Bjarne Timonen

Most of us have situations, people or places in our lives which bring about a lot of resistance in our selves. We often notice this firstly on a physical level, it might be a heavy feeling in the chest, pain in the neck or back. It might be a certain type of behavior which we can’t stand, a person whom we feel very strongly resistant towards or a place that just automatically causes us to shut down, creating a wall between us and what is occurring in front of us. The interesting thing is that often it is not so much what is objectively happening, but it is the stories, the layers we have created around them which make them feel so heavy. It is therefore very interesting to start investigating this resistance, in a non-judgmental way. Why do I feel so allergic? How does it actually feel in my body? Where do I feel it? (Because often we don’t want to actually experience the resistance, thereby making it even stronger). We can suffer a lot from these heavy ‘allergies’; these automatic reactions can even cause chronic physical complaints in the long run. Is it therefore not interesting to look at it? With a curious and friendly attitude, perhaps even with a bit of humor. If we do so, we might notice that the resistance itself isn’t all that concrete, that the stories we always believed in aren’t all that true and that this web of physical sensations, emotions and story lines is actually quite porous and transparent. It was our resistance against our resistance which never made it possible to actually see this. In this way our resistance becomes a very interesting thing, forming a direct path to seeing things more clearly as they really are.