When you can’t love the thing you’re avoiding — the emotion, the situation, the truth — you can love the resistance to it. This is not a consolation prize; it’s the actual doorway. As Joe puts it: “If you can’t love the thing, love the resistance to the thing.”
This reframe dissolves the adversarial relationship most people have with their own resistance. Instead of treating resistance as an obstacle to overcome, you meet it with curiosity, gentleness, even appreciation. The resistance is doing something — it’s protecting, it’s signaling, it has its own wisdom. When you love it rather than fight it, the whole internal war begins to unwind.
The key insight is that you cannot fight your way out of a war. Every layer of fighting resistance creates another layer of war. The question isn’t “how do I get rid of resistance?” but “how do I hold it with the most gentleness and love?” Joe describes this as the orientation of his entire life: “How do I hold without ever letting go of it, without ever losing contact, without ever losing the intimacy with resistance — how do I hold it as lightly, as gently, as lovingly as possible?”
Related Concepts
- Welcoming, not just accepting, emotions
- Embrace intensity for transformation
- Hug the demon, don’t slay it
- Resistance is a natural step in transformation
- If you can’t love the thing, love the resistance to the thing
- Heartbreak opens when fear is finally felt
- Welcoming the inner critic dissolves its power
- Shame hides from loving attention like a child under the couch
- Self-pressure suppresses the love and awareness underneath