By David Stevens | Yoga of the Mind
Have you ever noticed how exhausting it is to want things to be different than they are? The relationship that didn’t survive. The career that shifted. The body that changed. The version of your life you had planned — and the one that’s actually unfolding.
I’ve spent years sitting with students in meditation and sound healing work, and the single most consistent source of pain I witness isn’t the circumstances themselves. It’s the war people wage against those circumstances. The good news — and it’s genuinely good — is that some of the wisest minds across centuries and traditions agree: that war is optional.
Alan Watts, the brilliant British philosopher who spent his life translating Eastern wisdom for Western minds, put it memorably: “There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering.” He taught that our mental anguish comes not from life’s waves, but from our futile attempts to flatten them. “The only way to make sense out of change,” he wrote, “is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
Eckhart Tolle, whose Power of Now has woken up millions, says it plainly: “The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is.” The situation isn’t the problem. Your resistance to the situation is.
Ram Dass, the beloved author of Be Here Now, arrived at the same truth from a different path: “The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.” His entire life’s teaching circled back to this — be here, now, with what is, not with what you wish were.
Zen teacher Cheri Huber, whose book is literally titled Suffering Is Optional, offers perhaps the most direct formulation of all: “Nonacceptance is always suffering, no matter what you are not accepting. Acceptance is always freedom, no matter what you are accepting.” She also reminds us that “facing suffering, embracing suffering… is not painful. Trying to hide from suffering is extremely painful and will rob you of your life.”
Even the ancient Pali Buddhist canon, as translated by the renowned scholar-monk Bhikkhu Bodhi, points to the same root: the Buddha taught that suffering arises from craving and clinging — from our insistence that reality be something other than what it is. Bhikkhu Bodhi’s translation of the Noble Eightfold Path describes the entire spiritual path as “the way to the end of suffering” — and that way begins with seeing things as they actually are.
The thread running through all five of these teachers — from a 20th-century British philosopher to an ancient Pali canon — is unmistakable: resistance to what is happening is the mechanism of suffering itself.
Here at Yoga of the Mind, this is exactly where our meditative and sound energy work comes in. When we resist what is, that resistance doesn’t just live in the mind — it gets stored as stuck emotional energy in the body. It lodges in the chakras, creating energetic blocks that color how we feel, how we relate, and how freely we move through life.
Our Free Chakra Clearing Meditation is a beautiful, accessible entry point for beginning to soften that resistance — gently releasing what you’ve been holding and returning to the present moment. For deeper work, our Renew Your Energy Sound Healing uses vibrational sound to move through the layers of stuck emotional energy that the thinking mind alone often cannot reach.
You don’t have to keep fighting what is. The peace you’re looking for isn’t on the other side of a different life. It’s available right here, in this one.
David Stevens is the founder of Yoga of the Mind, guiding students through meditative and sound energy practices that clear the path to presence, peace, and possibility.
