In this episode, we explore how resisting our reality and fighting against what has already happened can lead to stress and unhappiness. When our expectations don’t match reality, we often waste energy wishing things were different, which only increases our dissatisfaction.
Inspired by Carl Jung’s idea that "what we resist persists," we discuss how focusing on what we don’t want can make those things stick around even more. By resisting, we direct our energy and attention to these unwanted experiences, perpetuating a cycle of negative emotions.
We also examine the protective patterns we develop to avoid pain and how these can trap us in feelings of sadness, anger, and anxiety. By viewing these emotions objectively and learning from them, we can break free from their grip.
Listeners are encouraged to take responsibility for their thoughts, actions, and the meanings they attach to their experiences. By practicing acceptance—not as resignation but as acknowledgment of reality—we can begin to align our actions with our true intentions and desires.
To wrap up, I challenge you to notice where you are attaching to thoughts or feelings and the meanings you assign to them. With this awareness, you can start taking actions that lead to a more peaceful and intentional life.
In this episode, we explore how resisting our reality and fighting against what has already happened can lead to stress and unhappiness. When our expectations don’t match reality, we often waste energy wishing things were different, which only increases our dissatisfaction.
Inspired by Carl Jung’s idea that "what we resist persists," we discuss how focusing on what we don’t want can make those things stick around even more. By resisting, we direct our energy and attention to these unwanted experiences, perpetuating a cycle of negative emotions.
We also examine the protective patterns we develop to avoid pain and how these can trap us in feelings of sadness, anger, and anxiety. By viewing these emotions objectively and learning from them, we can break free from their grip.
Listeners are encouraged to take responsibility for their thoughts, actions, and the meanings they attach to their experiences. By practicing acceptance—not as resignation but as acknowledgment of reality—we can begin to align our actions with our true intentions and desires.
To wrap up, I challenge you to notice where you are attaching to thoughts or feelings and the meanings you assign to them. With this awareness, you can start taking actions that lead to a more peaceful and intentional life.
Hello my friends and welcome back to the Brain Body Resilience Podcast. I'm your host, jpb. This is episode number 187. And today we've got a throwback episode. But first some updates from the world of me.
Speaker 1:
I spent the weekend doing more housework. We put up a sunshade on the patio, which is my new favorite thing. We have this west-facing patio with a window. Most of our windows are on the west side of our house. We live in an apartment and I think we have one south-facing. Everything else is west-facing, which is problematic for having a lot of plants, because I only have so much space on the west wall. Anyways, we put a shade out there because the sun, especially in the summer months, beats into our second floor apartment and it is hot and there is little airflow and everything stays hot and it is terrible. So we put up the sunshade and it is little airflow and everything stays hot and it is terrible. So we put up the sunshade and it is the best thing ever. It does such an amazing job of keeping the hot out of the patio and it is incredible, just in the last couple of days, how much cooler the air that blows in to the door from the patio is. Just it's it's not just like oppressively hot. So, um, this is my new favorite thing. Uh, our patio has been the big project over the last couple of months. We decided last year that we really wanted to have, like, a nice space that we can enjoy out there, because we have this beautiful, um like wetland green space area out behind our apartment and we wanted to enjoy it. And we never have. We just have the space. We've never chosen to um, do anything with it, and so we have, and it's my new favorite place. I love it so much.
Speaker 1:
If you follow me on Instagram, you see my pictures every morning and most evenings of just my time out there. And so we started with the storage. Actually, we I don't know we were taking something out of the storage and we're like you know what this is? Chaos. Let's do something. So we took everything out, we put down some like rubber mat on the floor, got some nice utility shelves and put everything back in there. I also got rid of a bunch of stuff, so that was lovely going into it. And then we started getting the furniture and the rug and some plants and now this shade, and I think that will be about it. Um, there will always be room for more plants. I would like it to be like a little jungle out there. So, uh, stay tuned for pictures of that.
Speaker 1:
But, um, that is just a bit of my excitement, my joy, that I wanted to share with you. It is just my new favorite thing, and y'all know I'm stay looking for the pretty little things and I find so many out there. I just get up in the morning and take my little hot bevy out and just sit there, instead of grabbing my phone first thing or looking at emails first thing or whatever it is. I just take a minute to wake up out there and just take it all in, let my eyes and ears adjust before jumping onto screens or whatever else the day calls and demands of me. And so that's my new space.
Speaker 1:
All right, let's get into this. I was digging into the archives and found, uh, one of our earlier episodes in the same theme as last week's episode on acceptance, and that was also the topic of my newsletter last week. So, um, maybe I am just needing to hear this all, or? Um, it's good, hopefully, for some of you, but if you're not already part of the newsletter community, you can join that with the info in the show notes that's always there, or come visit on Instagram and say hi there and get signed up too. I always love hearing from y'all.
Speaker 1:
So this episode is all about resistance to what is Resisting, the thing that actually just is reality, that exists in this moment. And this topic will come up again and again and again when we're talking stress and anxiety and building resilience, because, again, that creates so much of our stress is not accepting and resisting what is going on. Stress is not accepting and resisting what is going on. And this episode has another kind of another take, just a different focus on the same topic, and so I'm talking about different parts of this than I did last week, and it's always interesting to me to, and kind of cool to, see where my head was at in those episodes. As I look back, it just reminds me that everything is a spiral, the spirality of life. We come back to things over and over and over, but it's always different because we are and the experiences we've had have changed us and changed our perspective and we've learned, and so when those things come back around, we are in different places as we are interpreting them again with a different outlook. So it's cool to see how I've made sense of these things over time. And, um, speaking of spirality, I think there is. I have an episode with somebody on there and we will revisit that soon as well, because I think that's a really cool episode to bring back. So look forward to that. And really some of these episodes, I look back and I'm just like wow, that was really good, like I had some good shit to say. So I love going back over those and just again seeing what my perspective was, and so I want to share that again.
Speaker 1:
So, without further ado, here is this week's throwback episode, original episode number 62. What is up? Hello there, my name is Jessica Patchingbunch, you can call me JPB, and this is Brain Body Resilience. This is a podcast dedicated to growth, human development and stressing a little bit less so you can go ahead and live a little bit more. Hello, my friends, and welcome back to another episode of Brain Body Resilience.
Speaker 1:
Today we are talking about resistance to what is so. Much of our stress comes from resisting something that already exists, something that has already happened, something that we have already felt, that we don't want to feel, something that has already taken place that we wish hadn't we create these ideas for ourselves about the way something should be, and then we have these expectations based in this idea and then, when we don't experience the outcome that we had planned, that we had envisioned, that we had kind of conjured up for ourselves, we spend our energy and time fighting against whatever that outcome was that we didn't like. That has already happened. So really we're just fighting against the past. I the reason for this. This would spurred this episode in my thoughts here, as are some recent current events in my own life. Um, I shared with my newsletter people some of the things that are happening in my personal and professional life that I don't particularly want to experience, but they are there and this idea of fighting against what, what is popped up for me and so I wanted to share, and so, with that, if you want to be part of my newsletter community, I will put the link in the show notes to join me there.
Speaker 1:
So, in this idea of resisting, what is, whether we are feeling a certain way that we don't want to feel, or had an experience that didn't sit right with us what we resist persists and even grows larger, and this idea is attributed to psychologist Carl Jung and, if we think about it. It really just makes sense, when we spend our time resisting something, that we are directing our energy and attention to this thing. We're telling our brain this is relevant information and we want to find more of this thing. And so the more time and attention we give something, the more time and energy it will consume and it will grow and it will stick around. And so you know we are again.
Speaker 1:
The brain's first job is survival, and we are constantly trying to protect ourselves from pain of some kind, and in that we create patterns in the way that we move, the way that we breathe, the way that we think, the way that we interact with each other, and these all come from learned experiences of pain and how to not have those experiences again. When someone or something leaves us feeling sad or mad or anxious, or if we're feeling insecure or embarrassed or jealous, it's all. These are all just things that exist in the universe, that are passing through, just feelings, just a part of what the, the myriad of possibilities that exist in this human experience. And if we can look at it this way and look at these things objectively, like just a mild bruise it happened, it's not that serious. And then maybe, what did I learn from it? Then we can move forward without attaching ourselves to these things.
Speaker 1:
But if we do, when we do attach ourselves to these feelings or we allow these feelings to hold us in obsession over what happened and how we're feeling and how we don't want to feel that way and why we're feeling that way, then we become victimized by them, by this form of resistance, and it saps our energy and turns into this heaviness that we carry with us. And then, when we're in this place, we're stuck with this energy, conflicting with ourselves because this thing that happened, that made us feel a certain way, whatever situation it was. The experience has already passed, it no longer exists and when we store this energy and then struggle to process it, it spills over into the next day because we're not allowing it to release, to process, to go along its merry path. We're holding on to it, even though we think we're resisting it or trying to avoid it by not letting it pass and process. We're keeping it with us and so then we carry it into the next day.
Speaker 1:
We're not able to focus on and process the events from today because we've got an overflow from yesterday, from today, because we've got an overflow from yesterday and this attachment and reaction just makes matters worse in our state of mind and our feelings about these things. So, rather than concentrating on taking corrective action, aligned action to where we do intend to be, how we intend to feel, what we do want, or, you know, making some kind of agreement with ourself that we are going to accept the things that we can't change, which, yes, sounds very simple. Can I change this? No, okay, I will accept it then. It is that simple. It is far, far from easy, but, like all things, practice is how we get better at something.
Speaker 1:
So, if we're allowing our self-defeating ruminations to weigh us down and keep us carrying this heavy thing around, this informs our perception going forward, going forward, and it's really important that we recognize that we don't all resist the same types of things or have the same issues as each other, because we don't all have the same perceived notions of how things should be or how much they should matter to us. These perspectives and expectations come from every emotional experience we have ever had that we haven't processed, every experience that we have learned from that has previously caused us pain, and because we all have different experiences and different experiences, with our feelings and thoughts around those external experiences. We are all going to have resistances to different types of things, we're all going to place importance on different types of things, we're all going to be affected by different types of things and so keeping that in mind, I think, allows us to share in humanity without the need for it to be the same experience as our own in order to understand it. So, on the topic of emotions, these feelings that we're holding onto, unless we interfere with them, emotions just come and go. They just are information for us to build on.
Speaker 1:
Until we decide to hold onto them, events are not problems, they are just things. Until we have that resistance that causes the problem, that sticks around with us and creates that heaviness that we carry around. And when a person is dealing with their own anxieties and fears and desires, this does not leave a lot of energy to deal with what is actually happening in the current moment. In the present moment where we have the power to enact change, where we have the power to take aligned action, where we have the power to pause and assess what it is that we really want, what is useful, what is usable, what is not benefiting us in the way that we would like. So just a little something to think about.
Speaker 1:
When we are spending all of our energy dealing with our own anxieties and fears and desires, we are not in the present moment, we are not allotting that energy to the problems or or to to the events, the things that actually are happening in that moment, in order to process them and then let them pass. So what do we do then? We take responsibility for the part that we have in our experience, our thoughts, our actions, our behaviors and the meanings that we choose to give these things and this, my friends, is um, can be really, really difficult, and then that becomes a thing that we have to accept and learn to process and release. There's so many layers here, but what we can do is start to notice where we're attaching a thought or feeling and what type of meaning we might be assigning to that.
Speaker 1:
Awareness in itself brings change. So when we start to practice acceptance and this doesn't mean that we like what's happening, it just means that we accept what is, what does currently exist, what we are currently feeling, the situation and reality in this moment then we can do something about it. As long as we're fighting what is, we will continue to just place ourselves in that victim box. We don't like how this feels, we don't like how this happened, we don't like the situation we're in, we don't like whatever the thing is. Then we're resisting it and pushing against it, and what we resist persists and grows. And what we resist persists and grows. So we create this kind of box that we're in. But once we accept something and again we don't have to like it, but once we accept that that is what's happening or that is how we're feeling, we can begin to take aligned action with our intention for what we do want. So my challenge to you this week is to begin to notice where you are attaching to a feeling or a thought, or what meaning you are giving to this, and once you've noticed that, you can make a plan for aligned action.
Speaker 1:
Awareness always comes first. This awareness piece and this acceptance piece can be really, really heavy. And so, as we're going through these, I just want to remind you that this is all a process and it's not a quick process. It is our evolution as people, our adaptation to life, our learning and growth, and consistent our adaptation to life, our learning and growth, and consistent um, I don't know, efforts to to heal and uncover these pieces of ourselves that maybe we've covered up or you know, all all of these things in this personal development world as we continue our journey through life. All of these things take time, they take effort, they take energy and we don't have to be consistently working to grow and improve. Sometimes part of that is integration. Part of that is just allowing ourselves space to be so that we can adapt to those things and then eventually take steps forward. So with that, back to that awareness piece, notice where you might be attaching to things and not allowing yourself to move forward and carrying these things that become heavy when we don't have to. Just something to think about.
Speaker 1:
It's my challenge to you this week. I always love hearing from you, so let me know if you have questions, comments concerns, thoughts about any of this and how it's going for you. I love hearing from you, so let me know if you have questions, comments concerns, thoughts about any of this and how it's going for you. I love hearing from you Until next week. I do have just one request If you enjoyed this episode, if you found it useful, please share it with somebody you know who could also benefit from it Until then, until next week that is. I hope you have a beautiful week. This is um. I'm recording this the week before the Christmas holiday, so if you celebrate that, I wish you a very merry time, and if you don't, I still wish you a very merry time. So enjoy your week. I hope it's wonderful. In any case, I will see you back here next week. Thank you so much for being here. I am endlessly grateful for you and for your support. Until next week, peace out.
