“Do not let this energy build up inside you, but instead allow each moment of the day to pass through you”
― Michael Singer

Here’s a crazy statistic:

One study showed that 76 percent of people they polled, felt stuck in their personal lives, many feeling trapped in the same routine and anxious about their future. 

How about that! Wait…how about you? Are you feeling stuck, maybe confused or undecided about where to go from here and how to move your life forward.

Let’s see if I can help you. 

Take a minute and close your eyes. Imagine your heart is opening and you allow the best and sweetest vision of your future, your life, your work to emerge.

What is waiting for you?  What is happening? Where are you? Who are you with? What are you doing? What are you not doing?

Allow yourself to see it, even feel it. Imagine your heart is open and you allow your deepest vision to make itself known to you.

Now, sit with it for a moment. Let it permeate your being.

Bring something with you from your vision of the future, a word, a song, a sight…something that when you think about it, reminds you of your sweet future.

Now open your eyes. 

Was that easy? Did the vision come easily? Have you always known what you really wanted and where you really wanted to go when you think about moving forward? Were you still conflicted? Were there blocks?  More than one idea floating? Undecided? Or maybe no idea. 

The reason we have so much trouble with opening our hearts and connecting with our deepest vision, and the reason we have so much trouble sometimes manifesting it,  is because we have something called resistance. 

Resistance. 

• Maybe you want to change your eating habits. 
• Perhaps you want to grow a yoga practice or add life coaching to what you offer as a teacher or healer. 
• Maybe you’ve just always thought it would be great to grow yourself with a great personal growth program and have been thinking about hiring a coach. 
• Maybe you’ve been saying you’re going to deepen your own personal yoga practice with longer sessions or private classes.  
• Perhaps you want to become an executive in your organization and make more money.

But…you don’t do it. Other things get in the way. You have a busy life. You have a 9-5 that exhausts you at the end of the day. You might even have people around you who don’t support your ideas. 

Those reasons all seem reasonable. And yet, they are all one thing. Resistance. 

Let’s have a closer look at resistance. Here’s the scientific explanation of resistance. 

“An electric current flows when electrons move through a conductor, such as a metal wire. The moving electrons can collide with the ions in the metal. This makes it more difficult for the current to flow, and causes resistance.”

“Resistance is the hindrance to the flow of charge.”

Now, let’s look at resistance from a psychological perspective. 

Why do people avoid the very things that can help them the most? You sign up for a fun dance class but when the evening comes to go, you don’t go and have a million excuses.

It’s a way of pushing back. The psychological theory of resistance goes back to Sigmund Freud. He saw that people in psychoanalysis often avoided the subjects they most needed to face. He concluded it was because it was touching something from their past that was too traumatic, and so they were avoiding talking about it. Sound familiar?

So we see resistance in science, in psychology. But what about spirituality? 

We could say that resistance is the work of the ego mind, that incessant voice in our heads.

Our ego tells us that “we’re not worthy or less than, that we can’t, or that  it doesn’t really matter anyway.”

Steven Pressfield who wrote a powerful book called, “The War of Art,” writes that “the Self wishes to create, evolve – to move forward in our life But the ego likes things just the way they are.”

And so if you’re unhappy with your habits, self-image, or lot in life, your ego is likely the culprit holding you back from doing anything about it.

Your ego is the source of your resistance. 

Let’s recap.. 

Resistance is that force that blocks you from reaching your highest potential. And it’s a common feeling. It’s the tightening and holding in our bodies. It’s the closing of our heart.  It can manifest as anger, defensiveness, confusion, exhaustion, overeating, under eating, feeling bored or disinterested or simply giving up. And its source is our ego mind. You know, that inner voice that never stops talking!!!

PHEW! What can we do about it?

It’s time to figure out how to deal with it so you can open up, let go and move forward toward becoming your highest and best self, toward living your highest potential and sweetest future.

We combat resistance by not fighting it…by learning the art of being open.

What are we opening up to? 

Life. Reality.

I bet you don’t even realize how much you fight against reality on a given day?

Often it’s small things like the weather. We wish the weather were different. It might be a deadline or workload or even what your child is wearing.  “How am I supposed to get this done? My manager is driving me up a wall.” Maybe it’s a relationship. “Don’t do that. I don’t like it when you do that! I want you to do it this way.” 

Life unfolds in front of us, and we resist it. 

Author Michael Singer writes about how it has taken 13.8 Billion years for this moment to arrive… and we don’t like it? 

That is resistance.

And that’s the ego mind. It always has an opinion on how life should be, how others should behave, what is right and what is wrong. It has a strong opinion on how life is supposed to unfold. 

And so, the art of being open means allowing life to unfold as it is going to anyway. We simply have to give up trying to control it.

That doesn’t mean we don’t take action that needs to happen. We just stop fighting against what is happening.

For example, in Michael Singer’s autobiography called The Surrender Experiment, his company gets into trouble with the FBI. Being open meant he didn’t fight against it. He didn’t go on and on about how wrong it all was and how it shouldn’t be happening or why is this happening to me. Instead, he stayed open by allowing it to unfold. He did the work he needed to do. He hired lawyers. He did all the paperwork. He did what he needed to do to take care of the situation. What he did was let go of his ego’s resistance, his worry, his disappointment, his anger. He let that pass through him and he allowed life to happen.

I first learned this when I was a child. I broke my wrist when I was 12 years old. And it was a very bad break in two places. They sent me home from the hospital for several hours while I waited for the operating room to come available. I was to go back later in the evening to have it set under anesthetic. I wasn’t to eat or drink. They put it in a sling and I went home. Only, I was in tremendous pain. I went to my bed and laid down. I was kind of whimpering and crying from the pain. I was really struggling. 

Then, I had this amazing experience. A voice in my head guided me. It said, “go into the pain.” You see, I was fighting it. And so, I put my attention on the pain, my broken wrist. I stopped resisting the pain, you know, fighting against it. And in that moment, this wave of energy passed through me, and then kind of burst, like an egg bursting on my head and this warm feeling rushed through me. I was kind of in a trance I guess. The amazing thing was that I could feel the pain, but it didn’t hurt anymore. And I lay there until I went to the hospital. 

I learned a lot about letting go from that childhood experience.

What we are letting go of is the resistance. We stop fighting.

We surrender.

Surrender is a very powerful spiritual practice. We are saying, my personal self or ego self does not actually have any power here. I am letting go and allowing something greater than my small or personal self to take over. 

And we are acting also. We are consciously staying open by opening our heart, we are consciously letting go of the resistance and we are now into the flow of energy that will move us forward. 

And then we ask: what is the next right step here? And we take it. No matter what!

And that’s it. That’s the most powerful technique you can use, today, to be able to get unstuck and move your life forward toward what you really want. 

There are hundreds of things, both important and petty, that we keep hold of in our lives. But the trick to moving forward is always, keep your heart open, accept that this is what is happening right now, and let it go and then do the next right thing.  That is the way to move forward. 

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Thanks for reading.