Resistance and Its Relatives

by Linda Heron Wind

Resistance is something we all feel from time to time. Sometimes it makes me cranky and other times I feel like a child stamping her feet and ready to throw a tantrum. While I have noticed this feeling and struggled with it throughout my life, it wasn't until recently that I really began to examine it. It seems like resistance is coming up a lot these days in all its related forms.

In one form, resistance is a distant cousin of the saboteur. Whenever there is something I want to create new in my life, the resisting part of my mind goes through its list of why it won't work, why I am not capable, worthy or able to have whatever it is. When I hear resistance going on in my head about these things, it is relatively easy to quiet it by simply not believing it, but there are much more subtle and devious techniques that it uses. For example, just as I am ready to move forward with something, it creates an illness or drama to take my attention away. It is very hard not to give in to illness and drama.

Sometimes it uses lures involving my favorite things, like opportunities to do something fun or to be with people I enjoy. These are also hard to resist since it feels like moving forward is depriving me of something.

I have learned to work with all these conscious distractions that resistance creates, sometimes more successfully than others. The most difficult form of resistance that seems to be arising now is coming without a calling card. It arises as emotion from deep within the unconscious. It can be intense or very subtle, but either way it comes without warning, either exploding into consciousness or creeping in unnoticed day after day. The former paralyzes with its sting of fear and the latter paralyzes with the drug of apathy. Either way it leaves me immobile and in a state of confusion. It is hard to remember at such times that there was a dream I was working toward manifesting, as it does not seem as real as the illusion that this great magician called resistance has created.

The more I study resistance, the more I realize that it always seems to come from my mind. I do not see my spirit engaging in resistance and my emotions and body seem to be used by my mind to create its "special effects" in the movie it wants me to jump into. So I contemplated why the mind is so resistant. When you consider the purpose of the mind - to interface between the spiritual realm and the world of form - it is no wonder that is filled with many worries and fears. It goes to work even before we are born attempting to make sense out of physical experience based on very little information. Things appear dangerous that are not, or unpredictable when they really are, and it seems that the mind begins to construct a story about who we are based on the experiences we have. While we now as adults know that we are not our experience, the mind still believes that we are, and it resists attempts we make to break out of that identity.

Deepak Chopra talks about how the mind makes premature cognitive commitments about the world, who we are, and what is possible. He gives the example of how flies that are raised in a jar will not attempt to escape when the lid is removed. They made a premature cognitive commitment that the jar was the extent of their world. We also behave like the flies, in that we made judgments as children, based on very little evidence, about our world, who we are and what is possible. These commitments are held unconsciously and they surface in the form of resistance.

It is as though the mind has a list of reasons we cannot do certain things, be certain ways, be accepted, or be loved. While we are not always aware of the list, we can feel it come up as resistance "to leaving the jar." And since it is always looking for more experience to support its faulty claims, the mind will used the resistance as further evidence that we are too anxious or lazy or that we are too whatever to be anything but "in the jar." So are you ready to say, "Enough with this jar!!"

That brings up the last type of resistance I want to talk about - resistance to the illusion. This resistance is often experienced as anger or frustration. There is also fear if we listen to it and act on it in our lives. There comes a time when the old patterns of diminishment that we have lived with become unbearable either as we see them within ourselves or in the world as a mirror to our own unconscious. Either way it is about our own mind patterns that hold us captive in the jar. To escape is to break with tradition - our own, our family's, our culture's. And yet we are escaping, one by one, slowly but surely. Those who have made it call back through the invisible barriers encouraging the others to seek freedom from the tyranny of the mind.

Perhaps the resistance of the first kind can be used to find the places that hold us in the jar, that bind us to illusion. We can follow the tracks of this resistance back into the unconscious and laugh at the silly stories hiding there. As we gain the wisdom of the truth - that we are perfectly acceptable and loveable just for being - our minds relax and the resistance to illusion will move us freely forward out of the confining jar. May that be our collective journey for this coming year - freedom from illusion.

Mind out of control
An energizer bunny
Remove the batteries!

Resistance shows me
The edges of illusion
Break out of the jar!

If you have comments on these articles or ideas for future topics, call Linda Heron Wind at (585) 924-5620 or send e-mail to LHWind@aol.com.

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Page last modified December 20, 2004 by RMC