Resistance to practice

Charlotte Joko Beck, in her book, Nothing Special, takes a look at how living in concepts instead of experience relates to our lack of patience with ourselves:

Nasrudin, the Sufi sage and fool, was once in his flower garden, sprinkling bread crumbs over everything. When a neighbor asked him why, he said, "To keep the tigers away." The neighbor said, "But there aren't any tigers within a thousand miles of here." And Nasrudin said, "Effective, isn't it?"
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Good practice always entails moving through our concepts. Concepts are sometimes useful in daily life: we have to use them. But we need to recognize that a concept is just a concept and not reality and that this recognition or knowledge slowly develops as we practice.
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To do the work of practice, we need endless patience, which also means recognizing when we have no patience. So we need to be patient with our lack of patience: to recognize when we don't want to practice is also part of practice. Our avoidance and resistance are part of the conceptual framework that we're not yet ready to look at. It's okay not to be ready. As we become ready, bit by bit, a space opens up, and we'll be ready to experience a little more, and then a little more. Resistance and practice go hand in hand. We all resist our practice, because we all resist our lives. And if we believe in concepts instead of experiencing the moment, we're like Nasrudin: we're sprinkling bread crumbs on the flower beds to keep the tigers away.

I've found that regular practice helps remove the need for that extra layer between event and awareness that concepts provided. Directly experiencing the moment helps us bypass the reliance on a general conception or framework on which to hang our experience. Think about it. When you are really experiencing love, you are not thinking about the concept of love, you are experiencing the thing itself. When you have the pure awareness of a glorious sunset, you are not thinking about the concept of a sunset, you are directly experiencing the sunset itself. This is what is meant by letting go of concepts.