11 Jun Resistance hurts the most

What we feel most during an unpleasant incident, what plays up the most, is often not the emotion itself but our resistance to it. You can observe this well in physical pain. When you bump your elbow against an open cupboard, a sharp stab shoots through you, immediately followed by self-reproach and anger: ‘Oh how stupid of me’, and then: ‘But who leaves that cupboard door open?’
The pain does not disappear immediately, it can only follow the laws of nature and slowly fade away.
Forces join together and we revolt: we demand of ourselves that the pain disappears immediately, the muscles contract even more to achieve this.
Our body cramps up. This cramp hurts extra.
When visiting the dentist, you may keep your fists clenched and your stomach tightened. Afterwards, you are exhausted. Not from the pain or the fear, but from the fight.

Mental pain
The same thing happens when we experience something bad, such as a loss. We then suffer mental pain. Our system reacts to this in the same way as it does to physical pain.
In our heads, thoughts race, saying the same thing in different words. All these whirlwinds are variations of denial: ‘I don’t want this. I don’t want this to happen to me. It’s mean and unfair. I don’t deserve this’. In the body, the muscles around the emotion contract, but also in places that have nothing to do with the emotion, such as the shoulders, stomach or jaws. This resistance produces a much more powerful unpleasant sensation than the emotion itself.

We don’t feel the pain so much as our resistance.

Animals don’t tense up. Animals only experience stress when we humans put them in unnatural situations, such as when fireworks are set off at midnight near their home or when their living space is severely restricted.

Like a stretch on an elastic band
A little about the word stress. You often hear that a certain amount of stress is part of life. Then we perform better, they say.
However, it is more correct to say that adrenaline increases our reaction speed and gives us more clarity to deal with risky situations, and we have that in common with mammals. I would use the word stress when there is more tension in play than necessary. Like an elastic band that is pulled too hard.

Then there is something else.
You could say that not only the muscles of the body contract in denial, but also the thought waves of the mind become constricted. Because we compress our thoughts in denial, they look for an opening that is not there. In desperation, they transform. Anger or jealousy arises or they give up and we become sad.

The human drama
I call this the human drama. It is responsible for suffering in small circles but also on a large scale. Wars want to justify themselves by unprocessed pain that has been inflicted but that will never be calmed down by any revenge.

The drama of the human is that he wants to control the pain, the fears and the sorrow with his thoughts. However, thoughts are not capable of this and are not suited for it either.

You do not process suffering with the thinking system but with the feeling system: you have to allow the pain instead of resisting it.
The good news is (contrary to what people often think): allowing (old) pain or fear is much less spectacular than our resistance to it.

To be able to process well
In the workshop ‘De Innerlijke Metamorfose in zelfbeeld en emoties‘ you will learn the different steps to be able to process well, not only what is happening to you now but also the pain from the past. Participants in this workshop praise the safety, lightness and humor with which the sessions are presented. In a relaxed atmosphere and using striking examples, we go through the process of processing. At the same time, we get to know the basic state that is present in every person and that we call ‘The sea of peace and trust’.
The workshop also addresses positive feelings such as laughter, love and enjoyment and because we also allow these, we also experience them more deeply.

*This post has been automatically translated from Dutch