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    I Don't Want To, I Don't Feel Like It: How Resistance Controls Your Life and What to Do About It
    I Don't Want To, I Don't Feel Like It: How Resistance Controls Your Life and What to Do About It
    I Don't Want To, I Don't Feel Like It: How Resistance Controls Your Life and What to Do About It
    Ebook226 pages1 hour

    I Don't Want To, I Don't Feel Like It: How Resistance Controls Your Life and What to Do About It

    By Ashwini Narayanan and Cheri Huber

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Whether it's a choice, such as a class we' ve signed up for, or a chore we feel we have no choice about, resistance (a voice in the head saying "I don' t want to, I don' t feel like it") can rocket us from commitment to inaction in a matter of seconds. Employing the tenets of Zen Awareness Practice, the book provides numerous exercises and tools for working through resistance. It reveals how the voice of resistance operates in everyday life, the many forms it takes, and how to be free of it. Transcending resistance is a practice of recognizing it as a process that happens to everybody and not taking it personally.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKeep It Simple Books
    Release dateMay 29, 2024
    ISBN9781953624017
    I Don't Want To, I Don't Feel Like It: How Resistance Controls Your Life and What to Do About It

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    • 4/5
      Argh, the font! I know Buddhists don't do things unintentionally, and that the font is supposed to provide a little bit of annoyance for you to overcome, like a koan, and that the handwriting style actually makes you think a little harder and store the information in long term memory. But omigod it's so annoying.

    Book preview

    I Don't Want To, I Don't Feel Like It - Ashwini Narayanan

    Preface

    In 1984, we published The Key and the Name of the Key Is Willingness because we thought it contained just about everything necessary to guide a person to wake up and end suffering through practicing awareness. The book was transformative for many, but it soon became obvious that it was not the miracle we’d hoped for. People were suffering as mightily as ever. Something was missing.

    In subsequent books we addressed specific content, such as fear, depression, and relationship to illustrate the principles of Awareness Practice--very helpful in many ways, but not quite the revolution we envisioned.

    What eventually came to light was that people won’t end suffering because they feel unworthy, and we realized that sense of unworthiness is a product of self-hate. The recognition and exploration of the process of self-hate inspired There Is Nothing Wrong with You (1993).

    People were now able to recognize the conversation in their heads that was causing distress. Gaining some distance from the conversation brought the realization that there’s an active process that causes us to feel bad.

    We don’t feel bad because we are bad,

    we feel bad because we’re listening

    to a self-hating conversation

    telling us we’re bad…

    The work of There Is Nothing Wrong with You allowed us to step back from and observe the process of suffering. From that vantage point we could see how suffering works and stop taking it personally. We could stop believing the voices were there because there was something wrong with us. In mentoring the young parts of ourselves, we could open to the possibility of embracing all aspects of ourselves in unconditional love and acceptance.

    A part of the work of going beyond self-hate is making recordings of reassurances, accurate information about ourselves in direct opposition to the self-hating voices.

    And yet, even able to see all of that,

    people continued to listen to and believe

    the judgmental, punishing, cruel voices.

    Even worse, their suffering now included Why are you still suffering? You should know better!

    The net result of this work seemed to lead to focusing on the process of suffering rather than practicing the process of ending suffering. In other words, people began to focus on their relationship with the voices of self-hate instead of turning attention to unconditional love.

    Several years later, reassurances grew into the Recording and Listening practice presented in What You Practice Is What You Have (2010). This tool is completely revolutionizing our Awareness Practice. Recording and Listening provides a replicative way to experience the compassionate wisdom of our authentic nature. The ability to access authenticity enables us to develop a practice of choosing wisdom and compassion instead of the messages of self-hate and suffering.

    Suddenly, we had a tangible, reliable way to practice having--and being--what our hearts have always wanted.

    Traditionally, spiritual seekers go to spiritual teachers to have wisdom imparted. The teacher is the holder of the wisdom; the sincere student is the recipient of the wisdom. This tradition has perpetuated the notion that wisdom comes from outside of us and is in the possession of a select few. The belief is that if we work hard and are good students, some of what we receive might stick. But it is unlikely that we would ever become repositories of wisdom.

    Wonderfully,

    with Recording and Listening

    people began to have

    an undeniable experience

    of the same wisdom they had

    seen and recognized outside

    appearing inside.

    It’s not that we hold that wisdom. It’s that the wisdom we’ve been seeking is as accessible directly as it has been via an external authority.*

    People began to recognize intuition and insight, realizing that knowing is something that drops in, with or without an external mirror in the form of a teacher. (We are not saying that a teacher is unnecessary. If we don’t have a wise and trusted guide, we will surely be guided by ego.) It became obvious that accessing wisdom, love, and compassion is possible only when the attention is not on the self-hating voices in the head.

    * We’re not supportive of the notion often bandied about that everything I’m seeking is inside me. We’re describing a very different process. The wisdom, love, and compassion that is the authentic nature of a human being does not reside within the I of ego. It is not housed in a me or a we. We go beyond the ego sense of I and drop the sense of a me when we touch true nature. (In this same way we don’t talk about loving myself. Compassion for the self is very different from an egocentric relationship in which an I is loving itself.)

    Recording and Listening practice has proved to us beyond doubt that the quality of our lives is determined by the focus of our attention.

    Focusing attention on

    love,

    kindness,

    generosity,

    compassion,

    spaciousness,

    and gratitude

    results in direct experience of the joy of presence in life.

    And yet, even having direct experience that what we seek is immediately available, knowing from personal experience that there’s a method to access it,

    people still slid back into the familiar grooves of listening to and believing the self-hating conversation in the head.

    And then one day it dawned:

    is the culprit!

    This book explores

    the process of resistance

    to having the life we want.

    We do not attempt

    an exhaustive exploration of

    either Awareness Practice or resistance.

    We simply show common ways

    resistance sabotages us,

    leading to failure and unhappiness, and

    we present tried-and-true practices

    for developing a more authentic orientation

    to life.

    For fun, we created this symbol for ego-I and sprinkled it throughout the illustrations. It represents the system that creates and maintains the illusion of a separate self, which we refer to as:

    egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate

    conditioned mind

    conditioning

    ego-identity

    identity

    ego-I

    ego.

    Gasshð,

    Cheri and Ashwini

    P.S. This book is not meant to be read in the conventional sense of the word. It is not meant to be intellectually understood, but intuitively savored. It is based in Awareness Practice. Sit with it, stop often, sense what it says, and do the exercises. Notice what arises. Perhaps read it with the attitude of mind suggested by Rumi in this verse:

    Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment;

    Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition.

    DEFINING RESISTANCE

    I don’t want to,

    I don’t feel like it.

    There’s an impulse:

    -- I want to lose weight, eat better, join the gym.

    -- I want to meditate. I’m going to go to bed early, get more sleep so I can get up early and sit.

    -- I want to do something that lights me up.

    -- I’m going to stop wasting time, stop watching tv, limit my time on the computer, stop playing those games!

    There’s excitement, enthusiasm, and anticipation. We can see our new life, the way we’ll be when we’re doing all the things we want to do the way we want to do them.

    Yes!

    And right on the heels of excited enthusiasm is a subtle, or not so subtle, voice-in-the-head campaign that starts to leach out the elation and excitement.

    The messages go something like this:

    Before long we find ourselves still not meditating, not eating well, not getting enough rest, definitely not lit up, and what I want to do isn’t happening--again!

    Then, at some point, we feel the inevitable, What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I make my life work?

    And, all the feeling bad in the world doesn’t change a thing.

    If you recognize this

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