Resistance

©2008 Joan M. Newcomb

My son is taking Advanced Placement Government as one of his senior year high school classes, so his television viewing choices have changed. I really liked it during the last presidential election when he only watched the Daily Show (a pseudo-news show on the Comedy Channel). Now he's watching CNN and all of the debates.

Having spent a third of my childhood in Washington DC (and lived at one time ten blocks from the White House), I am very jaded about politics. I've pretty successfully avoided the news for the last decade. I choose to read the newspaper, because you can skip directly to the comics (something you can't do with television).

Recently there have been a whole lot of emails going around about Sarah Palin, and because they're mostly Saturday Night Live video clips, I've gotten sucked into watching them. (Go to www.youtube.com and search for Tina Fey, if you're curious).

Yesterday I watched the Daily Show, which compared McCain and Palin's folksy distortions of the truth, with Obama and Biden's retorts (which was stooping to the same level, if you ask me). I found myself getting worried about this country's future, and resisting the mudslinging. Then I added my own special spin on it by thinking - the next president's term will end in 2012. If Obama is elected, it will be a mass consciousness shift that will be instantaneously enlightening and pain-free. If McCain is elected it will be the Apocalypse.

Now, isn't *that* special? I'm resisting the distortions of the truth so intensely my own brain is adding some distortions of it's own.

Resistance achieves the opposite of what you desire. When you resist, you magnetically attract what you don't want. Resistance means you're focusing on what you resist, which means you're steering your life in that direction.

If you want to get the other guy elected, really, really resist him and his VP.

I'd better work on my resistance real quick, because I'm spending the last week of October in DC visiting my mom, a staunch Republican who is usually glued to the TV. I fly home on election day.

How can I not contribute to the collective energy of resistance? By practicing non-resistance. Non-resistance is the ability to be a 'body of glass' to whatever energy one is resisting. Imagine being a screen door and the winds of resistance blows right through (but the bugs don't). Imagine being transparent, so the mudslinging doesn't stick. Imagine all the space between your molecules, negative energy just flows through and out the other side.

Another way is to drop your focus and look at something else. Let go of everything you can't control (which is pretty much everything outside of you). Don't try focusing on the opposite - a sweet and happy Disney fantasy of 'the right' presidential candidate getting elected, because you're still resisting 'the wrong' one.

Take your focus off the election entirely. (For those of you in other countries, you can substitute something else you resist, although I suspect American politics is universally resisted). 90% of us have made up our minds already, so there's no need to continue thinking about it until the day you actually vote or send in your mail-in ballot.

There's lots of other television channels to choose to view, there's other sections of the newspaper, there's other topics of conversation. I personally am enjoying Cash Cab on the Discovery Channel (it's a game show that takes place in a taxi in New York City). My paper has two sets of crossword puzzles *and* sudoku. And here in the Northwest, the weather is always an entertaining thing to talk about.

Changing what's between your ears and what's in your heart will have a powerful ripple effect to your family and friends and beyond. The only way we can change the world is by changing *our* world, within.