On Resistance and Not Knowing

I have been having a lot of sensations in my chest over the last couple weeks that I would call anxiety.  I had been noticing it and identifying it and attaching it to external circumstances.  I was spending a lot of time “thinking” about it, playing out a wide assortment of imagined conversations and futures.  Then someone asked me a question that led me to look underneath because I couldn't answer it.

I definitely think of myself as a go-with-the-flow kind of person, yet the truth is there are a lot of changes going on around me right now and I am not going with the flow.  I know I do adapt, but sometimes it takes a while.  So this anxiety I’m experiencing is not because of anything anyone else is doing, but because of my own resistance.  I have a lot of ideas about how useless and bad resistance is, that it is a sign of being a bad yogi and that basically I should not experience it.  So I resist resistance.  I more or less force myself to go along with whatever is happening with disregard for how I am feeling about it (except for all the internal grumbling that usually accompanies this kind of situation, which I also have to feel bad about because it is not the “right” way to be handling things). 

And yet resistance is a force that exists in the universe.  Ayurveda teacher, Scott Blossom, named it as one of the qualities of the earth element.  Resistance allows us to brake while driving; resistance to gravity allows us to walk and do handstands.  So while it does seem to me that emotional resistance usually has to give way in order for healing and growth to occur, I can also see that the universe wouldn’t function without resistance.  With this awareness, I find myself accepting resistance.  And as soon as I do that, I am having the experience of acceptance instead of resistance.  Ahhh!

The other piece of this anxiety (and also the resistance) is the universal “fear of the unknown.”  Even though I know that it is pretty much human nature to be uncomfortable with not knowing, I like to think I have a handle on it.  But it turns out, lo and behold, I am just like everyone else.  I love how I can keep knowing something more—I know it, then I KNOW it, then I REALLY know it.  That part of not knowing is very cool.

I had an experience last night that seemed to confirm my not-knowing-leads-to-anxiety hypothesis.  I am in Los Angeles to see Amma, who has been important in my life and I had seen at least once a year since 1997 until last year.  I was really missing her, so I took time off work and spent money on airfare, hotel and retreat to be here.  So I am in the hall watching her give darshan (where she hugs people for hours on end) and it is wonderful.  Then it’s getting late.  It’s after 2am and it seems like maybe the line is dying down.  I might be able to get a decent night’s sleep (decent as far as being with Amma goes).  Then more and more people keep getting in line—it doesn’t really get longer, it just never gets any shorter.  Now it’s 3am—well, it must be going to finish soon.  I can feel my irritation with all of these stragglers.  And underneath the irritation . . . anxiety.  I feel it.  I let it be there. 

It is the not knowing.  I want to know when it is going to be done.  Here I am with Amma, the place I had been longing for, the destination I had put so much effort into getting to, and I am just wanting to know when it will be done.  I don’t have anything else to do.  I don’t have to be up at any certain time tomorrow.  But I am essentially wanting it to be over.  It seems that I am anxious simply because I don’t know how much longer it will last.  Even if it were 5am or 6am, but I KNEW what the end time was, I don’t think I would have been having this same experience.  Instead of being in the experience of “knowing” what was happening in the present moment, I was in the experience of not knowing what was going to happen in the future.  It did soften with this recognition—even when Amma began calling more and more people into the line until it was stretching all the way around the back of the room.

So, I guess this is about satya, being with what is, learning how to be with myself as I am.  Sometimes people wonder whether accepting things as they are means we won’t grow and change, but I would say that this is our inherent nature.  In accepting my resistance, my anxiety, my desire to know, I am not creating an identity for myself.  For me, it is about being more present to my experience in the moment.  And that actually creates more fluidity rather than less.

Here’s a quote from Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach to end with.  Even though I’ve heard this same idea many times before, suddenly when I read it recently, I got it in a new way.  It helped me with this whole exploration that I described here.  “All our reactions to people, to situations, to thoughts in our mind—are actually reactions to the kind of sensations that are arising in our body.”