“You are having difficulties because you are fundamentally at conflict with your thoughts and feelings and you are using X as a weapon in this conflict. You are hoping that if you do X for long enough you won’t have to feel any of these difficult feelings. This is why it feels so uncomfortable and you are having physical symptoms, it’s because you are fundamentally resisting your emotions which is to fundamentally reject yourself.

As long as you want your emotions gone, that is you want to battle with them, to control them you will always lose and feel overwhelmed. Whatever you resist, persists.

It is a good idea to get out of the habit of resistance because it is resistance to our negative emotions that cause us suffering and not the emotion itself. Emotions are truly neutral, resistance turns them into negative.

To fully accept an emotion:

1. Be honest – don’t gaslight yourself. If you feel angry, sad, ashamed then that’s how you feel and that’s how you SHOULD feel simply because you are feeling that way.

2. Don’t try to feel better – this is our bad habit of resistance. The good intention to feel better is a way of saying I don’t want to feel how I’m feeling now which is rejection. A good test to see if you are accepting is if you can honestly answer no to the question ‘would I mind feeling like this forever?’ (It’s okay if your answer is yes, it takes time to cultivate this attitude, Rome wasn’t built in a day!)

3. See that what you are is acceptance. True acceptance doesn’t come from the mind, it’s not an action that you do. Acceptance is your nature, the nature of consciousness. Consciousness has no way to deny any appearance in it, it’s like an open space. If you understand that that is your true nature you will know it was never you resisting in the first place, it was all the mind

4. Be kind to yourself, it takes time to undo the habit of resistance – we’ve been doing it for so long!“

– u/Wannabe_Buddha_420 on Reddit

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