During recent group Zoom meetings I have been asked if the desire for happiness or the desire to feel good implies resistance against negativity within ourselves.
"If I want to be happy, does that mean I am in resistance to unhappiness?"
I would say not necessarily. Happiness is a natural preference, in the same way that pleasant food is preferred over garbage. Once the fight against unhappiness or negativity starts to come to an end, there gradually becomes more space for us to choose a way to feel, if we want to do such a thing…
From this week's newsletter - For many of us, the challenges of life become far more deeply engrained in our minds as troubles, because in the background there is a secret assumption that the world should make us happy. If you don’t act the way I want, do what I think you should do, or if things don’t go exactly how I wanted them to go - if the assumption is that you or the world should make me happy - then I will suffer.
Hi Adam,
Love your books and online meditations. They have helped me accept the anxiety or "feeling" as I now call it as its easier to accept that way.
One question I have and I think I already know the answer is. I am in a job I dislike, the job itself is fine but it's a desk job and feels wrong to be sitting at a desk for 7 hours a day. I have tried to accept it but find it difficult. Is the next step to accept the resistance to the job?
What hurts is the resistance. If you had a thought of something bad, what makes it seem offensive or disturbing is the fact that another energy inside contracts and tries to push back against it. If you are experiencing thoughts you don’t like, what makes it feel bad is the resistance to them, calling the thoughts bad, believing that they should not be there...
One of the biggest hidden agonies of the human experience is the need or the desire for the present experience to be different. We often have a background feeling of “my current experience is somehow not enough, it needs to be different in some way”, and this manifests as many different desires and intentions to make us feel better, to take away the background sense of unease or discontentment...
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