Leaning In

Some time ago there was a day when I was feeling shitty. I felt frustrated with myself and with others, I felt resentful, I felt ashamed, I felt inadequate. What does one do when he feels like that? What I wanted was for that mood to be gone. I noticed in myself an urge to read. I noticed in myself an urge to masturbate. Anything to distract myself from what was going on with me.

But rather than giving in to distractions, I decided to sit with what was there: my frustration with myself and others, my feeling sad and disconnected. For a moment I let go of the desire to make this mood go away. I stayed with it. I tried to embrace it as fully as I could. It was not a thunderous and cathartic process. There were no deep insights. There was no profound shifts in my state. What changed after 5 or so minutes is that there was just a bit more acceptance of the way I was. I felt it was ok to be like that. Like in a Zen story where young monks asked their fellow monk who was announced to achieve enlightenment about how he feels and he answered: ‘As miserable as ever.’

It was ok to feel shitty. My attitude shifted to acceptance–not fighting and resisting the mood I had, not trying to get rid of it, not blaming myself for having it, not blaming myself for doing things that led to it.

And who knows perhaps as a result of that nice things started to happen. The same day, I received good news sooner than I expected. Accidentally, I met people I liked and wanted to connect deeper to. An old acquaintance wrote saying that he’ll be visiting Prague and wants to meet. All coincidences perhaps. But again and again when I cultivate an attitude of accepting what’s there, it’s as if I make myself more available for these types of coincidences. On the other hand, if I resist and fight what’s there, I become more withdrawn from the flow of my experience and these opportunities pass by me.

With the flow of our experience there are two fundamentally different attitides. We can lean into it, touch it texture. Or we can shirk from it, avoid sensing what is there.

When I say ‘lean in’ I almost sense the spatial meaning of it. It means my body moves forward, toward something. When I’m having a cold shower I can lean in toward the cold water. When I allow cold water to envelop my body and relax my body, the experience of a cold shower is much more pleasant and I adapt to it sooner than if I avoid exposing my body to cold water and if my body is contracted and tense.

But that’s leaning in physically. It’s observable and straightforward. What about leaning in mentally? How we can do it? The first small step can start from exploring what mindfulness teacher Michael Taft framed in a beautiful question: ‘What it’s like to be me right now?’ What thoughts am I having? What feelings am I having? What do I sense in my body? What needs, wants, and urges am I noticing inside of me? Observing, noticing, naming, describing.

Important also is the attitude. As I observe, notice, name, describe, can I do it non-judgementally, being receptive to the fact that it is what it is? Can I even welcome and invite it? A beautiful poem by Rumi ‘Guesthouse’ captures this welcoming attitude:

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

I’ve heard quite a few pragmatic persons object to that approach. They think that if they don’t resist their experience, they will give up in the face of their challenges and become passive. As if resistance fuels their intentionality and agency. To that I say that it’s possible to act without resistance. And what often happens is that dropping the resistance and leaning in toward the texture of our experience releases the vast amounts of energy consumed by our resistance.

Resistance by itself doesn’t change the experience. If cold water is pouring over my skin, no matter how much I resist feeling cold it won’t change the fact that I’m cold. What can change it is intention and action. Neither of them requires my resistance. I can step outside of a stream of cold water with resistance or without resistance. All other things equal, it’s better to do it without resistance. That way I save my energy, I’m less stressed and less disturbed by the experience itself. Resistance by itself doesn’t add anything, even though it’s a very natural first reaction for most of us.

Mindfulness teacher Shinzen Young symbolically demonstrates it in a formula where suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance (S = P × R). This formula emphasizes that resistance doesn’t reduce the suffering it only makes us spend additional mental and emotional efforts as we are suffering. To make it sound more practical, replace suffering with stress and pain with challenge and there will be the same pattern. The more you resist and fight your experience as you face a challenge, the more stressful it will become.

In a certain way, I believe what leads to effective coaching is people fully experiencing the complexity of their thinking and feeling processes. In producing an insight we need as much of our cognitive capacity. And if some of it–and often a lot of it–is fettered by our resistance to the situation, the probability of developing an insight is going to be lower. And vice versa, the more fully we can perceive what is without leaking the energy on resisting it, the closer we are getting to producing a valuable insight.

If we lean into our experience we make ourselves available to the richness of the cues our bodies, minds, and environment give us. If we shirk from our experience we are closing ourselves from the richness of the cues our bodies, minds, and environment give us which tend to perpetuate the very thing we are shirking from.