Danielle Klafter

Welcoming Resistance

You can listen to the post read aloud or you can read it below for yourself:

Resistance meets me on all sides. Maybe you somehow live a magical life where things come easy and fall into place without much effort, but if you do, don’t tell me. From what I’ve observed, resistance haunts us all. Some days moreso than others, but it’s continually there.

No matter what I want to build into my life—a workout regime, a writing habit, a parenting shift, marital intimacy—I have to face resistance if I want to embrace that lifestyle or task. I have to resist feeling tired or lazy. Resist fear of outcomes. Resist insecurity or self-doubt that I can actually do the hard thing I’m setting out to do. Resist needing approval from others. Resist disliking an early bedtime. Resist doing the dishes now instead of later. Resist being the first one to initiate the hard conversation. I could go on.

There’s something in me that resists even resistance itself. I have this idolization in the back of my head that somehow things should be easier. I crave easy. I’m not sure where I got that idea from. Life doesn’t support it. Scriptural texts never promised it. It’s probably a form of prosperity gospel that somehow lodged in my brain. If I do all the right things then my life will be easy. But everything I’ve learned about growth and spiritual journeys and what transformation entails is the opposite of easy. Easy never inspires growth. Maybe it gives you a reprieve, a short stay at the oasis where you sleep for a bit and refill your water tank, but it’s never a spot to stay. You’ll never reach the Promised Land if you stay in the desert.

But I’m considering that even ideas about the Promised Land could be misnomers. Maybe that’s where my ideal of “easy” comes from. I think, okay. I’ll walk through the desert but when I finally get to the Promised Land, THEN it will get easy. But it’s not easy there either. When the Israelites get to the promised land they see giants. They have to walk around cities for days looking like idiots, waiting for the walls to fall down. They have to fight wars. And then they get sidetracked along the way plenty of times. They fall prey to approval syndrome and want to be like all the other nations and ask for a king. If you haven’t read Old Testament history—here’s a news flash: it doesn’t go well for them. The Promised Land is not easy either. It’s just the next step in the journey of growth set out for them.

I know all this. I know from experience that hard things and facing pain and resisting resistance all engender growth and lead to transformation. I’ve seen the fruit in my own life. And yet…I still find that muscle wanting to quit. Not again. Do I have to do the hard thing again? Can’t I just have a night or a day or a week or a month or a year off? Please? Can’t I?

My daughter’s new school talks about the three-headed monster of resistance, distraction, and victimhood. They talk about this in the context of each learner being a hero on a journey, and these are monsters they have to face along the way. These are monsters parents have to face too. We’re all on a journey.

I’ve written before about the Welcoming Prayer practice (I’ll link that post in the references at the bottom of this one). It’s a practice that centers around welcoming what is. For starters, I can welcome the fact that I’m feeling resistance. But it’s also a way to sink in and eventually through the resistance. But only from a roundabout way.

I’m listening to an audiobook right now by Thomas Hübl entitled Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma―and Our World. A refrain throughout the book seems to be starting with recognizing what is. Don’t focus on what you want to be or what you think you need to fix. Just witness what is already there. For instance, if a therapist is sitting with a client who just feels numb, Hübl says it’s not the therapist’s job to change that numbness or fix it. He contends that it’s the therapist and the client’s job to bear witness to that numbness. Draw attention to it. Be with it. Presence it. In other words, welcome it. Often, the very act of witnessing will lead to some kind of shift or opening that wasn’t possible before. But that is the fruit, not the goal—an outcome to be forced or accomplished.

So when it comes to setting goals and aiming for transformative change in my life, it seems to be this fine tightrope between setting intentions but also witnessing what is present. A good kick in the ass to make myself get out of bed and do the hard thing—no excuses. But also grace to honor my frailties and limitations.

I keep a large vegetable garden. It’s mostly a source of joy for me. I love planting seeds, nurturing them, watching them grow and produce and then getting to eat from the bounty. I preserve lots of salsas and relishes and jams so our family can enjoy garden bounty even in the dreary cold of winter. Gardening has generally come fairly easily to me. There’s work to it, but if I put in the daily to weekly maintenance, it tends to bear fruit. Except last year my tomato plants got a blight early and there was hardly any canning of spaghetti sauce and salsa and tomato soup. I was a bit heart broken. But I had some extra stores laid away and I made it through the winter with what I already had. But there were lots of empty jars to fill this year. So I tackled the problem, looking for a solution. I switched from a sprinkler watering system to a soaker hose one, so the leaves wouldn’t get as wet. I pruned the lower branches of the plants to try and keep them off the ground. I planted more tomato plants than usual so I could catch up on my canning stores. I did all the right things. But half my plants still got a blight or fungus this year and still withered before their time. Some of that might have been completely out of my control. We had torrential rain for a season of the summer that may have out-done all my attempts to keep water off the leaves.

When it happened, I reacted fairly emotionally. I first spent a couple hours drastically pruning my plants in an attempt to desperately save them from more disease. I was angry and frustrated. I wanted to force my way through the situation and make it conform to my ideas of what it should be. I can fix this! I WILL fix this! Then I gravitated to all-or-nothing thinking. I failed. I give up. I won’t put in a garden at all next year.

But neither of those lines of thinking serve me. What I gradually realized is that in some ways my garden was mirroring other frustrations in my life and I was having a hard time welcoming the mixed set of outcomes that my garden presented this year. I didn’t want to have to work really hard at things in my life, to nurture things into existence and care for them diligently, only to have no control over the outcome, to have to face grief and disappointment despite all my best attempts. Maybe you can resonate with that notion.

Here’s the truth about my garden this year. It wasn’t a failure. Yes, four of my tomato plants withered and died before their time. But more than four are still alive and producing. The ones I planted in a new spot along my alleyway thrived especially well. I have been able to can enough tomatoes. Some things in my garden didn’t pan out the way I’d hoped. My kale was decimated by a caterpillar population a couple weeks ago, just when it should’ve started producing more lovely fall greens. My zucchini plant died early, killed by squash bugs. My okra plants stayed shorter and produced less than normal. But other things in my garden were a success. I picked gallons of green beans. I had a hearty crop of lettuce. My beets thrived. My eggplants seemed yellowed for half the summer, but they rallied and have produced.

So the truth is that I worked hard to nurture the ground and bring forth vegetation and it did, just not in a perfect controlled environment or outcome. But it was good enough. The disappointments I suffered don’t cancel out the successes and the piles of vegetables I have been able to pick and put on the dinner table. I need to alter the black and white story I tend to tell myself. It’s good enough. It’s both and. Limitations and squash bugs and rainstorms are part of the broken world we live in. Can I welcome that reality?

And can I push past the disappointment that is often a form of resistance. I don’t want to do it if it won’t work out perfectly. OR I don’t want to engage in this relationship unless it will work out the way I want or unless this person will meet my needs exactly the way I envision. You write your own line of thought that mirrors your reality. Whatever it is, resistance will be part of the process. So I can either embrace what is available and accept the abundance that is provided, or I can give up and walk away from good things left on the table.

I’m going to let things rest for the winter, and then I’m going to choose to plant another garden when the time comes.

Resources:

If you’d like to receive my writing delivered direct to your inbox, subscribe below. To contact me with any thoughts, questions, or response, feel free to use the contact form on my website.

Be well.

danielleklafter Avatar

Published by

danielleklafter
Categories: , ,
Tags: , , , , ,