Explore how non-resistance frees us from our pain and allows us to move with the flow of life.
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
– Natalie Goldberg
I write to make sense of the world, and to process pain that I can’t always explain.
I write to transmute what may evade logic.
Why does darkness visit…and how does it disappear, sometimes just as surprisingly?
I have had, throughout my life, periods of time where a veil of darkness covers me in despair.
It is antithetical to my usual optimistic disposition, but seemingly equal in power when I’m in the throes of it.
It’s not something I share with many people, mostly because it’s not an energy I want to expand, and I’m not interested in wearing the mantle of victim.
Besides, most people want to fix our upsets and end up inadvertently making matters worse.
Not because they’re not well meaning, but because trying to fix the darkness is a form of resistance.
And resistance is futile.
Either we end up pushing down our unwanted experience until it finds another way out (like dis-ease), or we turn our upset inward and blame ourselves for not being able to get over it with all the good advice we’re getting...thereby making matters worse.
It can quickly collapse into a very vicious downward spiral.
I know, because I’ve been down it many times.
I think to myself, I’ve done so much work on myself, had so much personal growth, even trained and coached hundreds of other people.
How can I have fallen down this hole again??
Knowing makes no difference.
And resistance pulls us deeper into the abyss.
We reason that if we, knowing all we know, can’t pull ourselves out, there is no hope.
Or so our thinking mind surmises.
But darkness doesn’t always descend from a reasonable place, or even from external circumstance.
While our conscious mind conjures likely explanations, these are merely justifications for the uncomfortable fact that we can’t always know where pain comes from — and sometimes it’s not even our own.
We are not only connected to others in the here and now, where there is certainly much pain experienced, but to generations of souls whose suffering went unresolved.
Intergenerational trauma is a well-documented phenomenon.
Not just because behaviours are repeated, but because trauma is stored in our DNA and in our collective consciousness.
I come from a long line of wounded peoples.
In fact, several long lines.
In my background are the oppressed peoples of French Canada (from as far back as the late 1600s when my family first arrived on this land), Ireland and Ukraine.
All countries with collective trauma.
There is personal suffering as well.
A history of generations of abuse.
I used to dismiss these ancestral influences as unrelated to my life — my life of empowered choices and personal agency.
But here it is.
The veil of ancestral pain and suffering, blurring my vision and blanketing all possibility.
A pain I can’t explain but is as real and present as if I’d hurt myself.
And if advice doesn’t help, and resistance makes it worse, what then?
There is something that I have found to be very useful — and counterintuitive.
Non-resistance.
Acceptance.
Surrender.
Instead of avoiding the unwanted emotions and other sensations, we can face them.
Instead of trying to push them away or fix them, we can gently push into them, observing our mind and body with compassionate curiosity.
Spiritual guru, Mooji, suggests noticing these unwanted sensations and simply internally noting, “There it is again.”
No justification, no explanation, just acknowledgement.
When we allow the feelings, the phenomena, to be, they allow us to be.
It’s as if the act of acceptance releases their grip.
According to quantum mechanics, the act of observing a system can cause it to change its state.
Perhaps the scientific explanation lies there.
But understanding why or even how isn’t always what matters most.
What matters is that we recognize our experience as valid.
As much as we sometimes want to invalidate our pain and suffering because we “shouldn’t” feel what we feel or because we “know better,” surrender builds compassion and an ability to move with the flow of life, rather than against it.
It’s like dancing with a partner.
When the dancers don’t resist each other, the dance itself seems to take over.
There is much darkness in the world today, and experiencing it simply means you are aware.
You are awake.
You are fully human, and you are okay.
You don’t have to succumb to the darkness, but you can surrender to the dance.
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