What Happens When We Stop Fighting What Is?

As I was reading the news recently, story after story of political figures using hateful and bigoted language, I could feel my nervous system slide into fight or flight. My body tightened. My thoughts sped up. My mind kept saying, “It can’t be this way,” and “It isn’t supposed to be this way.”

Much of my energy wasn’t going toward meaningful action. Instead, it was caught in a futile effort to make reality unhappen. I felt churned up, frightened, and oddly captivated. My mind looped again and again, haunted by the problem. For weeks, I found myself both resisting what was happening and fearing where things might go.

Eventually, through a combination of practice and grace, I found my way back toward regulation. And from that place, I could see something important.

I had been living, thinking, and acting from a sustained state of fight or flight.

It helped to separate my intention, wanting things to improve, from the level of nervous system activation I was continually fueling by refusing to allow what is.

The moment I released the pressure to somehow make the situation go away before it fully arrived, to nip it in the bud, I felt relief. Not because I had taken action, but because an inner spring that had been wound too tightly finally loosened.

From regulation, I could think more clearly and problem-solve from what was actually available to me, rather than exhausting myself fighting reality.

This pattern is typical in all of our lives: a difficult diagnosis, financial strain, loss, uncertainty. There is a profound difference between knowing we want to do something and being stuck in a chronic state of fight or flight while trying to do it.

One powerful way to work with our nervous system and invite more ease into our lives is to welcome our experience, whatever that is, in the moment.

Our habitual responses are usually the opposite: turning away, resisting, minimizing, or fighting what we feel. We tell ourselves we shouldn’t feel this way, that something is wrong with us, or that if we ignore it, it will go away.

When we intentionally turn toward and welcome our experience, something shifts. We stop the exhausting struggle of trying to force our experience to be different than it is right now. In doing so, we stop amplifying the original feelings and instead begin to meet them from a more regulated place.

Just as self-compassion softens shame and self-blame, the capacity to be with our experience without resistance, judgment, or criticism is essential for nervous system health.

A simple practice for welcoming experience

Relax your body as best you can.
Take a few longer out-breaths.
Make friendly contact with yourself, perhaps placing a hand on your chest or face.

Then notice: “What happens when I give myself permission to be with this without tightening into a knot?”

Ask yourself: “Can I respond from wise action rather than from a defensive state?”

You might also ask: “In what ways am I fighting what is?”

Awareness does not require resistance. Just because you see something clearly does not mean you have to battle it.