Welcome.
This is a resistance exercise.
I encourage you to allow yourself first to come to a comfortable seat or perhaps you'd like to stand or lay down.
And the purpose of this exercise is to feel resistance in our bodies by creating it so that we can learn how to release and let it go.
And we'll use the element of water that you hear in this song to help us release.
We hear in Zen Buddhism and Sufism,
In the Bible,
In Hinduism and in many of the spiritual traditions that whatever you fight,
You strengthen and what you resist persists.
So embrace what you're experiencing and it will dissolve.
Breathe here,
Finding a place of stillness as we begin.
Softening your eyes closed,
Bringing yourself into a state of awareness,
Tuning into your senses,
Following as the breath moves in and out of your body.
I invite you to sit with this word resistance.
What is resistance?
What does it mean to you?
And with a kind,
Gentle awareness,
I invite you to scan your body for where you might be feeling some resistance right now.
And notice the quality of what you think,
Oh yeah,
That might be resistance.
Notice what that feels like.
One example could be pressure or sensation or a sense of curling in,
A sense of closing off.
There's a desire to protect something.
Breathing here,
Noticing,
Scanning,
Without judgment,
What's happening in your body.
Without fidgeting or trying to shift,
I encourage you to stay with the experience of perhaps resistance.
And maybe you don't feel resistance and that's okay too,
Just encouraging you to stay with your body as you breathe.
The intention here is to step towards the resistance.
So often in our society,
We're told to run away,
Just take a pill.
By all means,
Just move away from the experience of resistance.
But my invitation today is different.
Perhaps find some easy resistance to work with,
Resistance that feels workable,
That feels accessible,
Perhaps not the most traumatic,
But one that feels just present and on the surface for us to work with.
Perhaps there's resistance in your belly,
A constriction or a tightness.
Maybe there's a heaviness that you feel in your shoulders or an aching somewhere in your body.
I encourage you to stay with those feelings,
Perhaps even bringing them more into your awareness.
Bringing them a place to be felt,
To be experienced in your somatic body.
Can you step forward towards the resistance?
Can you open yourself to what this resistance might actually be sharing?
Perhaps there's wisdom in the resistance.
And if we can be curious about the resistance from a childlike,
Soft,
Kind,
Tender,
Non-judgmental place into simply noticing of what's happening,
We're no longer resisting it.
Therefore,
It may not persist.
It can move.
It can change.
It can flow like the water.
I encourage you to breathe into your belly,
Expanding your belly on the inhale and then pulling your belly button towards your spine on your next exhale.
Staying with whatever's arising,
With gentleness,
Compassion.
Perhaps the compassion can sound like it's okay towards yourself saying things like,
Let's keep breathing.
So to have a felt sense experience of resistance in our bodies,
I invite you to keep your eyes closed but take your hands and make a fist with both of them.
Notice what that's like.
Once you have a fist in both of your hands,
I invite you to squeeze your fists together as much as you can for the next few moments,
Breathing.
Feel the sensations in all parts of your body as you clench,
Squeezing.
What happens to your breath?
What happens to your shoulders,
To your back,
To your arms?
Squeezing,
Squeezing,
Squeezing.
Noticing your face and your jaw and your legs.
Keep resisting and start to tense your whole body.
Contraction,
Contraction,
Contraction for five,
Four,
Three,
Two,
One,
Release.
Notice.
Breathing.
Feeling how your body feels now.
Notice how the sensations move in your body like waves,
Like ripples in water.
Breathing.
Sometimes it's important for us to feel the resistance deeply in our bodies by contracting,
Contracting more even and then releasing.
Breathing,
Feeling the expansion that naturally comes from the contraction.
I encourage you to play with this idea.
Be curious about this idea,
Seeing how when we can work with resistance and step towards it and feel it,
How it naturally moves and we can support it in that moving with our kind,
Gentle attention.
I encourage you to see how this experience of resistance shows up in your life and shows up in your body and how you might want to relate with it from a different perspective.
We'll take a few more slow,
Deep breaths together.
Thank you for sharing this practice with me.
I am interested to see what has come up for you,
So please share it with me in the comments.
Thank you.
Be well.
Useless monkeys already come up!
!
!
You
