Great is the day when we are faced with a crisis we cannot avoid . This can bring us to a new understanding we would never have had by staying in our comfortable ways.  The good news is, we don’t have to wait for a big crisis to see the truth about ourselves. We can take the smallest situation we are afraid to face and walk straight towards it while watching what goes on inside us. This is 100% new. One can also say we are leaving the old self behind.
This is a beautiful excerpt from a talk given by Vernon Howard that explains why we repeat the behavior of ‘avoidance’ which keeps us in psychological pain every day:

“I can understand why you don’t want to take responsibilities, why
you try to find someone or some place to travel to and leave your
problems with them. It is perfectly clear to me as to why you do
not want to face crises, look them right in the eye, and handle
them.

It is clear to me why your daily lives are a series of evasions
and here is why: You still believe, you still think that you are
required to handle the situation, to solve the problem, to do
something with that difficulty that you have been confronted with.
You still think that you are required to solve your own problems.
Thinking that and knowing very well what you are really like, you
quite unnaturally push the problem away, try to leave it somewhere
for somebody else to pick up, hoping that they can handle it better
than you can. And by doing this, all the time, you fail your purpose
as a human being.

You refuse to look at the problem until you see one hundred percent
and absolutely that you can’t solve it at all. You fear that if you
face a problem yourself directly and intensely and persistently, you
fear that your failure-nature might be exposed. And indeed it will be
exposed, which should be your purpose in doing difficult things.”

***

Resistance to the disturbance is the disturbance.
~Vernon Howard