I Don't Want To, I Don't Feel Like It

Book excerpt: Employing the tenets of Zen Buddhist awareness practice, the book provides numerous exercises and self-help tools for working through problems with resistance, revealing how resistance operates in everyday life and guiding readers to consider how they can be free of it. The teachings in this book show how to recognize resistance in its many forms, not take it personally, and be free of its control. The platform is that the voice of resistance--thoughts such as I'll do it later--is not personal; everyone has it. Instead, it is the voice of a survival system that can take people from commitment to inaction in a matter of seconds. Then, self-hating voices level internal accusations for not having followed through, including thoughts of failure, shame, and lack of self-discipline.