What We Resist, Persists!
Jul 26, 2021
“The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment.”
—Eckhart Tolle (author of "The Power of Now")
I finally found my 2018 journal. I'd been searching for a couple of months. When I pulled out all of my supplies to facilitate an in-person workshop...there it was! As I was reading through it, I realized I'd spent alot of time trying to control events, people and things in my life that weren't mine to control. When we long for things to be the way we want them to be, rather than the way they are, that’s resistance. Hmmm...control=resistance.
The Universal Law of Resistance says that what we resist continues to appear in our experience until we learn to release what created the resistance in the first place. It's like we get to keep taking the test until we get it right.
Whenever we experience discontent, unhappiness, or bad attitude, there is something we are resisting. It's not the experience that itself that causes pain, it's the resistance. You may want to read that last sentence twice.
This "pain" is because we label our emotions as good or bad. They are not either, until our mind says so. Emotions are just energy in motion. All feelings come and go, so why pay so much attention to whatever shows up in any particular moment? If you think I've gone off the deep end here...remember the last time you had a fight with your hubby, you overdrew your checking account, you had a crucial conversation that went bad, or some other crisis...and then you had to go to work? You pulled yourself up out of your fetal position, changed your attitude and went to work, didn't you? AND as a leader, nobody had a clue what you had been through.
When you got home from work that night, the earlier crisis didn't seem so bad after all. E-Motion. Energy in motion. Those tough feelings came and went. The situation may not have been resolved, but the feelings were not as intense. We weren't giving those emotions energy because we were working.
How do we deal with resistance? First we need to become aware of what it is that we are resisting. Then we need to let it be. Don't try to fix or change it, just become aware of our inner chatter about it. What are we saying inside? What is the feeling and why? Don't fight it and don't stuff it either. Acknowledge it, surrender it and say "yes" to the experience/feeling. Be grateful for your awareness.
Yes, easier said than done and it takes practice. My experience has been that this works, because where my focus goes there my energy flows. If I am busily focusing on the negative, it calls more negative into my life. If I let go and surrender what I'm resisting, the tension drains out of my neck and those negative e-motions float away.
It's good to know that growth is a process...well, I'm happy with that fact most of the time...because there are still places in my life where I'm still taking that test. I've grown, though, because more times than not, I am able to open my grasping, little hands and let go of what is not mine to control.
Accepting...mostly,
Jan
Jan McDonald
The John Maxwell Team
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