by Linda Decker
There is an ancient toy called a Chinese Finger Puzzle that looks like a five-inch long, narrow cylinder of woven, colored straw. To play with it, you put one finger into each end of the cylinder. If you pull your fingers apart, the cylinder tightens around your fingers, preventing you from breaking free. The harder you struggle, the tighter the trap becomes. But, if you stop exerting effort and move the tips of your fingers closer together, you can easily remove the toy from your hands, Pretty neat trick, huh?
If you don’t happen to have a Chinese Finger Puzzle handy, you can still play along with us and experience this phenomenon. All you have to do is place a negative judgment on the next unplanned experience that presents itself to you (“Oh, no! This is awful!”) and resist it with all you’ve got. It’s all there: the feeling of being trapped in an experience that you cannot escape, the constriction, the loss of freedom. Resist a little harder, and you may have the bonus experience of stress, fear, anger or even physical illness!
Not to worry, though. Because you are knowingly playing with your personal reality by making the decision to resist deliberately, you have options.
Relax and remove the negative judgment from the experience. Replace it with something neutral (“This is just another event in my life.”), or even positive (“Cool— a chance to learn a lesson and strengthen myself!”). Use your imagination if you have trouble with this step.
Now, take a deep breath and ease into the feeling of the experience from the new viewpoint you’ve created for yourself. The very act of deciding to go ahead and experience whatever it is begins its resolution. At some level of your consciousness, “it” was created or attracted in order to provide an experience—that’s its reason for being. Resistance just postpones the inevitable. It’ll wait patiently until you’re willing to experience it.
From the viewpoint of being here, now, and willing to engage the experiences you have arranged for yourself, new choices present themselves. Solutions become easier to locate. You can free yourself from what used to look like a trap!
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