foreign rule of thumb is like go for the joy like I don't want the resistance to change how can I meet it most joyfully welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I'm Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson [Music] today we're leaning into resistance how it shows up in all its forms the path to developing a healthy relationship with the resistance and all the fun and foils we can expect along the way in self-discovery practices there's this idea that the path to deeper freedom is to go through our resistance this often sets us up with an adversarial relationship to our resistance as if all it does is needlessly hold us back the other day I read an essay by David White on the word denial I highly recommend giving the entire essay a read we'll link to it in our show notes but his closing lines really caught my attention to live in denial is to be in very good company denial is the crossroads between perception and Readiness to deny denial is to invite Powers into our lives we have not yet readied ourselves to meet so Joe David's treatment of denial rhymes with something you say a lot which is if you can't love the thing love your resistance to the thing if denial is one form of resistance seeing it in this light seems like a good pointer toward learning to love it so what exactly is resistance it's an interesting thing what David White is saying I think it's an incredibly profound and I think it needs to be said because It's usually the relationship people don't have with denial right so it's typical that people are like you're in denial they're not like oh cool you're in denial it's just something that you don't hear and so you know from the perspective of um in a war with yourself you always lose like to see the benefit of the other side to not take the other side personally to see the other perspective really allows you to have less of a war with yourself and so from that perspective I really appreciate what David White is saying and I really appreciate that that's needed often and I would even suggest that David White also probably say oh yeah there's a time to see through your denial as well so I think that the main thing that resistance is is not not being at peace with what is I mean that's a great way to describe it on an intellectual basis on an emotional basis it usually amounts to not wanting to feel something that's usually where resistance um where it comes from in the emotional body and then in the in the nervous system body there's just a there's like there is some fear there that resistance usually comes along too even though it might look like anger or frustration or but for me the most important thing to think about when I'm thinking about resistance is it's a natural step in transformation I get very excited when I'm working with somebody and they get resistant because I'm like awesome this is this means we're on the right path and it's their path it's not my path it's not what I think they should do or where I think they should be it's like impartiality is incredibly important and and the other wisdom of what David White is saying is that it it's like when they're ready so what's interesting is we're always ready for a new perspective or an epiphany or a seen through something but maybe it's not that and maybe it's not now or maybe you're seeing through something slightly different so no matter how wise your Guru gets or the person you're listening to on a podcast gets they can't be more wise or have more knowledge about you and no matter how wise you get you don't get to have more knowledge than the person you're talking to about them or more wisdom and so it's really critical to allow them their paths and not want them to be any different and it seems like it just gets really easy to to judge resistance like if we're not feeling something then we could judge ourselves for not being ready to feel it or we could try to make ourselves ready to feel it when we're not that's resistance yeah well that's like a matter of all of that is yeah all of that is just an uh what other like resistance in sheep's clothing you know or resistance in most clothing it's it's all of that is just compounding you know it's like you can't fight your way out of a war how can we tell when we're ready like if we're feeling resistance there must be some part of us that feels that it's not ready to to experience or feel this thing that we're resisting and how how can we know if if we indeed are ready yeah I don't look at it that way I look at it as part of the transformation meaning if you watch like a cell divide there's resistance there if you watch a tree you know slowly over time that their limbs will move to find light it's like there's resistance in that if I took all the resistance or all the tension out of your body it would die it's the evolution requires resistance it requires tension and so to me it it's not something like to get in a good relationship or to get in a bad relationship with it's just to be with the relationship you're in with it at that moment what are some other ways that that shows up and uh personally what what kinds of resistances are there and what leads to them mostly what leads to the different forms of resistances that come out is just what you've learned you know what what you're brought up with so you know if checking out was the way that you resisted feelings that you didn't want to feel then you check out and if fighting is the way to resist it you know being evasive being defensive um sleeping you know there's oh there's infinite ways of becoming super cerebral you know so there's all sorts of ways that resistance shows up in a work in the work that I do or just in a normal business meeting like you you see it all the time in business meetings you know people having resistance uh and then you see other people get frustrated with their resistance right and that instead of like oh cool so they're resisting something what do they know what what is it that they're what is it that doesn't say yeah let's do this in them and where's the wisdom in that and maybe only one percent of it is wisdom and 99 of it is ignorance but there's some wisdom in the resistance there's always some so it's not so much about knowing when it is good and when it is bad or knowing when you're ready or when you're not ready it's really like how do you be with the resistance without resisting that and let and then whatever movement happens which is again what I think is so brilliant about that David White poem is it it is one very clear pointer on how to stop resisting the resistance or in you know what you quoted me saying it's like how to love the resistance if you can't love the thing love the resistance yeah or or it seems like what you've been describing just now is even a curiosity or a wonder and that seems to kind of turn things on their head a little bit like if we if we see somebody else in Our Lives who is resisting something often our tendency is just to point out their resistance and be like like stop resisting or making it bad you know yeah in other words change to make me happy yeah I want you to change no to make me happy oh yeah yeah we've all done that yeah yeah we have yeah it's kind of interesting to think about it from that different perspective of just being curious so their resistance isn't bad if they're experiencing resistance and we want there not to be resistance there then that is a pointer to our own resistance and there's a lot there to be curious about yeah and there's also like this beautiful thing is like encourage their resistance or encourage your own resistance like the one one way through is to like get out of the Chinese thumb lock and one way is to go into the Chinese sunlock if you know what I mean like there's I often if I'm resisting something I'm in that struggle I just struggle all the way just go all the way into it and I can exhaust the resistance it's like or or listen to it completely let it fully have its voice but there's this kind of weird thing that happens with resistances like in some level there's a way in which we don't think we're gonna we have the tool the new tool we need because whatever we're not wanting to change whatever we're not wanting to feel there's a way that we've been dealing with it that's worked so far maybe not great but it's been working and so to change that I was like well what's going to happen and then the other question is what's going to happen to me and if you're not listening to that wisdom if you're not listening to okay so I stop you know yelling at my dog every time it shits in my on my carpet well then I'm am I just gonna have to live with [ __ ] you know and oftentimes like if you listen to that resistance you find out what tool is going to be there or you can address it yeah yeah this part of you is disappearing you know this part of you is is wanting to transform and what what do we see comes next and can you invite it back if you decide that you know this part of you wants to be back or wants to stay yeah bringing bringing some of this back into into my experience like a lot of times I'll experience some resistance around procrastination there'll be there'll be something that I want to do um is procrastination resistance well there's a lot there's different kinds of resistances in it like right like for me I mean procrastination could I think happen for a lot of different reasons and I think that would be a fascinating episode to get into yeah but for me it often shows up as this like fear of feeling the failure of not getting it perfect and then there's the resistance to my not doing it and then there's this like there's this fear that if I just if I go into that resistance in the way that you said then it'll just take over and I'll be stuck in it but what you're saying is like that it'll exhaust so I could just go all the way into the resistance rather than setting up another opposing resistance that just balances it and keeps it stuck yeah yeah that that can work if it's fully allowed to move but the question I would ask is like on the procrastination what is procrastination without any resistance in it not any resistance to it but like if you feel the procrastination in your system and then you feel what procrastination becomes if there's no resistance in the procrastination what happens well sometimes it changes into not not sometimes right now oh right what happens well I'm not feeling procrastination right now because we're recording a podcast actively right but if you if you did yeah let me bring something that feeling yeah yeah there's something you're procrastinating right now yeah yeah so feeling feeling into into a thing that I'm procrastinating there's just becomes a feeling of like there's a sensation in my body of like a little bit of anxiety and then the anxiety kind of just moves and becomes some kind of energy like like kind of like Get Up and gozies yeah and so what is that experience if there's no resistance in it uh I mean it feels like the impulse to do something that's what makes me ask that question what is what is procrastination without resistance in it yeah yeah it's like the the experience of procrastination has the impulse to do something otherwise you wouldn't be actively thinking you're procrastinating it exactly and you could not be doing stuff I'm not doing stuff right now but it doesn't feel like procrastination but as soon as I feel like I should be doing it well then then there's the feeling of procrastination that comes yeah I'm not launching a thermonuclear missile at this moment and I and I don't feel like it's procrastination well then take enough then fires you missiles from this conversation I'm feeling that the thing that I resist in procrastinating is the fear of whatever consequences of getting it wrong yeah and that fear if I'm not resisting it is actually like an excitement about doing something new right and so now what's the wisdom in the resistance if you love The Resistance what's the resistance in it it seems like the wisdom and the resistance is like you know I'm doing something new and when I'm doing something new I would benefit from being aware that I might have take steps that have unintended consequences and I can just be aware of those things exactly and so that so there's some wisdom there and if you incorporate that wisdom into whatever's happening that is like the next step of the transformational process right so there's a step of resistance that that's part of transformation and then there's a step of the incorporation or the integration of that resistance is is also part of The Next Step it's an interesting thing earlier I said you know you can't fight your way out of a war and I'm sure somebody in their mind's like yes you can like you fight a war you win and then the war is over but you have to stop fighting like if you kept on fighting the war would keep on going right and then this is what we do is we layer okay procrastination which is a form of resistance on top of resist I'm going to resist that that's another war and now I'm gonna like tell myself you know I should stop having a war with myself around uh procrastinating I should stop resisting procrastinating I've now I've created a third level of fight that's usually the bind we get into it feels like we can get addicted to or just used to being in that fight that's right there's a way to look at all of Spiritual Development I I wouldn't proselytize this but there's a there's a interesting mind experiment and body experiment to do if you could look at all of development as just how much the fight can go away in a day-to-day minute to minute second to second thing and there's an addiction to that fight like when I do business with folks you like one of the things that I read when I'm interacting with them is just like oh how much fight is in them and if you see somebody with a lot of fight in them they always have couple people there at battle with you know like achieving goals is a is a battle and you're like okay so if I'm doing business with this person I have to be completely okay with the fact that they're gonna do battle with me or they're gonna create a battle that I'm gonna get involved with and so how much fight is in a person and that's usually based on how much fight they had as a kid right how much being alive or being loved was a battle so it seems like this is like there's a preference for being in you know embodying some way of being in which we're not fighting ourselves and interacting and collaborating with people who are not fighting themselves how do you hold that without partiality yeah beautiful right because then immediately my mind comes to the bhagavadavita where it's like you know the our hero or main character says you know I don't want to fight my brother and Krishna I think it is I'm gonna surely offend somebody comes down and says now you gotta fight right and this is this is there's no life without tension there's no life without resistance you can't you don't you don't get to do that you don't get to transform or grow you want no resistance you get death the idea that you want less of it or more of it or is just another way to reify it and to be in the fight how do we not use this to justify being in a fight yeah how do you how do you drop a hot frying pan how do you you know how do you describe that to somebody how do you just not swing the sword I need a different example than dropping the hot frying pan is maybe like how do you let go of an AC current or DC current when you're being electrocuted and it's actually making you grab harder right yeah it's probably that is really more accurate I don't like it because it it ruins it ruins my nice little answer to the question uh see the problem with the question is how do we do it is like as soon as you think that there's a way to do it then it becomes a should and it becomes part of the battle or a strategy yeah the strategy and then you're looking for a result and all of that stuff and you're really looking to do the exact opposite of that so if you like put in your body like this sense of like trying and struggle and you feel that in your whole body and then without thinking about it you immediately feel the exact opposite of that feeling that's all that's necessary is the exact opposite of that feeling even in your say your procrastination it's that there's a thousand ways to get there except for there's no way to get there there's there's a thousand ways to realize you're there there's no way to get there is is I think the more the better pointer and whether it's David whites beautiful pointing of like denial of denial or whether it's the pointing of love your resistance or if it's a point pointing to just drop the frying pan or like they're all just pointers to just stop fighting if you have a relationship where there's some fight in it rather than making the fight a problem and trying to fight the fight just recognizing okay there's fight over here is this something that you know I can hold is this is this something that that is okay or do I need to draw a boundary and go do something else work with different people and you could do that without having to change somebody yeah I would say that if you're in the question of that you're in the resistance who enlighten me there's moments when somebody acts a certain way and it's really clear to you you're just like oh no no that doesn't work for me and if you want to do that like you're welcome to but just not at me or near me or I'm gonna go whatever it is you know you're not changing them but you're just you just don't allow that in your world and in that case there's kind of no resistance right you're not in your lesson or you're learning you're not in your transformation it's just like I know this thing for now is this way for me but if you're like oh should I do this or should I do that or maybe I could do this maybe you know typically the one that people have is should I just draw the boundary or should I learn to accept it you know is it more enlightened for me to draw the boundary more enlightened for me to accept it and if you're in that question you are in the transformation therefore that you're in the resistance now you're trying to solve it you're trying to fix it you're trying to make it different than what it is what if it's not from a perspective of being the most enlightened you can be but just like you're making a business business decision you're like is it better for the business if I go option A or option b same thing it doesn't really matter what the end goal is when I say more enlightened this or more enlightened that I I'm saying that it could be which would make me happier or which would be more profitable or which would be but in all those places it's where we're in our growth we're in our our transformation and you know like think about the problem that you have in business six years ago and how is like this big oh my God what am I gonna do and now you face that same problem in different ways once a month and it's no what am I going to do it's because that you know that whatever that transformation has occurred when you're meditating and you know early in meditation you notice that you lost what track of yourself in the meditation you know like there's a fight I shouldn't remember God and why am I doing this why am I still sitting here and then later it's there's no fight there's just like oh yep here I am because you recognize that the moment that you see that you've lost yourself you've found yourself so you're not in that fight like that anymore and so the so that the resistance is that you're in your transformation so there's a way to look at resistance and go yay I'm in my transformational process good for me right it's like bumping up against our edges yeah yeah and a sign that you're growing but it really doesn't always feel that way it often feels like a sign that you're not growing yeah yeah that's exactly it's that tension between the two things that is the like that I want it to be different and there's a frustration you know even like little kids when they're learning to walk they get really frustrated with themselves because they fall down not not the beginning of the transformational process but in it you know they get really frustrated but what about the resistance to the wanting to be different itself like because wanting to be different also has its own wisdom and that could be something to resist on its own yeah this is an interesting one it kind of feels like the the like oftentimes not that it needs to be this way but oftentimes when somebody's kind of beginning their Journey but before they end the journey they're like yeah self-help spirituality blah blah blah and then they're like they want something to be different and then it and then at some point they're just like I don't want anything to be different I just want to be me I want to be as me as me can be I want to see what I am right and that tran and there's like this acknowledgment that Evolution happens there's acknowledgment that development happens but it's not particularly wanting to be different it's not wanting to improve generally that seems to be the progression that people go through and my guess is it's very necessary it's very necessary for someone to have the phase of wanting to be different and then it's there's this phase that's very necessary for them to that they they see that that level of friction no longer serves them that level of resistance no longer serves them and so then they move into a different level and so I think it's like almost anything that we do whether it's recording sound or making movies or doing business the more we do it the more sensitive we become the more refined we become in it and the more the more that it's not done the more it's done with Discord the more it becomes unpalatable for us right so a great musician here's something that's a little Out Of Tune and they're like oh and like me I'm like what attitude I like the got a good beat you can dance to it whereas I might sit with somebody and notice a little bit of tension in them that they won't wouldn't notice for 30 years you know or 10 years or two minutes who knows right but the as you do the work you become more sensitive to the Discord and in that the Discord of I want to be different it stops becoming an accelerator and you start seeing it as a break but don't go Rush right and I think this is what David White is saying is like don't go rush and try to get to the place where you don't where that want is gone it's it's got its wisdom it has its movement you know let it let it have its dance enjoy its dance yeah a question that comes up for me now is like what part wants to be different because like in in a lot of these episodes we've arrived at this place where if you stop wanting to be different if you let go of your like ideas of being different you will naturally change you will naturally grow so there's like there's a part of you that does want to be different like you could look at you know Evolution and species want to be different they just don't know yeah like there's just not like a knowing somewhere of how that's gonna go right it seems like there's like if we are wanting to be different and we have an idea of what different would look like for us then we're using our intellect which is just going to be like a limited logicy form of it but might be great form of it too yeah it doesn't really matter because it a tree is going to grow the way A Tree Grows Right we're going to grow the way that we grow at I don't know correcting is this because of my intellect so because of my mind says so this is the soil this is the sun this is the this is the seed and we grow and it doesn't mean we give up our ambition either which is interesting or our will it's like the sensation is more that the ambition and the will belongs to something greater than us the feeling is that it's more of a universal will or a universal ambition and so in in some aspects far more gentle and in some aspects far more powerful what do you mean by Universal will without you know without jumping off the Wu train you're going to try to stop me from jumping off the Wu train um I'm trying to keep you on the tracks if it's a felt sense it's a an experiential it's like trying to describe there's a moment in which the sense of self changes in a in a kid right so there's a point where you ask them do you want GI Joe with a Kung Fu grip for Christmas and they're like yep you're like what does Mom want she wants GI Joe with a Kung Fu Grip dad wants GI Joe with a Kung Fu grip and then at some point they differentiate themselves and they see that their mom and dad might want something different than what they want for Christmas and so that sense of self develops and it seems to get bigger like it goes from like I am me to I am my family even in the distinguishing nature of it to I am my nation I am people I am the ecosystem and as that sense of self changes the parts of you belong to the bigger thing right and you can see this all the time where people like get lost in like I am the nation or I am my political party and if they feel offended it's not just them that are offended it's like they're a nation that should be offended or is projected that way so I think it's not anything different than that it's just that the sense of self becomes bigger than you it feels more Universal or something like that it feels more like Oneness yeah that makes sense and it it also points to how this path can lead to better collaboration because you could start by this is me I am me I have my problems and everybody else is in my way yeah to hey we all kind of have the same sort of problem everybody's got their own you know position that they're experiencing it from and we can share and integrate all of our different sources of information and come up with something more complex as a result yeah there there seems to be there's like kind of levels of it that be are better with collaboration and levels of it that are not as good with collaboration and then there's like middle stages that are kind of strange so for instance when you oftentimes at one stage of of like seeing the world you might like go into consensus and think that everybody's voice is equal and then that obviously is like a great way to destroy an organization there's you know manuals of the CIA written in the 1950s about how to destroy an organization and consensus building and committees and wow tell me more about that oh yeah it's a great document um it basically it's like a document that was written in I think 40s or 50s a CIA how to go in and destroy a business in a country where you want to destroy that business and it's like a delegate all decision making to committees make sure the Committees are all over six people and if you go into like the super dysfunctional organizations that's what's happening um all the time I mean and sometimes designed that way like maybe Congress and the Senate are designed to be not entirely effective because you only want the really most critical laws to pass but a lot of the non-profit world is is created this way where it's like offending somebody or making a call without everybody's agreement is very bad and are considered very bad and then they become very ineffective in their and their work and so I would say eventually yeah collaboration just becomes nature but it's the nature depending on where you find yourself in that process yeah well I guess it's important that collaboration remains collaboration among individuals with different perspectives right rather than an assumption that everybody is the same and should end up with the same decision right or has the same Authority or has the same expertise it's like it's that integration of there's a great way to say it which is that selfishness is the engine of unity right like it's the selfish Gene that makes the human and it's the selfish human that makes the human race and it's and it's the all these selfish you know cells and bacteria and fungus that are all making this beautiful Earth so it's it's like the interdependence is is created by our selfishness and it's kind of it puts you in that same perspective of without tension there's no Evolution without resistance there's no there's no transformation without selfishness there's no Unity so I think I can hear like half of our audience flipping out about this right now and good there must be ways for selfishness to lead to more connection and collaboration and selfishness to lead to more resistance and you know fight yeah and I think that that could like that could be a way to bring us back to resistance a lot of the things that we've talked about in this work is that you know in impulse resisted turns into a kind of contorted impulse that leads to disconnection and a lot of the behaviors that people consider selfish in a bad way or in a harmful way yeah I mean the key to being really good at selfishness is to really understand the underlying want right so the first one is like I just want to go get drunk and you know screws many people as I can hey that that doesn't actually satisfy you and so then what's the deeper want and then what's the deeper want and hopefully you don't have to play them all out and eventually you find the deepest want even close to the deepest want ends up to be a deeply compassionate thing for the people around you as well right like there's this idea that it's like I have to choose between being good for me to me or being good to you and I I don't find that experience I find that when I'm truly being compassionate with myself I'm almost always that action is truly being compassionate for the people around me it seems like that also like continues to relate to resistance because we might think we want something that we're used to wanting and just become really all right we just get stuck in that Groove and we wanted to start defending that want because we've got we've already gotten so invested in it and then when we start to see maybe we want something different that could be the seed of denial yeah yeah or yeah don't take that away from me or or it becomes like the the surrogate of something you know like there might be some political feature that we have that most of America doesn't want anymore but the transformation of it is so scary and the same thing in ourselves like oh yeah I don't want to be watching television three hours every night anymore but then I sit with myself for the first 10 minutes I'm like I don't want to feel that so boom back to the television so it's it's almost like it's not selfishness that's the problem it's it's almost just like undeveloped selfishness is the problem you know that we're we're competing against and and it's really strange that every time I hear somebody call themselves selfish in a session I'll say something to the effect maybe not every time but something to the effect of like okay so when your parents called you selfish what did they really mean hmm and almost to a t what they all really meant was I I want you to do something different that's what it means I've never called my kids selfish like you know it's just it's usually just a parent saying like I wanted you to do this and you did this other thing you're selfish I'm not even sure if I believe in the word selfishness in that way but but what I really like is that what you're saying is that there's moments of resistance that will move us away from will create an evolution in us where our we can see more clearly what's going to make us happy we can see more clearly what brings us peace we can see more clearly what creates Harmony amongst the people that we love and and there's something very true about that like one of the principles that I live by is is Embrace intensity and that's exactly for that reason which is that intensity that resistance is like I have found the more I embrace it the more I run towards it the more I run into it and through it um the more I love it for what it is the the less I resist it the more at peace my life becomes the more loving I become the more generous I become so for those people who don't like what I'm saying great beautiful there's some resistance to run towards I'm not saying agree with me but yeah feel it that kind of brings back to like one of the kinds of resistances is when we start to recognize something is true that we didn't want to be true or maybe we recognize a deeper want that isn't convenient for us or it doesn't seem convenient for you know people that we're in agreements with or something yeah so there's some of this advice is like or like a tool is to embrace intensity what else can we do to recognize those moments give ourselves the compassion to feel that resistance not problematize it and then Embrace that intensity in a weird way that's like all the work that all spirituality and all psychology and all um Psychotherapy and all it's it's kind of answering that question that's all it really is is right there is our natural movement towards ourselves our own Evolution and there is the resistance and the question is how does that resistance get met um what's the most effective or efficient or Joyful Way to to meet the resistance and and I would my kind of rule of thumb is like go for the joy like I don't want the resistance to change how can I meet it most joyfully and if you think it's like fake a smile you'll notice that's not very joyful but it's more to ask that question and there's also the question of who's resisting which is or what is resisting that's a great question as well how do I love the resistance that's a question how do I find the wisdom and the resistance all those things I think are hacks and the one that's most commonly not seen is what's the feeling I'm resisting what's the thing I don't want to feel and go and feel it yeah which I guess in in the case of like procrastination or some some forms of resistance is the resistance itself which brings me back to what you said earlier in this episode about uh just going all the way into it which seems counterintuitive at first but it makes more sense in this context because you can you can just enjoy going into the resistance and be like okay this is what it's like to feel this resistance great yeah with procrastination especially it's a really unique that's the thing each form of resistance has its own little nooks and crannies like for instance procrastination one of the things that the reason it works why it becomes like a AC current instead of a hot frying pan so to speak every time you think about doing the project you're giving yourself a negative reinforcement so why the [ __ ] would you want to do it right okay I'm thinking about the project now I'm beating myself up for not doing it so the project is associated with like beating yourself up like think about it on a mammalian level a dog comes and every time it sees you you kick it in the face it doesn't want to see you anymore it doesn't want to be around you it doesn't want to approach you yeah every time you approach a problem you kick yourself in the face it's like it's like procrastination can be really easily solved if every time you think about the problem you then Envision yourself enjoying the [ __ ] out of doing it instead of why haven't I done that yet right positively reward yourself every time you move towards that thing instead of negatively rewarding yourself and I think this is generally the the way in which the AC current happens instead of the hot frying pan right it's like that reinforcement that occurs generally is that we our resistance is painful and unwanted and we associate it with the thing so worked with a woman once who lost her dad when she was a child and every time she thought about her dad it hurts so she just doesn't think about her dad anymore right which is a world of denial in a world of pain a word of unfound emotions like a severe rigidity all that stuff is happening and it's all because she unconsciously negatively reinforced herself cause yourself pain every time she thought of her dad yeah and not you know cause herself suffering not like just letting herself feel the pain of losing her dad yes yeah so if if we're making the distinction the way the Buddhists do yes which is like suffering is the resistance to the pain yeah something that's been helping me lately with like things that I'm putting off or procrastinating is just sitting with what it feels like to be avoiding doing it which invariably feels less good than actually doing it even though the perception is like oh but doing it I'm going to feel confused I'm not going to know what to do I don't have the answers but like actually doing it like like writing something like writing an email can be even if you don't know what you want to say when you sit down and do it starting to type feels better than staring at it and kicking yourself in the face yeah you even in the wild wild was kind of kicking yourself in the face like that yeah which is what's caught causing my smile right now I love not knowing what to do yeah like and getting it wrong yeah that's a funny double bind like I really actually get bored immediately once I know what to do yeah if I have if I if I all laid out in my head I'm far more likely it's far more likely to take me a little time to get to it if I'm like oh man I have no idea what to say here then it's more likely for me to actually do it which just lets you know how arbitrary the whole thing is right like it's just the whole thing is this arbitrary notion of what we Define as what feels good and what feels bad and we Define that because of our past history because of an idea we hold about it and as that stuff starts evaporating as that as we see through our ideas like as you are experiencing this podcast hopefully this podcast has just destroyed a couple of ideas that you had that's the idea is I could just just pummels them and then you're like wait a second I don't know how to feel I don't know what to think here and you're kind of left in that place and and as that occurs all of a sudden we can create the relationship we want with it not the one that we were taught yeah one of the ideas that I had was like oh I've had so many stories that I've wanted to write about my like adventures and experiences and I've spent so much time thinking about what I would write and then at some point I just never did and then the moment passed and I'm like realizing now kind of triggered by something you said earlier that in a number of those cases I was figuring the whole thing out in my head and then eventually I knew exactly what the story was right and then it became uninteresting it just receded in the background I never actually wrote it right because I wasn't actually writing when I was doing the figuring out so nothing ended up written down exactly yeah and it's just to tie it back to resistance this is like the whole like oh I have this idea of how it is you know even that can be a form of resistance yeah you know like just like you said at some point becoming better the idea of becoming better the idea not the actuality but the idea of becoming better becomes too has too much friction same way this can have too much friction as well it starts becoming unpalatable well I definitely feel right now like a lot of the ideas and perceptions that I had about myself are somewhat broken right now after this conversation somebody was frustrated with me the other day they're like okay well you did all that and like now what am I supposed to believe and I'm like nothing this is done stop stop trying to construct a reality around yourself see what's there yeah yeah I'm definitely sitting in a lot of questions now which I'm looking forward to getting into tell me about a time that you like struggled with some resistance for a period of time and then suddenly found a way not to do it or just simply stop doing it yeah in my 20s I smoked a lot of a pot I don't know if there's a lot compared to what I see nowadays but um I definitely had a pot habit and mostly it was like on the weekends and then there's a short time where it was like daily when I didn't have this job and and I man I just like I beat myself up over it so bad I mean I remember just like the critical voice in my head got so loud and I became so abusive and I see that's now a lot with pot smokers generally is that like depression is over prolonged you seems to be part of it it's like they they're not motivated to do stuff they're constantly seeing the faults in themselves in the world um and I was just like fully in it and and no matter how hard I fought to get out and like it just like drove me deeper into it because the more that I was abusing myself about it the more I wanted to escape myself the more I smoked the pot right like so it was just kind of like that was the that was a cycle that I was in and at some point along the line I just realized oh what is it that I really don't want to face what is the self that I really don't want to face this is really early on in my my spiritual journey I think just after like my first Meditation Retreat or a couple years I I have a bad sense of time and I just I just ran into that I just ran into that feeling and it it turned out to be sadness was really the thing that I didn't want to feel it was just some emotions some anger some sadness and then I ran towards it and then pot just became like I don't want to [ __ ] abuse myself like that and then it was like oh but I I like it once a week and I cleaned my house and then but anyways by the time I was like 28 something like that it was like The Habit had almost completely disappeared and and then it completely disappeared and I I just I look back I'm like wait I didn't try at all to end this thing I didn't at all try to stop it and and now it holds absolutely no appeal like I look at it I'm just like yeah no there's a you know someone offers it to me at a party or something and I I'd say there's just zero appeal there's no Temptation there's no willpower and there's just a lack of Interest and so the more I resisted the habit of pot the addiction of pot the more it grew the more shame grew with it um and as soon as I looked at the underlying thing and embraced the intensity then the whole thing just kind of disappeared just dissolved without will without trying it just kind of undid itself and I find that generally that's the case is a place where I'm in the fight there's something under some resistance or not resistance some um there's some intensity underneath that's been wanting to be embraced and what's really interesting about that is that I used to think that there was some rush in that I used to think that um oh my God I got it yeah I gotta embrace all the intensity I gotta I have to fix all the issues I have to stop all the resistance and I realized like I spent so much time yeah there's only so much time and I realize it doesn't really matter if you do it's it'll stay there wait for it'll wait for you like if you don't solve your pot addiction today you it'll be there tomorrow you know you don't you don't there's no rush it's it's whatever it is that you want to transform about yourself it's gonna stay there the problem doesn't go away until it's addressed so you you can be patient and that in itself was just another way to let go of another level of resistance another another fight in me and the way I think about it now is like I can't let go of resistance it's it's letting go of life you know I can't let go of that tension so the question is how do I hold it with the most gentleness and love how do I hold without ever letting go of it without ever losing contact without ever losing the intimacy with resistance how do I hold it as lightly as gently as lovingly as possible yeah I really like that and that sounds like an episode we'll see thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US on your podcast app we'd love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com [Music]