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Welcome to my blog, where you'll find substantive, well-researched articles that blend neuroscience, philosophy, poetry, personal reflection, and the latest life coaching tools in service of helping people engage their full potential.
Filtering by Category: Resistance
If pleasure is emptied of its potency, situated as reward, rather than prerequisite to productivity, we're more likely to stay self-sacrificing, and compliant. We’re more likely to believe we need what’s being sold, and sacrifice ourselves in the selling.
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Feeling lost, scared, uncertain, grief-stricken, heartbroken, guilty, unsure—these emotions are core to the experience of conscious growth: of becoming more authentic, of saying yes to our truest longings, of saying no to what we've outgrown or what didn't fit to begin with, of risking heartache in honor of love, of risking failure in pursuit of our passions, of taking the leap, of having faith.
But when we profane the holy pain of growth by treating it as dangerous, inappropriate, weak, needy, excessive, indulgent, or just plain distracting, we don’t just muzzle self-actualization and cap our impact and potential for success, we become complicit with conformity at its worst: we abandon imagination, the fuel of courageous inquiry and inspired creation, without which innovation sputters, fear becomes status quo, and self-protection trumps co-creation.
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Over time, the curiosity that once propelled us effortlessly outward (into conversation with strangers, contact with insects and animals, imaginary worlds, woods and streams, tidal pools and marshes, empty lots, dumps, alleys, abandoned buildings, and forts erected from the refuse of neighborhood curbs) often becomes inverted and internalized: primary questions that once led us into exploration and wonder are often replaced by questions about our own belonging, our worthiness, and our competence. What will I discover here? becomes Who am I to want more? How can I figure this out? gives way to What’s wrong with me?
By mid-life we might feel pulled apart by these seemingly antagonist energies: the quest to learn and grow, on the one hand, and the fear of doing so, on the other.
Either way, I can tell you that, if recognized and harnessed, this tension (often felt in our bodies as acute discomfort) can be a very good thing: it's the symptom of untapped potential. Of your aliveness. It's your gateway to growth, to healing, to intimacy, to innovation, and purposeful service to others.
The problem isn't the tension itself between curiosity and self-criticism, but the way we perpetuate competition between them by inhabiting one at the cost of the other.
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Have you been feeling alternately anxious and elated? More swing-y than steady? Extra vulnerable? Fraught at times by uncertainty, by bouts of worry? I ask because, like me, many of my clients are also experiencing deep internal shifts right now, and what I know to be true is that without guidance, we can all too easily mistake these signs of what I call radical becoming—a deeply generative state of psychological/spiritual growth that is often, though not always, accompanied or catalyzed by an act of creation/change (making a piece of art, writing a book, having a baby, starting or ending a relationship, starting or ending a new job, launching a business, etc.)—for their opposite: symptoms of something gone wrong, of depression looming, of our own failure and ineptitude.
Over the years, I've come to recognize this state of being, in which we can feel both oddly at home and at sea, as the hot center of the creative process. Given the sometimes surreal and disorienting feeling of this state, a state that, in my experience, can last for weeks, even months at a time, it’s no wonder that many describe the creative process as otherworldly, a syncing-up of human and beyond-human forces (I think here immediately of Elizabeth Gilbert’s recent book, Big Magic, which I loved). It’s also no wonder, given the often-uncomfortable symptoms of creation-in-process, that we resist this state. If unrecognized, let alone unmanaged, our resistance can sabotage the journey altogether, and foreclose the rewards that make the discomfort along the way worth every sob and ounce of angst: Innovation. Service. Enlightenment. Love.
But when we’re in the throes of new growth, we often don’t know it. What we do know for sure is that we feel a little (or a lot) crazy, or overly anxious, or overly sensitive, and we’re not sure why. We make those feelings, as well as the thoughts that generate those feelings (“I’m not good enough,” “What’s wrong with me,” “There’s not enough opportunity,” “Life isn’t fair,” etc.) mean something, usually something about our own insufficiency. That is, we believe them.
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The only thing blocking you from manifesting your desires is your resistance. But how do we know when we are resisting? What does it feel like? Look like? In this week's blog I share some of my own personal story to help answer these questions, and I teach you the 7 Key Questions that will shift you from Resistant to Receptive. Enjoy!
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