If I were to count how many times I’ve heard in, “I swore I would never be like my father,” or “I swore I would never be like my mother.” Sometimes the resistance being so incredibly strong that it does not seem possible to admit paternal relationship. The statement is, “I’ll never talk to anyone like him or her again.” The parent has been reduced to a pronoun and guess what? All of your relationships do just that, remind you of him or her. Reduce you to a him or a her, an object of past perception. This is a recurring and common syndrome that is not the result of conscious choosing. This is an unconscious habit of resistance. The habit of saying, no, not this. I will not let this happen. It is resistance that keeps pain alive. Keeps you swallowed up in a barrier of isolation. Pain that shows up in the recycling bin of relationships that we were sure we would never enter. Pain that shows up as the need to figure it out, to get rid of it. Or to somehow fix the other or fix yourself. So it does not happen again. The endless “fix it,” “hide it,” “run from it,” project.

As long as there is a “no” stored in the system there is resistance to experiencing directly what is beneath the no. The mind’s habit is to distance. From this distance, it distorts, contracts, imagines, concocts all sorts of temporary trances. This cycle of pain will fuel itself on other pain or resistance patterns. When we come into the light of presence within ourselves and the yearning for liberation supersedes the unconscious pattern to repeat the pain, we’re at the doorway of a huge transformation.

For transformation to begin, there has to be a conscious yes to seeing the pain, the unconscious material. “I see it and I can no longer withstand the pain of this unbearable cycle.” This is where we begin. This is where pain ends.

Prajna – excerpt from a chapter in her Parenting book called “What We Resist Persists”