender there is not a single part of me that says “This may be the way things are but it shouldn’t be this way.”  Surrender means that whatever exists in the present moment, I accept it as if I had chosen it.  Surrendering in this way promotes seeing a situation clearly, and once I see things clearly, positive actions that I can take often reveal themselves to me.   If no action is possible, then I can simply rest in a state of calm. A little story might help to give a sense of what surrender of this sort feels like.

            Suppose I am walking down a city sidewalk taking care of some errands.  At some point it starts to rain and I have no rain gear.  At first there is agitation and tension:  “I’ve got to get out of this rain, I’m going to be drenched, this is terrible.”  But there is no shelter anywhere, and it is now raining even harder.  I become frantic, looking for a way to avoid getting soaked.  At some point, I say to myself “Ok, I’m going to get really drenched and that’s just the way it is right now.  I can be ok with that.”  In that moment, there is a great relaxation of the body and the mind, and a sense of peace.  I’ve stopped fighting with the reality of the present moment.  I have surrendered to the reality of getting wet.  I still can and should do the things I am able to do to minimize the damage, but I can now do those things while in a peaceful and centered state of mind.  I might even enjoy the experience the way that children sometimes have fun getting drenched in the rain! 

            Here’s a second story. I’m recovering from surgery in a hospital. Medical staff enter my room at all hours of the day and night and poke and prod me, and the food is terrible and even unhealthy.  Nurses don’t always come right away when I call.  It would be easy to fall into resistance:  “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be; this isn’t how a hospital should be run; I hate this!”  But then I remember: this is the way this hospital is being run right now. If I surrender to the truth of this moment, my anguish drops away and there is peace.  And there is nothing about being in this surrendered state that means I cannot still ask for the things I want and try to improve my situation.

            Once I have surrendered to the truth of this moment I become calm and I see more clearly, and I can take action.   So if people are not doing enough about climate change, I ask myself: “What can I do about that?”  Well, in my case I can do many things.  Just to name a few examples: I can do speaking engagements in my local community; write an opinion piece for the local newspaper; thank and commend people any time they take a step toward combating climate change; and talk to neighbors about growing a portion of their own food at home to reduce their climate footprint.  The action list for other people in other situations will quite likely differ from mine, because our strengths and our opportunities differ. The essential result here is that I put my energy into constructive action rather than resistance and suffering.

Some Practices for Letting Go of Mental Resistance 

            Often people will say, “Well, I understand what surrender means, but how do I actually get myself to do it?” Fortunately, letting go into a state of surrender is a learned skill, and there are a good number of mindfulness practices that can help us.

            The first one is the practice of saying “Yes” to things. We do this each time there is some situation that is causing us suffering because we are mentally resisting its existence.  This can be done either silently or out loud.  So instead of resisting something, try taking a deep breath, followed by the words “I say‘Yes’ to the fact that it is raining,” or to the fact that wildfires are getting worse, or to the fact that some politician is promoting some destructive lie, or to the fact that many people don’t do the things they could to thwart climate change. See if you can do this using a relaxed, soft, and friendly tone, as though you are welcoming what you had been resisting. You may even want to combine saying “Yes” with mindful breathing and smiling.

            At first your “Yes” may sound mechanical and insincere—that’s ok.  Keep using the practice and see if your tone doesn’t change over time.  Even if it does not change, the practice will still be of help in relaxing and accepting the reality of the way things are right now.

             Saying yes to what is in front of us is an enormously useful practice.  Any time we are tied up in knots or furious over a situation we can remember this practice:  “I say ‘yes’ to unhappiness,” to flat tire, to a government that seems totally incompetent.  And if you are saying right about now “Yeah, but that won’t work for me because such-and-such,” just notice that your “Yeah, but…” habit has arisen, acknowledge its presence, and choose not to act on it.  Saying “Yes” is a practice, and the only way to understand how it can work is to try it out for several days and see for yourself how it helps you.

            There are also simple, but quite powerful, meditation practices we can use.  These can be used either as micro-meditations lasting only a few seconds to a minute, or as longer formal sitting practices.

              A simple acknowledgment of the presence of mental resistance can work quite well.  When we begin to see our resistance well up, we can acknowledge its presence in us.  We can say silently “Hello resistance, I know you are there.”   We simply acknowledge its presence without judging it or ourselves for its being there.  When we do this, our resistance loses much of its grip on us.

 

              A third kind of practice is a modified breathing meditation.  First, we catch ourselves going into resistance mode, and then begin breathing mindfully.  It can be very helpful to combine the breathing with saying silently “Resistance is present… Smiling to resistance.”  The first half is said on the in-breath, and the second half on the out-breath.  Another phrasing that is useful here is “Resistance is present… Letting go of resistance,” again coordinating the words with the in-breath and out-breath.  After a few repetitions, this can be shortened to “Resistance… Letting go.”  It may even be useful to emphasize the out-breath and to visualize the resistance leaving the body with each exhalation of air.

            A fourth kind of practice involves making the feeling of resistance our primary focus in a meditation.  We lean into the resistance, entering a relaxed state of curiosity about it.  Where do I feel resistance in the body?  What does it feel like?  What is the thought stream that is present?  The idea is to just be there with the feeling of resistance and notice what it actually feels like in the body.  In the same vein, we can also check in to see if we have made the resistance that is present into a personal identity.  Am I seeing myself as resistant person?  Letting go of this definition of self can help to loosen the grip of resistance on us.  Simply view the resistance as a sort of vibration in the body and acknowledge the fact that “resistance is present in this moment.”  

To be continued in the next post…

 

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