Seth Godin just released his new book called Linchpin – Are You Indispensible? and from what I’m hearing it’s  another great offering. And lucky for us, he spends a significant number of pages on the concept of resistance and the lizard brain – what we here at The Heart’s Voice call the “safety brain”, the source of our resistance and defenses.

And suddenly everyone is talking about it! Up until now doing a Google search on the term “resistance” would mostly generate pages only a licensed electrician would understand.

In a recent guest post on Leo Babauta’s  Zen Habits Blog, Seth says this at the very end:

The resistance is powerful, so powerful that all the shortcuts, time savers and focusing tools are powerless in its path. Now you know its name. Now you know how it sneaks in under the radar and sounds quite sensible as it undermines your work and compromises your vision. When the resistance appears, you must call it out. Call it by name. Recognize it for what it is and then defeat it. You will defeat it not by rationalization or even a calm discussion. You will defeat it with single-minded effort, effort so deep and dedicated that it might exhaust you.

So what is it about dealing with resistance that’s so exhausting? And does it have to be this way?

And the answer is – it’s awareness and intention that require so much of our energy when we’re trying to get past our own resistance. And I’m convinced, through my own direct experience and that of others, that any one of us can learn the skills to handle our resistance much more easily!

If you’ve ever done any kind of mindfulness practice – breathing, a mantra, yoga or meditation – you know that it takes energy to watch your thoughts, your state or your body.  And it takes energy to stay awake and to notice when you’ve strayed from being present. And it takes energy to bring yourself back to the practice again.

We can expend a lot of energy just being aware and holding our intention.

And that’s just for 20 or 60 minutes or so. Magnify that by the weeks or months that it might take to complete a project that we’re resisting, and we can see the huge amount of energy that it takes to be present and focused for that long.

Add to that the fact that our resistance is constantly trying to derail us from our goal in order to keep us safe from some imagined danger, and we can see how much energy this takes when we approach it like a battle!

So can we ever really defeat our resistance?

And I would say that the answer is no…and yes.

Bottom line, no one can be alive without their amygdala, or their “lizard brain”. So, no, we never really defeat it entirely. And it’s actually designed to shut off access to our logic and left brain functions in order to take over and get us to safety.

Our brains were perfectly designed so that when a sabre-tooth tiger strolled into our village, we didn’t spend any precious escape time wondering whether to run to the left or right. The adrenaline closes a gate to our logic brain and simply reacts – fight, flight or freeze.

That’s why we call resistance “sneaky” – because it’s designed to act in a way that prevents us from being consciously aware of what it’s doing. And that’s also why we often don’t see what it’s done except through hindsight – our left brain is quite literally disconnected while our safety brain is operating. At least it is until we have some practice.

So what’s the antidote to struggling with resistance?
Awareness.

Conscious awareness is the single only thing that trumps resistance.

It’s entirely possible to be focused on our goal and feel our resistance come up, and notice the adrenaline firing, and notice the biological cascade of symptoms that follows, and feel the emotions and hear the thoughts, all bent on stopping our current course of action….and not react at all.

I know this because I’ve done it. And my clients and many of my friends have done it. And most long time meditators can do it.

And that’s because of awareness.

Think of awareness like a space you’re standing in. And think of your resistance like an agitated squirrel.

When you’re trapped in a 3×3 ft closet with your resistance, it’s pretty hard not to react to it. When we haven’t had a lot of practice developing our awareness and our capacity to not react, our inner space feels pretty tight and it takes enormous energy to stay detached and focused in that tiny space.

Now imagine standing in the center of a football stadium with the same agitated squirrel. You’d be WAY less affected by it. You could easily hold your focus and your intention, stay on a task you were doing, and not be bothered much by it. And it would hardly take you any energy at all.

That’s the power of awareness and that’s when resistance stops being exhausting!

So anything that increases your awareness will decrease the energy it takes to get past your resistance. And there are literally hundreds of ways to increase awareness and, for the first time in history, without needing to spend years in a mystery school, they’re widely available at a bookstore near you!

And I believe there are some really exciting things that become possible when lots of us gain this kind of awareness, and we’ll explore those in the next post.

I’d really love to hear your thoughts, feedback and experience with this idea. Please join the discussion in the comments below.

If you’d like to sign up to get the next installment by email or in a feed reader, you can subscribe. And if you’d like to learn 3 practices that will help you cultivate more awareness and detachment with your own resistance, you can download my free e-book.

You might also like these:

1. When Fear Makes Our World Smaller
2. Why Traditional Coaching is No Match for Resistance
3. Is Being a ‘Visionary’ One of Your Resistance Strategies?

Most of our fears are pretty much hardwired in before we reach the age of 6 . So it’s an interesting experience to watch my brain in the process of adding a new one.

As an adult, it’s not something I get to see everyday. And I’m watching this one with the same fascination I used to approach dissection assignments in grade 8 biology!

I’ve discovered I have an allergy – a major one – to black fly bites.

Living in the woods now, I’ve just experienced my first black fly season in Nova Scotia. Actually not nearly as bad as what I’d heard about it, but I never dreamed I would react to a bite the way I did!

My first 2 bites were both on an ankle – thank goodness! One a month ago and the second 2 weeks later. I was surprised by the first reaction, but thought it was a fluke or the bite was infected. No big deal.

But the second one was worse! Within 30 hours my foot was twice it’s normal size and you couldn’t see any ankle bones at all! Plus,  I had a low grade fever and chills 6 hours after the bite.

So now, my safety brain – the fight or flight part – has added “going outside” to the list of dangerous things in it’s catalog.

What to do!

Having never had a major allergy, suddenly I’m starting to understand how it is people get more and more cautious in their life when there are things that they react to.

We all go through this process, whenever we’re hurt in our life in any way. Physically, emotionally, mentally.

Our brains are designed to remembers exactly what caused the hurt, and how it happened, and then it watches for those same circumstances and warns us with adrenaline when we get to close to them the next time.

It doesn’t matter if it’s black flies or relationships, the process is the same.

This is the very same process that, in its extreme form, results in agoraphobia, when we react to more and more things in our life and our world gets smaller and smaller until one day we just don’t leave our house anymore.

So my brain is now saying it’s wise to stay inside and that my backyard is a dangerous place. I can feel this as a kind of low level anxiety that shows up when I’m out back in the garden. (That’s the brain starting to get hyper-vigilant.)

But I LOVE the yard, and it’s finally warm enough to be out there  in shorts!

Fortunately, I’ve learned to stay detached from my safety brain, so I’m going to be able to talk myself through this fear. Mainly by staying present with it, paying attention to my breath and choosing to stay outside in spite of it’s warnings by remembering what I love about being there.

I also have an ace in the hole, when it comes to dealing with fear. I have the best tools I’ve ever found, from The Way of The Heart, and I can use them to clear the original experience so I don’t keep reacting to it.

It’s like taking the card for “going outside” right out of my brain’s card file, so it literally doesn’t warn me about that any more.

Of  course, I won’t be removing the allergy by doing that, so I’ll take some wise precautions before I go out, like putting on bug spray and staying a little more covered than I might.

I’m also going to keep some Benadryl around from now on! But at least I don’t have to let my world get smaller and stop going outside just because my brain says so.

Where has your world gotten a little smaller? Is it time to challenge your brain about that?

You might also like these:

1. What’s Colouring Your World?
2. Beyond Jekyll & Hyde – Outgrowing our fear of ourselves
3. The Curse of “You should know better”