It can be quite a test when we are confronted by the darker, more painful dimensions of those circumstances set in motion through our choices and actions. In the presence of such unpleasant conditions, we ordinarily tighten up, shrink, rigidify, withdraw, go numb, or otherwise diminish ourselves, ricocheting between defensiveness and submission, as though there’s nothing else we can do.

Just as we tend to inflate ourselves through association with pleasant circumstances, we also tend to deflate ourselves through association with nastier circumstances, assuming the role of victim, through which our capacity for responsibility is abandoned for the shrinkwrapped righteousness of self-blaming or other-blaming. Thus do we pollute ourselves with blame’s developmentally arrested morality and its supporting cast, in the melodramatics and ethical sewage of which guilt and vengefulness take turns masquerading as conscience.

Trying to make sure that we are safe from the unpleasant -- as exemplified by insuring ourselves to death -- only guarantees our keeping it and its worrisome ramifications in mind, where it contextually festers and reproduces with itself until it is literally fleshed-out, translated from the hotbed of its mental blueprinting into all-too-solid reality.

Awakening exposes -- once our honeymoon with spirituality is over -- what is not working in our lives, revealing key changes we need to make or at least open ourselves to making, but if we persist in obstructing, sabotaging, or faking such changes, we will very soon be realigned with our snore, dreaming that we are really living.

The good news is that as lost as we may be in our dreamland wanderings, oppositional forces inevitably will get in the face of the part of the dream that assumes it is us.

Opposition is inevitable and necessary, exposing flabbiness of spirit and every kind of complacency and mediocrity, generating situations that invite us, incite and enliven and challenge us, to Wake up, to hone and ground our alertness, to test and retest our ability to not be sucked in by our reactivity and mechanicalness.

As we begin to shed our blinders --or allow an increasing transparency -- and to make the changes that we know we must make, all kinds of obstacles arise. Doubts may multiply, dread may colonize us, resistance may flatten or blitz us, family and friends may turn away from us. We may then understandably want to turn back, to exit the chrysalis in reverse, to numb and dumb ourselves down. Thus do the old ways pull at us. Familiarity is so seductive.

If we don’t deal well with our difficulties, we may take up residence in disembodied rationality or metaphysical escapism, finding therein a consoling numbness. Or, more commonly, we may settle into a denser state of being, not leveling out until we have found a degree of opposition -- or contractive force -- that we can generally make good use of, rather than merely tolerate.

We don’t get to move on until we are truly ready to do so, and that decisive shift arises not just from our mind and feeling self, but from our core of being, including within itself -- and this cannot be overemphasized -- the essential energies of whatever in us opposes it.

Before we can embody a deeper life, we must be able, more often than not, to remain grounded -- that is, centered not by egoity, but by Being -- not only in the presence of discomfort, unpleasantness, and opposition, but also in the presence of our reactivity and aversion to such challenges. This involves a skillful befriending and acceptance of insecurity, providing sufficient safety to let go of playing it so safe.

Being nonreactive requires the readily-activated ability and willingness to see and feel whatever opposes us as more than just something oppositional. This means ceasing to submit to -- or feed with attention -- our violent intentions and thoughts regarding our opposition.

Our work is to take care of our opposition. This asks that we stretch and expand and open, permitting ourselves vulnerability, a vulnerability that is a source of strength, especially the kind of strength that is utterly unthreatened by dependency.

Opposition is neither to be ignored nor bewailed. The point is to sensitize ourselves to our adversaries, without shrinking or thinking ourselves into their operational strata, so that we are neither stuck in recoil nor bound up in submission. Our work is to enter into empathy -- however indirect its expression might be, or might have to be -- with them, without necessarily locking horns and minds with them, until we can genuinely wish them well. Loving -- not necessarily liking, but loving -- our apparent enemies is a kind of radical sanity, for in loving them, we are not only ceasing to demonize them, but are also aligning ourselves with their healing. And their healing is none other than our healing.

So, yes, open to loving your enemies, but don’t grovel or grow spineless in such love. Instead, stand tall in it, like great oaks asway in the push and slap of a violent storm, and stand soft as well, like grasses bending and bowing in the same stormwinds, losing none of their dignity in their prayer. Stand not like those who act as if they deserve the whip or insult, but like those who are alerted and further awakened -- and are thus healthily appreciative of -- the whip or insult, for only in so doing will you genuinely be able to love your enemies.

Our need is to know our opposition -- both inner and outer -- intimately, so that we might know ourselves. To stand in the midst of malignant contractedness or gross misunderstanding without abandoning or betraying ourselves is an art to be practiced with great patience and care. This goes far beyond facile notions of forgiveness, and far beyond merely trying to persuade ourselves that we are indeed transforming the negativity in our lives, for not only are softness, pliability, and receptivity essential, but also forcefulness, thrust, and bedrock-firm stands.

Having access to such qualities or responses is not so much a methodology as an ever-fresh art, through which we can touch the all without losing touch with the particular, finding a deepening intimacy with both favorable and unfavorable conditions, doing so not to reach What-Really-Matters, but rather to express and live It.

In taking care of our opposition, we take care of ourselves.