We all experience resistance often disguised as fear, procrastination, anger, frustration and stagnation. You could be experiencing resistance around both big and small things, from a business idea that you have but never action, to taking cold showers in the morning. Both of those things have their own degree of discomfort involved and again we come back to the fact that our mind likes to keep up safe in situations that are familiar and predictable. Fear is a big factor to work through and one that can manifest as a fear of failure, rejection, regret or discomfort. It stops us stepping into our full potential and doing the things that make us feel alive. But of course, failure is a part of that. We need to fail to learn and grow and it’s guaranteed for all of us. Staying in resistance stops us growing and not working through our fear of failure with mind and body work will keep us stagnated and ultimately unfulfilled.
We also so rarely talk about the resistance that we all experience day to day. We see others' projects when they’ve come to fruition, or hear about someone’s accomplishment when it’s completed. We don’t hear about the months or years of sitting on an idea, too fearful to make moves. We don’t see the marathon runner procrastinating before training or the cold water enthusiast say how much their mind screams to turn away from the water’s edge - but eventually they do it anyway and that's something we all need to work towards doing if we feel stuck, uninspired or envious of those around us.
In experiencing resistance we can feel shame, lazy and whole host of negative self talk that we unfairly pile on ourselves, often out of comparison to someone else or fear of what others may think. We push a task to the next day, come up with excuses as to why we’re too busy that week to give time to something we know needs addressing and before you know it another month or year has gone by. When you break down your resistance to something you’ll quickly see that it’s only our mind standing in our way, stepping in with a learnt thought or behaviour keeping us in the same repetitive loop. Working with the breath and reprogramming the mind to break those loops and form new neural pathways will create the space to move forward without chronic resistance. Our thoughts and emotions trigger patterns in the breath and vis versa; when we’re scared we hold our breath and that emotion, unable to be processed, becomes stuck within the body, so using the breath to trigger a certain physiological response in the body will allow that emotion to then be processed creating resilience within the body and our ability to sit with discomfort. So, if you’re equipped to deal with the fear of failure and the failure itself, we allow to experience the fear alongside the potential pride, fulfilment, joy, motivation and inspiration. We are all capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for and surely this life is about experiencing as much as we can, failure and all.
Originally published in my newsletter 09/05/2021