“The completely open heart embraces life as it is, not what could or should be.”
--Adyashanti

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“We miss What-Is due to a lack of attention.
Instead, we create something else using excessive imagination.”
--Wu Hsin

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Once upon a time, the instant I hit a still-single 30 years old, the pressure to marry- from family, friends, strangers, professionals, and coworkers- increased exponentially.

The problem had two names. “Judy,” and, “Resistance.”

Judy was resistant to happiness, to all the great guys out there, to marriage, and to a normal lifestyle. For whatever much-theorized, deep-seated, needed-healing reason.

This was everyone’s belief including mine.

So at 31, I forced myself to stop resisting everyone’s idea of how my life should go, and got married.

Guess how that worked out.

Fast forward to all these years later, and now I see you out there, “resisting” various obligations in your own life.

Trying to coerce yourself into following the meal plan, not smoking, exercising, doing the paperwork, the writing, the meditation. Nagging yourself to get out of the house, socialize, or cross something, anything, off the to-do list.

Trying to figure out whyyyyy you don’t do that stuff, trying to find strategies to make yourself do it, itemizing the many supposed consequences if you don’t get it right and finally behave.

Instead of noticing, for a start, that you only resist musts, shoulds, have-tos, and supposed obligations.

After all, everyone knows, with absolute and unquestioned certainty, what your life should properly look like, what you absolutely must do or not do, and what is Good For You.

And there’s no acceptable “no” to What’s Good For You.

And yet somehow a big, fat, not-allowed, “no” exists anyway.

Which no amount of resisting resistance changes into acceptance.

What a no-win conundrum.

Enter guilt, shame, self-disgust, failure, therapy, and spiritual seeking.

So let’s get honest for a change. Perhaps the problem is not some deep-seated (in you, of course) issue named Resistance.

Perhaps there’s not even a problem at all.

Perhaps you simply don’t want to.

You don’t want to get married, cut carbs, do the taxes, fold the laundry, stop drinking. You don’t want to do what the guru says, share your deepest fears with some group of total strangers, or do whatever is being asked in order to get over “trauma.”

Hellooooo. You. do. not. want. to.

And then you might notice that this not-wanting-to can’t be helped or controlled or stopped.

Because preferences happen to you. They’re not your fault or doing.

I mean, if that power had ever been yours, you‘d have made your “wants” into something more acceptable ages ago. If you could have stopped it, you would have.

So when we say your “don’t wants” are a problem that it's up to you to fix, we’re attributing far more power and control to the self than it actually has.

We’re also saying existence is stupid and wrong.

So perhaps instead, consider renaming Resistance to the far-truer, “Don’t want to.”

I hope you’ll try this on. Because that rename comes with surprises.

That rename reveals that the same exact life you currently have, with no changes whatsoever, might be easier, lighter, freer, just by seeing that you’re allowed, even encouraged by existence, to want whatever has come to you to want.

Through no fault of your own.

That rename reveals that you’re allowed, even encouraged by existence, to live a life that doesn’t look like everyone else’s.

After all, does existence show any interest in everyone being thin, healthy, successful, social? Does existence show any interest in every human living until an energetic 95, while feeling only good feelings?

Life has different ideas, preferences, and desired outcomes than us wacky humans.

Existence might even know what it’s doing.

Even when what it’s doing sometimes shows up as cravings for wine, or isolation, or unhappiness and tears.

Or “resistance.”

Because just like acceptance and doing-things-“right”-according-to-humans is What Is,

Resistance is also What Is. Resisting resistance is also What Is. Don’t-want-to, is also What Is.

Just as much as acceptance or proper behavior.

Equally.

And who knows,

maybe being married to that

will turn out to be something we can accept

without resistance.