Taming Aversion: How to Work With the Mind When It Pushes Back

There’s a moment, familiar to anyone who has tried to live deliberately, when the mind simply says no. One minute, we’re aligned with our highest intentions, the next, we’re scrolling, tidying, grazing. That small, invisible shift — from presence to avoidance — is the terrain I’ve been exploring lately. Not because I’ve mastered it, but because I’ve been caught in it more times than I can count.

Aversion is easy to mistake for laziness, distraction, or even moral weakness. But what if it isn’t? What if the mind’s pushback isn’t defiance, but a form of care — a protective reflex triggered whenever growth begins to feel unsafe? The older I get, the more I suspect that the moments I’m most tempted to flee are the moments that matter most.

Every meaningful change seems to summon a guardian. The Buddhists call it mara; Freud might have called it resistance; psychosynthesis would describe it as a subpersonality defending its role in the inner system. Whatever name we choose, the pattern is the same: when the psyche senses transformation, it activates its most familiar defences.

Sometimes I’ll wake up with a vague heaviness, an urge to delay, to simplify the day, to shrink the horizon of possibility. The rational mind can explain it away (fatigue, overwork, weather), but underneath there’s often something more intimate: a small, frightened part that’s unsure what will happen if I really allow change to occur.

The task isn’t to override that part but to listen to it. Roberto Assagioli urges us to treat each subpersonality as purposeful, never pathological. In the same spirit, Internal Family Systems founder Richard Schwartz suggests asking these inner protectors what they’re afraid would happen if they didn’t intervene. Often the answer is touching: You might get hurt again.

There’s a strange irony in inner work: aversion tends to appear at precisely the moment when we’re closest to contact. The body stiffens not because we’re far from the truth, but because we’ve brushed against it.

This, I think, is why so many contemplative traditions treat aversion as a doorway rather than a wall. Pema Chödrön describes it as “the moment we touch our edge.” In those moments, the goal is not endurance but intimacy — learning to stay with what trembles.

When I sit in meditation and feel the urge to move, I’ve started to see it as a kind of emotional sonar. The resistance tells me something important is near. Rather than pushing through, I name it: aversion is here. I feel where it lives — perhaps in the throat, the chest, the solar plexus — and I breathe around it, widening the frame. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes it’s not. Either way, the willingness to stay changes the quality of the moment.

Unexamined aversion tends to generate drama. The mind, avoiding stillness, manufactures movement — endless narratives, self-critique, external blame. I sometimes think of this as the “noise of protection.” Beneath the content, the function is the same: distraction from direct contact with feeling.

In my own life, this often appears as overthinking. If I’m avoiding grief, I become analytical. If I’m avoiding fear, I become productive. The activity disguises itself as virtue — busyness, preparation, clarity — but underneath is the same motive: anything but this.

This dynamic is at the heart of the next workshop I’ll be leading — Stopping the Drama Cycle: A Workshop on Love & Our Limiting Patterns (3 November, 7.00–8.30pm UK time). We’ll be exploring how the mind uses drama — both internal and relational — to regulate discomfort. It’s not about pathologising the habit, but learning to see it clearly, tenderly, and to notice the quiet peace that emerges when we stop feeding it.

The paradox is that aversion softens not through conquest, but through companionship. The moment we stop trying to get rid of it, it begins to loosen its grip.

One practice that helps is gentle inquiry:

• Ask, what am I unwilling to feel right now?
• Ask, what am I protecting myself from?
• And then, what would it feel like to allow just one degree more of openness?

This incremental approach — widening the window of tolerance rather than forcing it — honours the nervous system’s intelligence. As Bessel van der Kolk reminds us in The Body Keeps the Score, safety is the foundation of transformation.

Psychologically speaking, aversion is a sign that the psyche is reorganising itself. Spiritually speaking, it’s the ego’s last resistance before surrender. Either way, tenderness is the most effective solvent.

So much of contemporary self-help is built on the rhetoric of mastery: “hacking”, “rewiring” the brain. But perhaps what’s needed is not mastery but maturity: the willingness to work with the mind, not onit. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with what I call “soft discipline.” Instead of pushing through aversion, I create conditions for the opposite of fear: trust. I light a candle, clear my desk, breathe slowly, and remind myself that resistance is just another form of aliveness. It’s the psyche’s way of stretching before the leap.

In contemplative traditions from Buddhism to A Course in Miracles, resistance is reinterpreted as an invitation — an opportunity to practice forgiveness, not in the moral sense but in the cognitive one: the gentle release of judgement against ourselves for finding the work difficult.

This theme continues in Practical Miracles: Practicing the Course Beyond the Book (8 November, 2.00–5.00pm UK time) — a longer session on translating spiritual study into lived practice. We’ll explore how resistance can become revelation when approached through the lens of practice, not theory.

The longer I’ve worked with clients and students — and with my own mind — the more I see that aversion is not an obstacle to healing but one of its instruments. It appears wherever the psyche is trying to protect what it loves. To work with aversion, then, is to enter a relationship with love in its most disguised form.

The next time your mind pushes back, you might imagine thanking it. “Thank you for trying to protect me.” This simple act of recognition can dissolve years of struggle. Aversion doesn’t vanish, but it begins to trust you enough to soften. Growth, after all, isn’t the elimination of resistance but the deepening of relationship with it. What begins as pushback may, in time, become partnership — the psyche’s way of saying, I trust you to take me further than I could go alone.

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Upcoming Workshops

Stopping the Drama Cycle: A Workshop on Love & Our Limiting Patterns
🗓 3 November, 7.00–8.30pm (UK time)
In this workshop we will explore how resistance and reactivity keep us circling the same emotional loops, and learn how to step out of them with compassion and clarity.

Practical Miracles: Practicing the Course Beyond the Book
🗓 8 November, 2.00–5.00pm (UK time)
This half-day workshop is deeper immersion into A Course in Miracles as a lived practice, where we will translate insight into relationship, creativity, and peace.

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