Chains of suffering

One of my guiding principles for inner work is “let everything be”. If you feel angry, let yourself feel angry. If you feel sad, let yourself feel sad. If you feel bored, let yourself feel bored.

It’s the resistance to these feelings that causes problems.

Or in buddhist terminology, this resistance is tanha: a wish that the world were different than it is. Tanha creates dukkha, dissatisfaction.

Both art-of-accomplishment and jhourney use a particular trick that is highly effective. If you can’t figure out how to deeply allow the sadness to exist, can you deeply allow the resistance to the sadness to exist?

But what is this?! Now resistance is okay, it’s the meta-resistance that’s bad?

I’ve landed on this model: There’s many links in the chain between your grasping and the sensation. Breaking or weakening any of the links is effective. Breaking meta-resistance is just breaking a link a little further up the chain.

I’m not sure it’s right, but it’s nicely poetic at least: The chains of suffering.