When the woman steps into her feared “abyss” — the dark spiral she’s been running from — she finds nothing there. No depression, no madness. Just peace. Just sensation. The terrifying void was peace all along, and her resistance to it was creating the fear.
She recognizes the paradox: “It’s the thing I crave, and when I meditate there’s this… everything we crave we push away.” Joe distills it to three words: “Craving is the pushing away.” Not that craving leads to pushing away, or that they happen simultaneously — they are the same movement.
The moment you orient toward peace as a goal, you’ve created a want, and the want itself is the barrier. Her whole body relaxed when she heard it. The comedy of the human condition: we spend enormous energy running from the very thing we’re running toward.
“Craving is the pushing away.”
“God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”
Related Concepts
- We deflect what we crave
- Peace is harder to allow than pain
- Resistance creates the feared outcome
- We push away approval we seek
- Intensifying a feeling moves you through it rather than trapping you
- The pressure-resist cycle is a game to avoid feeling sadness
- Self-pressure suppresses the love and awareness underneath
- Stuckness is resistance to the abyss, not the abyss itself
- Trying to feel joy is the resistance that pushes it away