The habits and consequences of Inflexibility

Inflexibility is a personality trait that can be seen in several actions in our life.  It’s not that it’s a good or bad attitude, something chosen or not, and much less a defining factor between saints and sinners.  Inflexibility is the reaction that we come to when we don’t know what to do or how to handle a certain situation.  When we’re afraid and don’t know how to handle it, when there’s pain that surpasses our understanding, and even when we’re ignorant about certain things which makes us feel attacked, alone, or empty, and we resist somehow (be it consciously or unconsciously) new ideas and knowledge; that is when we become inflexible.

Inflexibility can present itself in our personalities in many ways.  In some ways it is how we resist looking at something difficult or hard to understand about ourselves.  We can create lots of excuses and justifications for these aspects of ourselves, and we don’t always see our inflexibility.  It’s not a question of saying “yes” or “no” to everything, or being sweet or stone-faced about it all.  We make many different faces for inflexibility, which we use to camouflage it to be able to continue living with whatever it is that bothers us, and with outside pressures.

Harmful habits

We are inflexible, for example, when we’re always busy.  Being busy distracts us from pain and other internal restlessness.  The excessive activity is a resistance to ourselves.  Another example are the habits we assume to calm or avoid the anxiety or nervousness we feel, habits that later become harmful to the body.  Some of these habits could be smoking, overbooking yourself socially, alcoholism, and in even more severe cases, addiction to drugs or other things.  All of these are just ways to resist going deeper into ourselves and immersing ourselves in what we don’t understand or feel deeply.

Tension

Resistance is inflexibility.  We are inflexible when we don’t have something to guide us to understanding and comprehension.  The body then begins to manifest this inflexibility, it becomes tense.  But this tension is only a reflection, and the area that becomes tense only indicates the weakest area of the body.

It’s obvious that no one wants to feel pain or sadness.  However, that force inside us that pushes us to reestablish harmony and equilibrium, and to solve internal conflicts, insists from within us to push us towards understanding.  One day we become sick and, if we listen to the body, we begin to leave those resistances behind, or rather, the habits we use to resist.  If we don’t listen to the body, over time we need more cigarettes, and more dependencies.  We’ll continue down that path until we no longer have the chance to look at our interior and solve the conflicts that block our happiness and pleasure.     

Revised by: Dra. Loredana Lunadei on 01/24/2019

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