What We Resist Continues to Live Through Us
During a Vipassana and Restorative Yoga retreat that I recently co-guided in Germany, I experienced one of those moments that seem almost insignificant at first.
And yet, something about it stayed with me.
It revealed a pattern I had known for years, but never seen with such clarity.
One evening, I was sitting in meditation. Nothing extraordinary was happening. There was simply a quiet sense of contentment. A feeling of ease moving through the body. The mind was calm. The heart felt open. There was a subtle sense of well-being present.
Then suddenly, an image appeared. An anxiety-provoking scenario. A future event that had not happened. A possibility that was not real. A story created entirely by the mind.
Within seconds, the atmosphere changed.
The contentment disappeared. The body tightened.
Attention was pulled away from the simplicity of the present moment and towards a future that did not exist.
What fascinated me was not the image itself. It was how quickly I recognized the movement beneath it. I had seen this before. Not only in meditation. In life. Again and again.
There is a pattern that has accompanied me for many years.
Whenever life becomes calm, whenever there is room to breathe, whenever things begin to feel good, something in me starts waiting. Waiting for the next thing to go wrong. Waiting for the next challenge. Waiting for the next disruption.
As if contentment itself cannot quite be trusted. As if peace is only a temporary visitor. The roots of this pattern are understandable.
Like many of us, I have experienced periods in life where difficult events followed one another in quick succession.
Moments when just as one challenge had passed, another appeared. Moments when there was barely enough time to recover before life demanded attention once more.
The nervous system learns from such experiences. The mind learns too. It begins trying to protect us. It begins scanning the horizon. It begins preparing for danger before danger arrives.
Over time, this vigilance can become so familiar that it no longer feels like a reaction.
It feels like reality.
Yet during that meditation, something became visible. I saw the mechanism itself. I watched the mind create an image. I watched it offer a story. I watched it attempt to pull me away from what was actually happening. And for perhaps the first time, I did not follow.
Not because I pushed the thought away. Not because I replaced it with a positive thought. Not because I convinced myself everything would be fine.
I simply saw it.
The image was not reality. The story was not reality. The fear was not reality. It was a movement within the mind.
Meanwhile, life continued unfolding here. Breath. Sensations. Sounds. Presence. This moment.
And as soon as that was recognized, something beautiful happened.
Equanimity returned.
Not because the mind stopped producing thoughts. Not because the pattern disappeared. But because awareness was no longer entangled with it. There was space around it.
To observe experience clearly. To see things as they are.
Often we assume this means observing sensations, emotions, or thoughts. But sometimes the deepest insights come when we begin to observe the stories that organize our experience.
The stories that quietly shape how we move through the world. The stories we have repeated so many times that we mistake them for truth.
What became visible to me was not merely fear. It was a relationship to life. A belief that moments of ease are fragile. A belief that peace must eventually be interrupted. A belief that whenever life becomes beautiful, something painful is waiting nearby. Seeing this pattern did not instantly erase it. Nor did it need to.
The insight itself was enough.
Because what is seen clearly loses some of its power to unconsciously direct our lives.
This is why I continue to return to silence. Not because silence guarantees peace. Not because silence removes discomfort. But because silence reveals. It reveals the places where we are still holding on. The places where old experiences continue to shape present perception. The places where the mind continues recreating familiar worlds. And perhaps most importantly, it reveals that awareness itself is larger than any story passing through it.
Every experience carries the potential for insight.
Moments of joy. Moments of discomfort. Moments of fear. Moments of contentment. All of them belong to the landscape.
The practice is not to hold onto the pleasant experiences or push away the difficult ones. The practice is to walk the path with enough presence to see clearly what is unfolding. To recognize when the mind is showing us reality. And to recognize when it is showing us a memory, a fear, or a familiar pattern wearing the mask of reality.
What we resist continues to live through us.
Yet what we are willing to meet, observe, and understand gradually loses its need to control us. And perhaps that is where freedom begins. Not when life becomes predictable. Not when difficulty disappears.
But when we no longer need reality to be different from what it is in order to be fully present within it.
(*Dutch) breng ‘Yoga in het leven’
🎧 Wil je verder luisteren over dit thema?
In "Wanneer rust onveilig voelt" | 'Yoga in het Leven' de podcast #3, deel ik openhartig over mijn ervaring tijdens het mede-begeleiden van een stilte retraite, en het onderzoek in hoe de mind soms naar het bekende grijpt, juist wanneer er rust ontstaat.
Voel je dat dit thema iets in je raakt en je nieuwsgierig maakt om anders naar gedachten, patronen en beleving van het leven te kijken? In het programma ‘Yoga in het Leven’ neem ik je mee op een verdiepende reis waarin yoga verder gaat dan de mat. Waarin we het onderzoek aangaan in de integratie van de yoga filosofie in het dagelijks leven.