‪What You Resist, Persists — What You Accept, Transforms

This article was originally published on Soulaia.com. This version has been lightly updated to reflect my current understanding, work, and offerings while preserving the heart and core message of the original article.

‪You’ve probably heard it before– the notion that life isn’t about what happens to you, but rather about how you respond to it. It’s been my favorite motto for over a decade now, and it’s given me a sense of agency over the circumstances of my life. Initially though, I thought responding mostly meant figuring out how to get rid of difficult feelings and unpleasant experiences as quickly as possible. If I felt anxious, sad, disappointed, rejected, hurt, uncertain, or uncomfortable, my instinct was almost always:

“How do I make this stop?”
“How do I move past this?”
“How do I get back to feeling okay again?”

And honestly, exhausting myself trying to outrun my inner experience often created even more suffering than the original feeling itself. It taught me a lot… the many years of resisting… and it also guided me to a different way of meeting my life that exists too.

And that‘s what I share with you below.

If You Resist It, Will It Go Away?

The story of King Sisyphus from Greek Mythology goes like this: Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to Hades (the term for ‘Hell’ used by the Greeks). The eternal punishment? He had to roll an incredibly large, heavy boulder up a hill. When it got to the top, guess what? It would roll down again… Over and over again, Sisyphus efforted to get the boulder up the very top of the hill, after which it would repeatedly roll back down.

The teaching contained within this myth (and Joko Beck describes this exceptionally well) is that all that’s really happening is that Sisyphus is rolling a boulder up a hill and then watching it roll back down. In essence, if we look just at what we are doing in the moment, moment by moment, then pushing the boulder up the hill and watching it roll back down are really the same thing. There is no inherent difference. One is not inherently bad and the other inherently good. But… bring into that our personal interpretation... And all of a sudden, we are seeing that, no matter what he does, Sisyphus can’t get the rock to stay at the top of the hill. Our interpretation, then, is to judge that his task is extremely unpleasant and hard. And so Hades is not found in pushing the rock, but in how we think about it, and how we create ideas of good and bad, and of hope and disappointment in response to everything we experience.

We don’t know if the boulder will stay atop the hill each time. Perhaps it will; perhaps it won’t. Neither action is good or bad in and of itself. So the heaviness and the burden, then, come not from the boulder itself but from our thinking that life is a struggle, that the circumstances of our life are wrong, that what is happening shouldn’t be happening and that life should be other than it is. This isn’t a new revelation– in fact, the sentiment that our struggle is the product of unpleasant circumstances multiplied by how much we resist them (Struggle = Circumstance * Resistance) has been professed for many decades, including by Carl Jung who alluded to it when he said, “You will always become the thing you fight the most” and by Eckhart Tolle, when he very poignantly expressed that “Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists”.

I should also mention here that not all resistance is unhealthy. Sometimes resistance is actually wise. Sometimes it’s a boundary. Sometimes it’s discernment. Sometimes it’s our nervous system trying to protect us from something harmful, overwhelming, unsafe, or deeply painful. The kind of resistance I’m speaking about in this article is less about healthy boundaries or protective instincts and more about the exhausting inner struggle that happens when we fight against the reality of what we’re already feeling, experiencing, or carrying internally.

The Many Forms of Resistance

We are all– in some way, shape, or form throughout our daily lives– trying to escape a reality that we don’t prefer.

Two predominant ways in which we do so, as you saw above, are by 1) judging our reality, and 2) arguing with our reality. We may notice the sun setting and then think to ourselves, “I don’t like sunsets”, judging our experience as bad or unpleasant as an attempt to escape it and be somewhere else. Or we may attempt to argue with our reality by thinking “I wish the sun wasn’t setting. My day would be better if the sun didn’t set. My day is done. It’s no longer any good. Every day is like this. Every day this sun-setting thing happens. Why does the sun always set when all I want is for there to be sunshine all of the time?”

The sun is setting… it’s happening... And you are arguing with the fact that it’s happening.

The same goes for anything in life… When you are arguing with reality– whether that reality is conflict in your relationship, a ticket on your car’s windshield, feelings for someone you “shouldn’t” have feelings for– it is like repeatedly throwing a tennis ball at a cement wall, expecting it to cause some sort of indentation, but that’s just not what happens when a ball hits cement. Nothing happens except that maybe your wrist starts hurting and you grow increasingly frustrated. Reality changing just isn’t what happens when you yell about it or wish it wasn’t so. Nothing happens except that maybe your head and heart start hurting and you grow increasingly exhausted.

Resisting reality comes in the form of judging it and arguing with it, and also very matter of factly in the form of avoiding it. How do we attempt to avoid reality? Well, some of us drink or smoke in order to escape the present-day reality that is our life. Others of us shop. Many of us eat.

It doesn’t end there. In trying to resist it, we also often spread the woes of our reality, asking or even coercing other people into helping us carry our heavy boulders through the personal and professional relationships we maintain throughout our life.

It’s clear that as a species, we’ve gotten pretty good at avoiding reality. And if we want to get better at living a truly happy life, it may help us to begin opening ourselves to another way of meeting reality.

Accept and Be With What’s Real

Fast forward King Sisyphus’ experience to decades, centuries, perhaps thousands of years later… If he is still unhappily pushing the boulder up the hill, what would it help him to do?

Wouldn’t you agree that it might very well help him to accept that pushing the rock is his current reality and to give up hope that this moment of his life will be different than what it is?

Panache Desai, for one, says, “Accept what life has served to you and you will naturally move into more.” I’d agree. Learning how to be with life as it is, at least more often, is one of the deepest shifts many of us can make in reducing unnecessary suffering, i.e., the “pushing the rock up the hill” phenomenon of resistance that we oftentimes find ourselves in. That is part of what creates more inner peace, freedom, and contentment in our lives. It’s not so much about getting life to feel good all of the time, but to be present with whatever rocks and boulders happen to be there, and to be consciously aware of how we are responding to that present life experience that we’ve been given. Because that’s where our choice lies– in how we respond to each and every moment and circumstance of our lives. While acceptance may sound like “giving in” and looks like complacency, it’s far from it. Rather, it’s a willingness to be with life as it is in this moment, knowing that anything but that leads to unnecessary suffering (like that of our human condition).

And to be clear, acceptance does not mean approving of harmful behavior, staying in unhealthy situations, tolerating abuse, abandoning boundaries, or giving up our agency. Acceptance simply means honestly acknowledging what is already true in this moment rather than exhausting ourselves fighting reality internally.

What Happens When We Stop Fighting Ourselves

So, what’s your current boulder? Is it the fact that the sun is setting and you strongly feel that you didn’t get enough done? Is it an agitation with someone you love? Is it anger about a recently discovered ticket on your windshield? A fear of losing your job or of losing someone you love? An urge you don’t want to admit to having?

When we notice that the sun is setting, when we notice someone we love doing something we don’t prefer, when we notice a ticket on our car’s windshield, when we notice we have an urge that we wish wasn’t there– acceptance might sound like honestly acknowledging:

“Yes, this situation is happening.”
“Yes, my partner keeps doing this thing that hurts, frustrates, or impacts me.”
“Yes, I’m feeling sadness, anger, disappointment, fear, grief, or confusion about it.”

And from that more grounded place of honesty and awareness, we’re often better able to discern what boundaries, conversations, decisions, or actions might actually be needed next.

Often, freedom begins not when we finally get rid of uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, fears, urges, or life circumstances, but when we become more willing to honestly acknowledge and compassionately face what’s happening inside us without immediately fighting, suppressing, escaping, shaming, or denying it.

Paradoxically, the more terrified we become of our inner experience, the more trapped by it we often feel. And the more capacity we build to stay present with ourselves safely and compassionately, the more freedom, choice, clarity, and groundedness we often begin to experience.

At the same time, there’s an important difference between accepting a feeling and acting on it. For example, accepting that anger, grief, fear, jealousy, shame, self-harm urges, attraction, or pain exist within us does not mean we need to impulsively act those feelings out. Often, healing begins by learning how to honestly acknowledge and compassionately be with difficult emotions without immediately suppressing them, exploding from them, or letting them completely run the show.

In many ways, this is about learning how to stay in relationship with our experience rather than immediately fighting it, collapsing into it, or running from it.

A relevant analogy I love comes from the world of improv. In improv, a skit progresses with a “Yes, and” where one person aligns with and redirects their partner’s energy and words instead of blocking them. It is the same in life. It’s when we notice our experience, and practice awareness of our response to that very experience that we transform. Accepting our present reality (including, oftentimes, our resistance to acceptance) frees us up to respond with more authenticity, choice, and intentionality to our lives. As Pema Chodron so beautifully says, “Let difficulty transform you and it will. In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away.”

What Acceptance Has Taught Me

Over time, I’ve come to believe that healing, happiness, and peace of mind are not necessarily found in eliminating all discomfort from our lives, but in learning how to stay more connected to ourselves through the full range of our human experience.

None of this means life suddenly becomes painless. Human life still includes loss, uncertainty, disappointment, heartbreak, fear, grief, frustration, and change. But often, additional suffering gets created when we layer resistance, shame, self-judgment, panic, or internal war on top of what’s already difficult.

Much of the work I now explore inside Happy from the Inside Out® centers around this very experience of building a more compassionate, grounded, emotionally honest relationship with ourselves and our inner world.