I’ve been working on another post about how life was “supposed” to be. It felt kinda dark, so for now it’s tabled. And that’s okay. Maybe it just wasn’t time for that particular train of thought to go out into the universe just yet.

I’m working on being positive. It’s funny though, when people describe me the word ‘bubbly’ usually comes in at some point. I always thought I was a really positive person. And maybe that’s the image I project out into the world. Or maybe I’m just deluding myself. *shrugs*

One problem at a time, right?

So, resistance. It’s this thing that has come up for me quite a bit lately. It’s the thing that you can feel in your body when you don’t want to do something. When resistance hits I want to try and crawl out of myself, literally. I want to itch and claw at my skin so I can escape this feeling. For a long, long time I let myself ignore it, step away from the thing causing it, or try to numb it with anything that let me not feel the resistance.

During this time of not working (aka unemployment) I have learned a lot (and I mean a LOT) about the brain. It’s your brain’s job to tell your body to either stay and defend yourself, run away as far and as fast as you can, or to curl into a ball and hope it all goes away. Technically the 3 F’s: Fight, Flight or Freeze. The most important thing I’ve learned from all my reading about the brain (which comes up a lot in self-help books) is that your brain is NOT your friend. It’s there to protect your body so you can live to see another day.

In essence, your brain wants to protect your body from all the big, bad, scary things. The thing is, the big, bad, scary things of today are super different than the ones from hundreds of thousands of years ago. Today, the things that make you feel that resistance are still big, bad, and scary just usually in a different context.

That trick about just getting started for a few minutes is a very viable and valuable tool. The more you resist the harder it can be, but if you let yourself lean into that resistance a bit it can help with that whole pesky procrastination problem. Ha! say that 3 times fast for a good tongue twister: pesky procrastination problem.

So, as much as it sucks (because, come one, we all know that it does) that resistance is usually what we need to know that we are on the right path. Gosh, I hope this makes sense. I’ve been pushing myself to not avoid or to lean into that resistance when I feel it. For each time I lean into the resistance I’m working some ‘muscle’ in my brain that eventually will help me not to resist, or not to feel so much resistance.

It feels counterintuitive to do this, I know. However, I have seen it in action. I’ve seen it start working for myself. Definitely, not calling it a miracle cure or anything along those lines, but certain things that were giving me those ‘resistance feels’ on a very intense level have…calmed a little bit with each attempt.

What do you think? Do you experience resistance too? How does it feel in your body?