Allowing everything, understanding resistance

We’ll begin by finding the intention to just deeply allow experience, to be exactly as it is, to allow and welcome the moment to moment experience of being you as it arises through the body, the heart, and the mind and the senses. This is a slightly different intention to that of focusing or concentrating or trying to achieve a certain mind state in the meditation for this practise. We’re not interested in achieving this or that mind state in getting here or there. We’re interested in deeply welcoming and allowing whatever happens to be present. So finding this intention, finding a sense of ease with this intention, it’s like it’s not a heavy thing. It’s certainly not something that requires effort in the usual sense. If it sounds at all abstract or vague, then that’s okay. For now we’re just going to check in with ourselves and become a bit more aware of what’s happening in our direct experience right now. So sensing your body and sensing the many sensations that are coming and going in your body right now, sensing the breath, sensing patterns of tension, sensing the more subtle tingles, other sensations that you can feel moving around your body if you look closely and becoming aware as well of just the general sense of how your body feels. There might be a word that we associate with this, like tense or tired or neutral, numb or relaxed, restless. And underneath the word, just become really familiar with what that feels like, with the felt sense of the whole body as a kind of whole space or a whole field, not so much a collection of parts. And coming back to this intention to just really allow and welcome everything. This intention is the opposite of resistance. And in a way, it’s the opposite of effort. Just tuning to your experience of your body with this intention. Welcome. And you might be able to sense, along with your body being experienced as it’s being experienced right now. There may be some resistance, could be quite obvious if there’s pain or discomfort, something unpleasant going on. There might be some really obvious resistance. Sense of, I don’t want this to be here, kind of pushing away of our experience. You can just become really familiar with this resistance and hold it with the same sense of really allowing and welcoming. And as you do so, it may soften a little bit. We don’t want to pile resistance on top of resistance by requiring that all resistance vanishes. Instead we just extend this attitude. Allowing, welcoming, receiving, witnessing. This resistance, when it’s more obvious, can manifest as physical tension, maybe that you can feel in the forehead or the shoulders or the chest, some tension. And you might sense this associated with some kind of resistance, some kind of unwillingness to open fully to experience as it is. If that’s the case, we can encourage a softness and just breathe with our resistance, with our whole experience and checking in with the heart, checking the emotional flavour of things. Right now, you might sense this in your body. You might sense the body kind of flavoured by whatever emotions are present, even if it’s quite a subtle flavour or quite a neutral flavour, can sense how the emotional state shows up in the body. And it may also be that there’s a more specific sense of a particular emotion manifesting in a part of the body, in the throat or the heart, the belly. Just spend a moment becoming a bit more intimate with your emotional experience right now. And extend the same attitude. This sense of really allowing your emotions, your heart, your mood to be exactly as it is. This is just an intention. It’s not really a job, it’s not really a task. It’s a way that we meet our experience. Again, you may notice some resistance to feeling how you’re feeling. Again, this might show up physically, maybe in a part of the body, maybe as a kind of background sense in the body, sense of tension, constriction, contraction. And often it can have the flavour of trying. When there’s an experience that we’d rather not have, or when there’s something we’d rather be experiencing, there can be this very deeply entrenched sense of sort of subtly trying to have a different experience than the one we’re having, even though that’s impossible because we’re already having this experience, it’s already here. And staying with this intention for really allowing and welcoming everything can highlight the ways in which we don’t allow, the ways in which we resist, we push away. It’s very important how we respond to those instances of tension and trying and pushing away. We don’t want to push them away; we want to include them in this attitude of allowing. They might then choose to melt away in a kind of natural way, or they may not. It can feel a little vulnerable, a little tender. To really allow things to be as they are can feel like a stripping away of armour, can even feel like a stripping away of our very boundaries. And just know that we’ll be able to go back to pushing experiences away and trying to have different experiences. But for now, we’re experimenting with a different attitude, trusting experience and showing a sort of humility in the face of experience, rather than the habitual attitude of how can I have a different experience? How can I improve this or make this go away? And slightly ironically, we may notice that when we do really allow experience in this agenda-less way, it does get easier, it does soften. Space is created, but it’s not us creating that space. It’s not us letting go of anything really. Just all in the way that we meet and allow and welcome our experience. And it takes a certain kind of sensitivity, a certain kind of awareness to really notice the ways that we’re resisting our experience. It’s a kind of deep listening quality. And it’s helpful to really want to understand the ways that we resist the ways that we push away. Have that desire to really know my inner workings, how I cause tension by trying to have a different experience. And it may be that your attention naturally gathers somewhere like the breath or the body if you’re accustomed to doing so in meditation. And that’s just fine. That’s just another thing to allow. It doesn’t have to. When attention wanders here and there, we can just watch it with affection. Like watching a kitten playing, walking over here to nibble on some food, walking over there to roll around in the grass. It’s like we’re taking a step back into this very hands-off attitude that just trusts the wisdom of our experience, that doesn’t need to make it different to fix something, to change something, to have control. In this attitude, there is inherently a kind of care and love and compassion. When I really allow and trust my experience, when I allow my body and my heart and my mind to be as they are without deciding that I need to be different, I need to change this, I need to fix that. This is exactly how we want to be cared for, how we want others to treat us. Right now things are like this. My body feels this way, my heart feels this way, my mind’s doing this thing and that’s okay. Don’t have to like it. I may or I may not. This goes beyond like and dislike, kind of quiet steadiness and acceptance. Not a disempowering kind of rolling over and taking it, but a deep spaciousness that can just let things be without the need to be so tangled up. We’ll just rest for a couple more minutes, allowing everything to just be as it is.