Hello, and welcome back to Practicing Human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about working with resistance to an open heart.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so one of the big barriers for people in a meditation practice, but also in any sort of practice that is designed to create more openness and receptivity than anything that we desire, is working with the resistance points to that perceived outcome.

And what that looks like, let's just say in a meditation practice, could be your, maybe you're focusing on the breath.

Let's just say you're doing something like a choiceless awareness, just this open presence where you're relaxed, receptive, attuned to whatever is arising in this moment.

But you perceive something that feels like a point of resistance, attention in the body, and the attention goes there because there's tension, feels like a contraction, maybe like a tightness in the chest, or even just something like a physical pain.

And then the mind perceives that as a barrier to the thing that you're trying to get to, this open, receptive place, like, oh, can't get there because there's contraction right now.

And this creates an oppositional relationship to that experience, creating more tension, more suffering, and contracting the system even more.

Now, the key thing here is that those points, those resistance points, those contraction points, they are not actually contractions.

Those are normal openings and closings of the body, pain points, ease, different variations of emotion, could be joy, could be frustration.

Now, these fluctuations are going to arise, and then pass.

The actual openness and contraction is happening in the relationship to these experiences.

And so our job in those moments, when we perceive something that feels like a resistance of what we're trying to get to, is to shower that resistance in love, in awareness, in spaciousness.

And so instead of the pain being a hurdle to what we're trying to become, it becomes the very thing that we expand around, that we meet with surrender.

And this is true also when doing the work of opening the heart.

We perceive an outcome that we're trying to get to, receiving love, openness to love, not closing down, when we get triggered, all these things that we have in mind.

And then when something does arise, that feels antithetical to that, and it's a closing of some sort, then we kind of throw our hands up and go, well, this is getting in the way.

No, that is the way. That is what we meet, the love that we're grounding ourselves in, is not because of that momentary frustration or guarding.

It's the very thing that we bring to that guarding.

We take a step back from that and go, oh, yeah, of course there's resistance, of course there's anger, of course there's guarding and protection.

And you envelop that with the love, that with the heart, that with the understanding.

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