When you procrastinate, when you avoid, when you just won’t face what’s right in front of you, and do what you need to do, you are experiencing resistance. Resistance is caused by fear; resistance is another way to say: “I am afraid”, or “I feel insecure”, or “I don’t feel safe because this is new to me.” “This” could be almost anything. It could be any new situation or old trauma, any change you want to make or need to make, or facing something in yourself or your life that you have been avoiding for a really long time. “This” could also be an emotion you haven’t met or worked through yet. When things are new to you, they can feel exciting, or scary, or both since they are, well, new. I remember in my first marriage, I wanted my then husband to “do his work” and to grow with me so that I wouldn’t end up feeling abandoned or rejected. How human of me to try to control what life offered me, so that I wouldn’t have to face my deepest fears. This is an example of my own resistance to meeting and dealing with stored trauma, (my feelings of abandonment and rejection). I came to realize that I don’t ever get to decide how, when, or even if someone else will grow. Life, being the luscious abundant force that it is, continued to offer me all sorts of opportunities to surrender my often petulant attempts to feel safe through trying to control something that can’t be controlled. Trying to control life and its experiences, or other people and what they do or don’t do, is like trying to build a skyscraper on quicksand. Such a structure will never be stable, and is doomed to collapse. Knowing you are afraid, doesn’t mean that you stop being afraid or even that you stop acting out of the fear you are experiencing. You will always act out of your lowest level of consciousness. Why? Because fear becomes an overlay of your operating system and supplants the logic of love with its own looping logic of lies. Without an interrupt that permits you to bring your awareness to fear’s con-job, you will continue making choices out of fear. That can feel like eating shit cakes and taking shit baths; it is a painful way to live. As hopeless as any situation may seem, the truth is that fear and resistance are hiding another way. So what is the new way?
- Become aware: without awareness, you are stuck in living out disconnected patterns without any choice of a new way or a new possibility. Open to seeing the pain you are experiencing and naming it. If possible, release any judgment of what you are experiencing as “good” or “bad”. The more you can witness the experience as if you were watching a movie, the greater possibility you have of identifying what is causing you pain and what is coming up for you to be healed.
- Bring compassion, understanding and acceptance to what is hurting you. Whether currently or in your past, you may have sought attention and approval from others via flirting or sexual encounters, or are running away via alcohol, drugs, social media, or even food; you deserve more love, not less. If you are in a rut of judging others, bring compassion to recognizing where in your life you are judging yourself and have not forgiven yourself for not being someone or somewhere else in life. If you are feeling abandoned or rejected by others, look to see how you can embrace that hurt, tender part of yourself and not continue the pattern of abandoning and rejecting yourself.
- Love more! When you find yourself judging, hurting, running, avoiding, etc. you deserve more love. Holding space for yourself is instrumental to shifting your consciousness in order to have a new experience. It is in the space of Love where the deep healing and transformation take place.
Again and again, I have noticed in others’ stories and in my own past, that we think by avoiding, pretending and denying a problem, we can be free of it. Well, that is a bullshit story that keeps us held in pain and limitation. The only way past these issues is through them. The only way forward is to release the blocks to seeing your pain points and issues clearly, accept them and open to a deep transformative healing. When you focus on bringing love into places of pain and struggle in your life, everything changes in the best way possible. As always, you deserve more love, not less, no matter how much pain you have experienced, or acted out of, in your past or even earlier today. This goes for others also, but if your pain is so loud, and you can’t seem to meet others with compassion and an open heart, that is more than okay. If that is the case, keep the focus on yourself and giving yourself more love, not less. This post originally appeared in the April 2018 Inner Prosperity Newsletter. You can sign up for our newsletter and get these gems in your inbox as well as a free guided mediation on peace.
