Inner Resistance is not Resolved with Blame: asking why is where your path of learning begins.
I want to raise an issue about learning which is a bit touchy for both student and teacher.
Often the learning process is full of powerful awareness for the student. Each word read, each voice raised in class, each conversation with the teacher ignites new understanding while blocks and outdated notions drop away.
Learning can be a refinement where the release of the chaff seems to lighten the load. The release can be so profound, the soul skims the roof of the sky, boundless and unlimited. The student is giddy with relief and gratitude, ready for more.
This experience can be what a student seeks over and over again as proof that learning is happening and the student is doing the “right” thing. The student wants reassurance that personal effort leads to progressing along the purposeful path.
The Path of Resistance
There is another possible path of learning which is not as enjoyable for either the student or the teacher.
This is the path of resistance – the path where the euphoria seems to be missing.
On this path, there is struggle and a desire to return to the feeling of deep profundity. Try as they might, the student can’t find or relive the moment of powerful clarity. In fact, there is confusion and frustration.
The student may think the prior experience of sky skimming has bestowed an expertise which should make them worthy of clarity and acknowledgment in this moment. So certain, the student becomes absolutely convinced of their rightness and that the trouble is elsewhere – not theirs because surely, they have done all the things.
Instead of examining the resistance, within this certainty, the student makes a choice to determine who is at fault and who is holding them back.
Most often the culprit is the teacher. The teacher didn’t do enough or did too much. The teacher didn’t proceed as promised. The teacher failed to recognize that they did all the things and give them credit.
Instead, the student stops. The feeling of resistance within is rolled up into a tight, heated ball and projected onto the teacher because the teacher is at fault. Blame is righteously placed on the teacher. If only the teacher could understand the clarity of the student, then the student would be able to comfortably attain the certainty the teacher is failing to see. The profound euphoria will be returned.
In this blame is the assumption that the teacher doesn’t see properly and is refusing to acknowledge the student’s certainty.
Instead, in the blame is the student refusing to deal directly with inner resistance.
What is Blame?
Blame is a blind path – intentionally blind to the truth of inner experience and the roots of personal resistance.
Resistance arises because this is the nature of the current learning path. Maybe the last turn was down a dead end. Or a new learning is available in a different direction. Or maybe the student is at a crossroads where every possibility is either unexpected or unknown. Fundamentally, resistance is a gift of unseen possibility.
The resistance is bundled with scary stuff filled with a sense of foreboding that once a choice is made life will never be the same. A sense that dear friends may be left behind, the student alone, solitary, perhaps feeling ostracized.
When resistance arises, venturing into the unknown alone is perceived as too much challenge, the mountain too far.
Instead, the pattern of blame wants to find security away from personal responsibility and inner turmoil. You’ve learned the things, now acknowledgement is due. Inner resistance safely tucked away and out of sight.
Teacher and Student
In a sense, this is the difference between student and teacher. One has dealt with inner resistance head on and has accepted this as the personal responsibility and opportunity of the learning path. And one has not – yet. The learning path is lifelong, yielding new roads of discovery and new peaks of awareness.
In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali discusses the dazzling jewels of the spiritual journey. Those twinkly bits which are mistaken as the destination of the journey. Once obtained, the mistaken perception is that the learning is finished, and mastery is secured. Thus, blame focuses on the dazzling jewels and declares them as the object of the sought-after learning.
In contrast to this conclusion, resistance is a call to us all that we are never done with learning. Life is a journey, not a destination. Life is not a search to secure the dazzling gems.
Instead, life is a continual ebb and flow across the spiral of eternal return. A dance with the divine. A continuous process of learning. An opening. An asking. A receiving. Steps to be explored, repeated, and savored.
Resistance within is a wakeup call that life and awareness has gotten off track.
However, somewhere, somehow, you’ve decided that your journey is complete, and all has been learned. In this space of avoidance, any inconvenience or disruption or disappointment is most certainly rests with the teacher – and not the student.
In contrast, inner mastery is not a path to finish. Inner mastery is an acknowledgement that because of the ever-expanding nature of All That Is there is always something to learn and to explore.
Inner mastery doesn’t need to do blame. Instead at any point for both the student and teacher, the approach to resistance is a question first to self and then, perhaps, to fellow travelers.
Why this now?
What am I not seeing?
Why?
The question of why is the needed acknowledgement when frustration surfaces, when you find yourself at the edge of the unknown. The impulse is to turn away from the darkness, the unexplainable, and the place where self is no longer the recognized self – or so it seems.
However, this is the place of expansion, where self expands within multiple dimensions. Where you momentarily leave your old self behind to step through a liminal threshold to find yourself on the other side, whole, complete for now, and ready to learn more.
Resistance isn’t failure. Inner resistance is a signal to the self to question, to seek to learn more, to take self-responsibility.
Blame directed away from self is a choice away from self-responsibility and the possibilities of seeking to understand the unknown.
This is how transformation and integration are connected. This is why the student clings to the headiness of transformation and tries to sidestep the uneasiness of integration.
Coming off the mountain top, experience can seem like you are leaving the best bits, those dazzling gems, behind. Instead, in the return from a peak experience you are primed to be more you than before – if only you will lean into the newly forming tendrils of your whole, authentic self.
Life finds authenticity and the vulnerability of the unknown and the unexpected.
Learning isn’t confirming what you already know.
Learning is the path into the unknown where you are not alone. Learning is accepting resistance not as indication of failure, but rather indication of new direction within infinite possibility.
Learning sees blame as a pattern worth shifting, understanding, and releasing. Learning leads the student through the darkness into new awareness and choice.
“What awaits me?” the student asks the teacher.
“I don’t know for sure,” the teacher replies. “What I do know is this: if you choose to walk this path, you are not alone. However, the choice for you is yours and not mine.”
“Why?” asks the student.
“Because why is where you begin your life – where your path of learning begins.”
Just to Be Clear
When a student tells me I got it all wrong, I know the student has hit inner resistance. Instead, of asking why, the student is stepping into blame as a way to deal with their inner intensity and avoid release. Until the pattern is seen and understood, I am not the first and won’t be the last to be blamed.
I know I don’t know everything. As a teacher, I am still learning, still exploring, and seeking understanding. Also sometimes learning paths are aligned and sometimes both the student and the teacher will benefit by following the path as it leads away from each other. However, blame doesn’t have to be the tool of separation.
When blame is thrown at me, I see the inner pain of the student and an inability, in the moment, to seek resolution and inner clarity.
Instead, the blame is an attempt to sidestep self-responsibility. The blame becomes all that can be seen and all that can be managed because whatever is below the surface is too overwhelming to make present.
More importantly, the blame is an attempt to sidestep whatever pain and confusion is lurking inside the student. The student has come to a point where learning and exploring is not yielding anything but painful bits of self-discovery.
In this situation, I as the teacher have few options available. Occasionally, the student will hear me as I try to help them see that the struggle is not with me.
However, often, the student doesn’t want to explore the pattern they are caught in, and they will stomp their feet and move on unknowingly repeating a pattern of avoidance and blame.
A Word of Caution
So, a word of caution – a suggestion – a request.
If you find yourself finding fault with another person. Stop. Question yourself. Ask why?
Why is this my choice?
Why now?
What responsibility am I sidestepping?
What is too painful to acknowledge?
What pattern am I repeating?
Also know that if you are my student and I am your teacher, I will respond to blame with Why?
Not because I think I know everything – rather, because I believe that asking Why? is my job as teacher and as witness. I am at this open door ready to assist you as you explore your resistance and pain. I will stand witness as you release and move forward. IF you ask me a question, I will do my best to answer quickly and clearly.
The Learning Path
When we go below the surface of life, we encounter both euphoria and resistance, both wonder and the unknown.
Whatever the experience, we have choice in our reaction and in our response. When we learn together, we have the opportunity to reach out and ask for assistance. As a student, the request for assistance is the student’s opportunity and responsibility.
As a teacher, I am always ready and open to respond when asked. The request indicates a readiness to deal with the resistance and, perhaps, move beyond blame.
Resistance indicates the possibility of finding a re-envisioned sense of euphoria – because resistance is indication that the path forward is to not return to the previous mountain.
Instead, the path forward is toward the next peak. When blame is sidestepped, and self-responsibility embraced, the new path will come into focus through question and release. Always, the student follows a path of learning through the mountains of life.
Life is a learning journey.
I won’t and can’t walk your path for you.
You walk your path. I walk my path.
Together we can learn to face both euphoria and resistance.
Together we can witness each releasing their patterns of blame.
Remember: why is where you begin your life – where your path of learning begins.
This article is from A View from the Boundlessness.
