Want to know what makes whatever it is you feel 1000x worse?
It's your resistance to it.
Resistance is an unconscious effort to avoid, suppress, or deflect the experience or expression of certain emotions, often stemming from past trauma, fear of vulnerability, or learned coping mechanisms.
Examples of this are:
• Distraction: Engaging diversions to evade emotional discomfort and introspection.
• Repression: Unconscious forgetting; burying distressing memories to shield oneself.
• Denial: Refusing acknowledgment; asserting everything is fine despite evident issues.
• Intellectualization: Analyzing emotions rationally, avoiding the actual experience of feelings.
• Avoidance: Shunning situations to escape emotional challenges and anxiety.
• Minimization: Downplaying emotions, diminishing their significance to cope with discomfort.
• Projection: Attributing one's own emotions onto others, often to avoid self-awareness.
• Substitution: Replacing genuine emotions with alternative activities or distractions.
• Deflection: Shifting focus away from personal issues by redirecting attention.
If you crack down on the resistance mechanism within yourself, you crack down on 99% of your own suffering.
It's never about what you feel. It's about your relationship to it.
All resistance is just self-struggle/internal conflict. It's an unconscious attack on yourself in order to feel better!
It's totally counterproductive to the goal we have.
Overcome resistance by surrendering to the present, actively feeling whatever you feel right now, and being open to whatever is occurring right now.
Mindfulness meditation is a powerful way to increase self-awareness, see this resistance mechanism clearly, and begin to let go and surrender.
Your awareness alone is curative. Simply by witnessing your resistance and surrendering to the present consciously over and over again you naturally stop resisting.