I’ve been reframing “problems” into “mysteries,” not necessarily to be solved, but to be explored. The older I get the more mysteries I notice in my body.
When I consider something to be a problem, I immediately try to fix it as soon as possible. But mysteries aren’t meant to be fixed. They require patience, curiosity, courage, faith and humility.
Because mysteries are sacred and beyond the world we know. And if we let them, they take us on adventures and open us to new experiences we wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Unfortunately, most of us don’t have time for mysteries in our busy lives. We take care of the problems we can, and sweep the rest under the rug.
I always joke with my massage therapist, “When my neck and shoulders aren’t tight, there will be peace on earth,” pessimistic of the possibility of either one happening in my life time.
I have the same relationship with my tightly wound fascia tissue as I do with God. I live with both, but don’t really have a relationship with either one. I take that back. I have a better relationship with God than with my fascia tissue.
As I continue in my daily practice to feel and flow pleasure through my body, I’m acutely aware of the places in me that do not feel pleasure-that ache to feel pleasure.
Statistics tell me that I will have more aches and pains as I get older, and the more scar tissue a person has from emotional or physical trauma, the longer it will take them to heal. That’s really depressing for someone like me who is holding about forty five years of emotional and physical trauma in my body.
But statistics don’t speak the language of mysteries. Mysteries transcend statistics. We enter them where we’re at-which is what makes each person’s journey unique and incomparable with anyone else’s.
For example, in a resistance stretching class I’m (https://www.thegeniusofflexibility.com) some people are way more flexible than I am. I have so much resistance, I could easily give up on ever opening my hips.
Though in the past I’ve looked at my resistance as a problem that was something I needed to release as soon as possible, the stretching class has encouraged me to see my resistance as a mystery-something to explore and make relationship with rather than numbly tolerate or get rid of.
What I’m discovering is how much pleasure there is in feeling my resistance, which is like an inner lover that not only meets, but strengthens my desire to open. As I simultaneously stretch and resist the stretch, the tension between my resistance and my desire is similar to the sexual chemistry I feel with a lover. I feel both held and pressed up against by my resistance. I feel its force and its wisdom that knows my body better than I do. I trust my resistancs to guide me to where I most need to let go.
It wasn’t like that at first. My initial experience of my body’s resistance to opening triggered feelings of helplessness and despair, which is why most of us would rather not access it, and why our resistance ends up expressing itself in unconscious ways, often through our projection of it onto others. Wanting to be a good little spiritual warrioress, I also judged myself for holding so much resistance in my body and not being strong enough to meet it.
Accessing our resistance is the first step to creating a relationship with it and allowing it to become our ally.
We can never meet opposing forces in the world until we meet our own opposing force within.
We can never learn to communicate with our impossible spouses or sexual partners or rebellious teenagers until we learn to appreciate the nature of our own resistance, whose very purpose is to resist our desire to open to life. Just as our desire to open will never understand our resistance, our resistance will never understand our desire to open, but the miracle is the two can simultaneously be accessed and experienced through dynamic tension. They can meet each other within our bodies!
And they need each other to be accessed and experienced to their fullness.
After my initial collapse into helplessness, I started finding the strength of my desire. As I found its strength, I added more resistance. I started feeling the deep pleasure of the dynamic tension between them, crying out both in ecstasy and grief for not having experienced such deep soul gratification until this moment.
I mourned for all the years I searched outside my body, trying to meet my Self through others-singing the Ho’oponopono prayer back and forth between my desire to open and my resistance and vice or versa, “I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.”
I let go of all my self judgment, my comparison with others, and belief in statistics and just focused on my own inner experience.
Because in the body, it doesn’t matter what level of open or closed I am. When I am fully present to my experience, every degree of opening feels as gratifying as the final destination, if there is one.
Which means no matter how old or scarred or sexually suppressed I think I am, I can choose to open to life. I can access my resistance and my desire to open, and feel the dynamic tension and pleasure of life flowing through my body. I can feel the pleasure of sexual tension, which is the tension between opposing forces, whether I’m in romantic relationship or not.
Incidentally, our desire to open and be filled by life is the magnetic primal feminine force that directs creational energy, attracting life in all its forms, from child spirits to lovers, to the right connections to financial abundance.
Most of us have yet to harness the receptive power of our desire because we have distorted it and tangled a lot of guilt around it, demonizing it as the “root of all evil.”We have weakened our desire to open to life and simultaneously strengthened our resistance or our fear of life. So much so, this resistance remains unconscious as well as the suppression of our desire.
As I stated in one of my earlier blogs, we bring consciousness to our life force through our desire. Or in other words, our life force is dependent on the waking of our desire. Though in fact we have an unlimited supply, we have access to only a small percentage, which is why we age.
This dormant life force, which sleeps beneath our fear, can only be accessed through conscious effort- through meeting our resistance or fear of life with our desire to open.
Paradoxically, our resistance is both the oppressor and liberator of our life force-and perhaps the only lover who will ever truly meet us.
