the opposite of umbrella

photo: jetheriot

When you feel a painful emotion, your instinct is to recoil. It's painful, so you pull away.

But it's exactly at the moment when an emotion is most repugnant that you have the greatest opportunity to know it.

The suffering is in the resistance – like when it drizzles, and we armor ourselves with unnecessary umbrellas. We recoil from the rain before it has even touched us. 

To learn to close the umbrella, to relax, to let the water find your face – it wasn't as bad as you thought it was going to be, was it? – that's the way forward. You feel it. You let it happen. You walk through the rain of it.