What Do You Love? Resistance and Nourishing The Heart
If you look around the landscape of your mind, your thoughts, your heart, and your world you will see that pain, fears, and worries plaguing you are anchored in resistance. The mind loves to solve problems and will seek endlessly to find solutions and rid you of the haunting emotions and feelings that seem to stalk you day and night, perpetuating internal battles. But I ask you to look again. Can you see that these things are with you, relentlessly beside you, not to hurt you but for you to bring them closer and open your curiosity and heart to them – to aid, give balm, hold, allow, and accept them?
This is not an easy task. When you stop to look again at something that has brought you discomfort, despair, or dis-ease, you feel the resistance within you. In that open-hearted pause to see something differently, you can see the invitation to open, allow, and let go of your resistance. Nothing about stopping to meet a scary foe or embrace what has kept us sleepless, exhausted, thwarted, and in torment is simple. Pulling the threads of painful and scary emotions back to the root will always reveal your resistance to what you do not want to allow or accept. And, while this is not an easy process – to love yourself is to allow and accept everything that is arising within you, allowing the flow of your life to be just as it is without resistance.
The essential chord in this symphony of life is understanding that when we resist what arises we will feel pain – yet when we let go of resistance and fully accept what is here to be here we find a vast horizon of peace.
The paradox is that when resistance is fully accepted, the resistance disappears.
_Adyashanti, “Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering”
When beginning to see the shadows as something else – as calls from our heart and soul needing our love and attention we can begin to unearth the deep well of love within us and become the first responder to ourselves as healer, compassionate friend, and guide giving unconditional love and grace to our being – to our aching heart and traumatized mind and body. Who knows you better than you? What more perfect person is there than you to meet the scared, tired, lonely, tiny parts of you yearning for understanding, acceptance, and compassion?
The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It’s when it begins.
There is an old story of a woman who goes to a wise elder for help and begins to tell her story of sadness, grief, and how life has abandoned her. She narrates all of the ways throughout her life where she was disheartened, lonely, asked for help with little resolution, scared and petrified to try new things, and take risks because she had so little hope left. She talked about how her life had been an endless series of disappointments, and betrayals, leaving her with growing fears of hopelessness, lack, and scarcity. She asked how she could find a way to peace and change herself or her life to find happiness, worth, and contentment. When she came to the end of her story she stopped and looked expectantly at the wise elder. After a long pause, the wise elder leaned closer to her and said, “Ahh yes, but tell me sweet child, what do you love?”
This story also reminds me of the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver. One of my favorites. In it, she writes: “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, and the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.” Nature does not resist it only ever allows and accepts what is with grace.
There is such quiet wisdom, acceptance, and allowing to know despair, to speak of it, to live beside it, but also knowing that deep love lives within you, in the world around you, and in the simple moments where your cat winds its body around your leg as an unbidden purring “I love you” drive-by. Or when your world and all of your thoughts are suddenly brought to a halt, scattered to the heavens with the sound of a beautiful songbird outside your window and you stop to marvel at the melody and beauty of this singular creature with its vibrant song.
We are wise, limitless beings and we can hold all of it – despair, fear, love, compassion. Problems arise when we resist what’s arising, contract around it into something hard, solid, and immovable, or define ourselves by fear, lack, disappointment, failure, or other feelings that burden us. When this happens we think our world is ending or toppling over into nothingness. Taking a moment to pause, stepping back to look again is the moment when we can remind ourselves that we are free, and how we are resisting and blocking the flow of life. Sitting with the resistance and opening ourselves in the smallest way to allow in what is here with acceptance and surrender is the most courageous act of self-love and self-care. Through this opening, we can begin to see all that is loving in our immediate world and begin to allow in all that we love about life.
Developing a list or journaling on the things you love is a beautiful way to express your love of self. It’s a practice in the powerful medium of gratitude and appreciation, reminding yourself and meeting your heart again with the things, situations, conversations, and interests that fascinate and move your internal landscape, bringing an ocean swell to your heart. It is also a roadmap for you if you find yourself in the dark woods of your mind or life challenges.
This is a practice of self-love that brings enthusiasm and openness back to your heart, makes rosy your cheeks, and curves a knowing gentle smile back to your lips. It brings the warmth of your soul’s vision back into your veins and floods your body, renewing every cell, and replenishing every stagnant, darkened part of you with the unique treasures you have collected of the things you love. No matter how small, trivial, big, or outlandish these are treasures indeed – specific to you and offering reminders, and a path back to yourself and your heart whenever you need them. Keep finding and cataloging these precious spaces, places, and things that bring you alive and where you find love and appreciation.
Please join me for an accompanying meditation to come back home to yourself, in the audio version and podcast of this publication.
Thank you for joining me sweet one. Go feel adored. I love you.
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