Listening to Resistance
When we seek to change, something pushes back
When contemplating any big or small change you want to make in life—what I call a “seed” in my book Slow Magic—one thing you can plan to encounter is resistance. It takes all kinds of forms, but we might think of “resistance” as the natural tendency to remain in the same state of being. Change is uncomfortable and scary, especially compared to what’s known and familiar. So even when we hate our life as it is, we tend to rely upon its predictability. When you set a change in motion, you push yourself into the unpredictable, and then we get resistance.
When weight lifting, we work with resistance to become strong. The weights naturally follow the path of gravity to move toward the earth, and we use our grounded feet, engaged core, and muscles to resist gravity. As you pull up to complete the deadlift, your muscles endure small amounts of damage in their heroic efforts to resist. Then you take time to rest, so your muscles can repair the damage and come back stronger in case you do something like that again.
We can think of this approach to meeting the resistance in life. In Slow Magic I expand upon how resistance could be internal or external. Internal resistance tends to look like avoidance. You might not even realize you’re resisting. You simply find so many reasons to put off taking action. Sometimes I really want to get back to a regular creative practice, and I sit down to write 500 words, but find some piece of software needs updating. I think, “Okay, this’ll take a couple seconds.” But then I need to change my password, or do some elaborate 2-Factor authentication, and when I open the Authenticator app on my phone see that someone texted me, and I think “Okay, I’ll just text this person back really quickly and get to writing.” But then I look back and realize I forgot to input the Authenticator code so I’m still stuck in this process, and actually I have to change my password for some reason? Then the person texts back. Eventually I finish all this and now I’m due somewhere else so I’ll have to write later.
The avoidance is subtle. Technically I would have gotten to all of these tasks eventually, so I can't say I was wasting my time. But I could have sharpened my will. “I said I was going to write now, and I’m going to write now. I will deal with the software update and the text later.” But if I can do that, then I might really start to feel the resistance that my avoidance was helping me not feel. I might feel uncomfortable, beset by all my self-doubts, lost, convinced that I’ve lost all capacity to write.
That’s resistance you can push through. It’s okay for all of those thoughts to be there, and I can mentally or spiritually ground myself and engage in the action anyway. Even if I write 500 words of garbage, I have completed the rep.
When you’re in the seed phase of manifestation, however, it’s useful to slow down and listen to resistance. We may have many different parts of us with feelings about a seed: Excitement, like, this is going to change everything! Fear, like, oh shit, this is going to change everything. Worry, like, I don’t know how to do this. Anger, like, I’m so annoyed I have to do this at all. Worry, like, my girlfriend’s going to hate this, my parents are going to disown me, everyone’s going to think I’m an idiot.
Most often, we don’t take the time to sit with and hear out all these feelings because something in us feels that we have to plow forward. Who can be bothered with things like listening to concerns and building consensus when there’s a goal? We might be afraid that in sitting with these things, we won’t act at all. That may be true. Sometimes it’s a good thing. Sometimes we have good reason to resist a particular change. If we have significant resistance to a seed, it may well grow stronger the further we go in trying to turn it into a full-on reality. Concerns that could have been addressed early on grow in cost over time.
On the other hand, it’s important to remember that when you sit with feelings of resistance, you don’t necessarily lose the feelings of enthusiasm. Whatever in you is excited about the goal gets to keep being excited, but tempered by wise caution, or even enhanced by having come up with a solid plan.