Resistance

Lord Hanuman

My dearest  friend posted on her wise and witty blog a question that I ask myself again and again: why do we resist what is good for us? The ‘good’ could mean anything: a diet, a new job, a new friend, a change of perspective, meditation, watching a different tv show, going to bed earlier, whatever. We bump against a possibility of something different, something that might be better for us, and we resist. Or I resist, anyway. It could be summed up in a phrase my mom says frequently:”the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.” Except in this case, though we know the devil we’re living with,  the one  ”we don’t know” might not be a devil at all, it might be something lovely and enlightening. But we don’t know it, so it’s shrouded in darkness, unknown and terrifying.

So why do we (or just I) resist? Behind my resistance is fear. When I was younger, in my early twenties, I used to shake my head pityingly at people who confessed they were sometimes afraid to do things, or take action. “What in the world is there to be afraid of?!” my 20-year-old self would scoff. I believe it was only because I was so young that I could move to New York City so fearlessly, without worrying what I would do when I got there. I was, frankly, too stupid to be afraid. I wasn’t brave, I was just very inexperienced.

Now that I’m thirty, it’s as if all the fear I kept at bay throughout my early twenties has rushed to catch up with me and it hangs all over my thoughts like that Spanish moss you see on the trees down south. The more I try to banish this fear with my old bravado, the more it clings and the more I feel like retreating—resisting—and remaining in one, very safe, very familiar place.

Which brings me to Hanuman: my favorite personal God in Hinduism. There are many stories about Hanuman, an avatar of Shiva.  Hanuman is the god with the face of a monkey, (that’s a whole other story that I can’t get into here ) and is the most physically powerful of all the deities. The story that inspires me most about Hanuman is the story of his resuce of the Princess Sita, beloved of Rama. Rama (avatar of Brahma) was Hanuman’s best friend. When Sita was abducted by Ravana, an evil enemy, Rama told Hanuman he must leap across the ocean and to find her on the other side of the world. But when Hanuman reached the ocean, he was beset by fear that he wasn’t powerful enough to cross over. So Hanuman knelt down to meditate. It is this position we often see Hanuman represented. His great energy is drawn inward and is unmanifested. Hanuman meditates on his love and devotion to Rama and his heart fills with so much love that he becomes large and powerful and he jumps across the ocean in a single leap.

So what does this have to do with resistance? Not unlike another Biblical hero (or anti-hero?) Jonah, who resisted God’s call to go to Nineva and hopped a skipper to Tarshish instead, Hanuman is afraid. In fact, we might think of Jonah’s three-day weekend in the belly of the whale as symbolically similar to Hanuman’s kneeling meditation. Before taking action, we must acknowledge our resistance, our fear.

What I love so much about Hanuman is that he was afraid, but he did it anyway. The solution to Hanuman’s resistance and fear is not what I could have predicted, coming as I have from my Waspy, Puritan ancestry–the answer is not to scoff at fear, or shame it into submission. No, the solution is devotion. It’s love. Another version of the story tells us that Hanuman was cursed at a young age by some sages, that he would not know his own strength until others told him of it. When he reaches the ocean to rescue Sita, Hanuman’s companions tell him of his great strength and sing praise to him, and as they do so, he grows more and more powerful. So Hanuman is filled not only by his love for Rama (or Brahma, the universe, the spirit of creation, or whatever you want to call it) but also for love of himself as a powerful agent of that universe. He goes from resistance to surrender and becomes a part of the greater whole. He’s ‘going with the flow,’ if we want to get 1970s with it.

In my family, we frequently remind each other of a story about my sister, Beth, when she was 6 years old. As first grade approached, she got more and more anxious, until finally the night before her first day, she burst into tears. Through her sobs, my mom finally understood that Beth thought she was supposed to know how to read already and she was terrified at her lack of preparation. She was obviously relieved when my mom told that you go to first grade in order to learn how to read.

We tell each other this story in our family because all of us, even our all-mighty dad, have the tendency to believe we need to have learned everything or at least pretend we’ve learned everything before we begin.  Everyone in my family likes order, routine, tradition: my dad made pancakes every Saturday morning for my whole childhood. We vacationed on the same lake every summer for all 18 years that I lived at home. We are people who like familiarity.  I’m about to start yoga school at this amazing place and even though I can’t wait to start, I’m (unsurprisingly) constantly worried about everything I don’t know, everything I haven’t yet mastered.

Again and again in my life, I’ve been faced with trying new situations, jobs, people, places that I’ve resisted out of fear. Not only of the unknown, but like Hanuman, out of fear that I am not strong enough to bear the change. The happy news about life is that we are presented with these same challenges over and over again until we break through our resistance; so even though if that sounds like bad news because we can’t avoid challenges that make us afraid, it’s kind of good to know that we can’t ever really fail; we’ll find the same challenges appearing in our lives until we find away to meet them.

When I did another scary thing, applying for my MFA, I wrote my entrance essay quoting one of my favorite poems by Stanley Kunitz. These lines drift into my head often when I’m trying to both soften my resistence and gather my power for what’s coming ahead:

“…Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes. ”

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