One thing I resist is slowing down my thinking and reactions. This resistance is related to my perceived need to settle and decide things. I resist giving myself space.
I appreciated Laraine Herring's* thoughts on resistance:
"Resistance manifests as tension in the body. This is easy to see in yourself. Try to push against the outside wall of your house. You're pushing with force (resistance) against a structure that is pushing back with exactly the same amount of resistance.
"You'll push all day and the next day and the next until you collapse. Neither of you is going anywhere. You can observe your muscles tightening, your belly constricting, your shoulders rising up to your ears as you push and push in a futile attempt to move your house with your hands.
"You can see this right away in your body. Resistance and tension in the body are contractions. They take up space. As you lose spaciousness within your body, you lose the ability to flow with what is occurring."
When you resist, do you note how your body responds? What do you think Herring means by contractions taking up space?
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Thanks for exploring the mystery - Nicky Mendenhall
* The Writing Warrior (2010) Laraine Herring
Image received 3/39/2014 in the rough neighborhood I live in.
Hi, Nicky,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate how beautifully Laraine Herring put this relationship of tension and resistance. And, yes, I have often noticed how they go together. Sometimes it is my body that is my the first indicator that I am resisting something in life. Sometimes I'll notice first some stubbornness or over activity in my mind that will alert me to extra bodily tension. So the noticing can come from either direction but I have never known one to be there without the other.
As for the space, I notice that when I take the time to settle down and sense deeply into the inner space of my body, if all is well (I'm going with the flow, as it were), there is a feeling of openness in every part of my body. Sometimes it glows and sometimes it expresses itself as a darker, velvety peacefulness. But if I am holding extra tension, that spaciousness tends to feel smaller, denser,or gummed up with dense patches and bands of physical/emotional/mental tension. At times they might feel heavy and dull and hard. Other times they may distinguish themselves by feeling more dynamic, perhaps harried or frantic, vibrating at unpleasant frequencies.
—Linda