**\#️⃣ Tags:** #Wisdom #Resistance > **🌱 Planted:** Fri 18 April 2025 --- Isn't it interesting how the moment we resist something, we end up strengthening its hold over us rather than making it go away as we originally intended? We assume that by resisting something in our experience—fear, anger, sadness—we're making it go away, but what if the resistance itself becomes the very thing we're trying to get away from? Let's think about this through the lens of what might happen when fear arises and we try to escape it. We might try to run from it, fight it, or do something about it, but all of that is still just a form of fear itself. Here, our resistance to fear is simply fear looping back on itself. It's fear afraid of its own fear. Now, because we're resisting the fear instead of allowing it, we've got double the fear with us than before we began. The same paradoxical pattern reveals itself with all our emotions. When we're frustrated or annoyed about feeling angry, our anger has multiplied, only now it's turned on itself and we're acting it in. If we feel ashamed of our shame, we're deepening the shame we're not wanting to feel. When we get anxious about being anxious, our anxiety often escalates and becomes more intense. This is like being caught in a Chinese finger-trap. The harder we pull to free ourselves, the tighter the trap grips and we become even more entangled in the exact thing we're trying to get out of. What we resist doesn't just persist, rather it transforms into the very substance of our resistance... and then it intensifies. The cosmic joke then, as [[Alan Watts|Alan Watts]] would say, is the energy we use to push away our experience is the same energy which gives that experience its power over us. --- **➡️ Next:** [[Change happens when we stop trying to change]] **⬅️ Back:** [[Resistance blocks our natural unfoldment]]