Stop Biting Yourself! by Guy Finley
Key Lesson: Resistance always bites the hand that feeds it.
The Power to Leave Painful Thoughts & Feelings Behind You
Just as a storm in the atmosphere of the earth is born of conflicting fronts of different temperatures colliding with one another, so too must there be conflicting forces within us in order to form a mental or emotional storm. Our task is to become conscious of these unseen forces that dwell in the unenlightened parts of us. As we grow to realize that no disturbance can remain within us without our granting it the force it needs to sustain its fury, we realize that we have at our disposal two great powers. We are empowered to dismiss storms when they appear in our psychic system &, with time & practice, we can learn to dismiss these disturbances before they begin!
The storms in our lives all share a common cause. Each storm, large or small, centers around something that happens to us that we don't want to be happening for whatever reasons...
Imagine a woman caught in an emotional firestorm of anger because she does not wanted to be treated like that. Or a man who feels trapped by a tormenting depression because he doesn't want what life continues to bring to him. Can we see that these two storms share a common root? Both rise as they do because of our unconscious resistance to something that has already happened.
Whenever we face an unwanted event & find ourselves feeling nothing but resistance, we can discover that this stress-mess is made from our insistence that this should not have happened. And how about when we recall past mistakes, painfully reliving how we fell down -- either a moment ago or 10 years back? Aren't we sure that whatever that error may have been -- it shouldn't have taken place?
The storms we suffer are not born simply from any particular event that takes place, but rather they rise from an unknown ground in us due to our undetected resistance to them. Further, these unwanted events that we so strongly resist are not the actual events themselves. What we secretly struggle against in these moments are unwanted images of that event fashioned by ourselves. This occurs, for example, when we imagine a fearful future, or see ourselves thrown for a social loss of some sort. In these moments we suffer, as we do, because we are looking at what we don't want to see. And then, because we don't know that we have been tricked into giving these negative fantasies our attention, we try to imagine ways to escape their punishing presence. The more we struggle to get away, the more attention we inadvertently lend to what we wish would disappear! It's a great paradox: not wanting to look upon what is bothering us keeps what is bothering us in plain view! But now we are beginning to see our way out of this trap.
From this moment forward, whenever some dark storm appears in us, we must neither run from it, nor stand there & hate what we think is happening. Instead we must awaken to ourselves, bring ourselves back into the Now & quietly, deliberately, drop any image that our thought-nature presents within us to justify the brewing conflict. Learning to dismiss the storms that sink our chances to be happy takes dedicated inner work, but you may be assured such powers are possible. Your True Nature already dwells beyond the reach of self-wrecking storms.
