This morning, as I sank into meditation, some feedback I received recently about how stubborn I can be came floating into my mind. I’d found the feedback interesting because I know I can be stubborn. I just haven’t often thought of stubbornness as a self-defeating game. Which, at the time I received the feedback, was exactly what it was. The question that came floating into my mindscape as softly and easily as a cloud drifting across a summer sky, was. “To not be stubborn you must be willing to let go. Are you willing to let go?”
Let go? I wondered. Of what?
It all.
What all?
Your resistance.
But I’m not in resistance. I just don’t understand how to let go of being stubborn.
What if there’s nothing to understand?
How can there not be? There’s so much to know.
How will you know when you know it all?
That one stumped me. I am reminded of a piece of feedback, Thelma Box, founder of Choices Seminars gave me once in a process we were doing on the JoHari Window. “I experience you as a woman who will never find an answer good enough for her.” That one stumped me too.
Problem is (which is just another way to say ‘there was a big wallop of truth in her feedback’), she was dead on.
Sometimes, no matter the question, I think there’s got to be a better, deeper, more complete, all-knowing answer (haha! I just proved myself right by searching for a deeper meaning to my neck pain! Aren’t I fascinating! 🙂 ). Which means, I keep searching for a better one and better one and better one.
Does it matter if I don’t actually know what I am resisting to let go of, or how to not be so stubborn as much as it matters that I focus on letting go of my resistance to not being so stubborn?
Release. Let go. Surrender.
Dare Boldly 
I’ve gotten way less stubborn as I age. It just seems like a waste of energy to be inflexible about something that probably isnt that super important in the big picture. I can still dig my heels in but it’s got to be a major point.
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Me too Bernie — but I find myself holding onto pockets of stubborn ‘stinking thinkin’ when it comes to my thinking about ME sometimes! 🙂
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I get that for sure. It’s the mindset of I am not good enough or “whatever I’m already fat, so why can’t I eat this?” Oh well, I can stubbornly put self care on the back burner. But I’m less stubborn wirh other folks now.
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Elgie,
That’s deep looking for deep insight.
Sometimes, looking deep is looking into a deep dark hole of nothing …
Mark
p.s. I share similar experiences – the quest for knowing this more, knowing myself more – and knowing that I am, makes this feel a worthwhile pursuit I need to keep living for
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I remember my former husband saying that once when we went for marriage counselling Mark. When the therapist asked him — when you look inside what do you see…. For me, looking inside is never a dark hole. It’s always a beautiful, mysterious, sometimes mystifying river of thoughts that serve me well, and others that don’t. I think the struggle is to let go of the thoughts and beliefs that don’t serve me well — sometimes, I prefer their discomfort over the unknown possibiities of what is possible were I to let them go!
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