In 2004, I came across a book that changed my life .

Looking back  now, I like to say that the book “outed me” in a way I’d never experienced before. While I was reading it I kept having the same thought, over and over, “How does he KNOW this about me?!”

Click the image to grab it from Amazon

The book, Your Own Worst Enemy – Breaking the Habit of Adult Under-Achievement, written by Dr. Ken Christian, thoroughly explores all the ways that we habitually limit ourselves and gradually create lives of settling for just a little, or sometimes a LOT less than we’re capable of. (And he delves fully into the way our school systems helps create this, too.)

Ken coined the term SLHPP’s which stands for “Self-limiting High Potential Persons”, as his work and research showed him that its the brightest among us who tend to do the most self-limiting.

This is where my inner cringing began.

He then goes on to describe 12 very distinct self-limiting styles such as “stop-shorts”, “floater-coasters”, “self-doubters”, “rebels”, “checkmates”, “extreme non-risk-takers” and “extreme risk-takers”.

When I saw my exact self-limiting style described EXACTLY in his pages, I knew that my days of hiding were over. (I was a very clear “stop-short” with low-risking tendencies.)

At the time, I was already engaged in very deep training with my own teachers in growing my awareness and my ability to work with any pattern or “program” I encountered in myself. So I brought these same skills I’d learned to the patterns Ken was showing me in the book.

In hindsight, this was the beginning of my work with, and deep study of resistance.

By 2009, I had developed an effective process including a map of resistance and the biological mechanisms behind it, and distilled that down into a distinct series of steps that could be facilitated and taught to others.

Somewhere along the way, I think I said to myself “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could tell all this to Ken Christian?”

Well my full circle moment has arrived!

In a moment of complete serendipity, a good friend and former coaching client of Ken’s contacted him in early March of this year to point him to my website, where his book was being proudly promoted in my sidebar.

And, because of who Ken is, after he’d checked out the whole site, he decided to just pick up the phone and call the contact number he found and say “Hi, thanks for putting my book on your website”.

We talked for an hour and a half!

Somewhere in the middle of that first call, we both had the thought “We should present something together one day.”

And here it is:

On Tuesday, July 26th, at 6 pm Pacific, 9 pm Eastern, Ken will be hosting me on a special teleclass for his MaxPotential community called “Breaking Out of the Stuck Zone”.

• How the brain creates resistance
• Why you can never “think” your way out of the Stuck Zone
• What the latest research on brain plasticity can tell us
  about how to get the brain un-stuck
• How you can end the battle with your resistance
• How to eliminate the guilt, shame and feelings of inadequacy
  that go with being stuck
• Four words that can help you break any self-limiting pattern
• Why breaking your old habits requires space not time
• The missing ingredient in any action strategy
• The 5 steps that I use to resolve the fears underneath resistance

And I’m sure we’ll get into a bunch more stuff that I can’t even predict right now. That’s just how our discussions tend to go!

Plus, I’ll be sharing some research I’ve uncovered where a California doctor has developed the very same steps I’ve been using on resistance and is using them to treat OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) VERY successfully.

I’ll be sharing why it works and the crucial 5th step that they’re missing.

Even if you can’t be on the call with us live, register at the link below so you can get this recording:

Breaking Out of the Stuck Zone Teleclass

(If you’re reading this post in your email, you might have to go to the website to get a clickable link.)

I truly hope you can join us and …to the friend of Ken’s who had the thought to send him here…I am eternally grateful!!

You WANT to be taking action on your true desires, but you just can’t seem to get past that invisible wall that’s got you stopped.

Maybe random things just keep getting in the way. Maybe you’ve been telling yourself you’re too busy – but that doesn’t make the longing stop.

Or maybe you KNOW you’re sabotaging the very thing you want the most and judging yourself for that is becoming one more reason to avoid it.

Whatever your resistance looks like, you know you simply must get past it if you’re ever going to get to where you really want to be in your life.

And if you’re anything like me, you’ve found that willpower doesn’t work long term – it’s just tiring – and forcing yourself takes all the joy out of something you want to love and not hate everyday.

Get the Skills and Knowledge to Go Past Your Invisible Walls

The Wisdom of Your Resistance is a 5-Week Teleclass program that shows you step-by-step how to track your resistance and enter into a compassionate dialogue with it so you can immediately end the tug of war you’ve been having with yourself.

Your resistance patterns, and all parts of you for that matter, are incredibly wise and with the right training, you can start finding out WHY they’ve been getting in your way so you can give them what they need to get on board and work FOR you.

You’ll be building skills in 6 distinct areas and learning practical techniques you can use anytime, anywhere, to make new choices and keep resistance from taking over.

Plus, you’ll be unlearning a lifetime of judgment and inner criticism and learning brand new positive, heart-centered ways to stay connected to your motivation and desire.

The program includes 5 weekly teleclasses, mp3 recordings and transcripts in case you can’t be there live,  a community support forum, weekly worksheets and pdf guides, a copy of the 15 Minutes to Outsmarting Your Resistance kit and one personal Discovery Session with me.

And you won’t have mountains of homework! This is about doing tiny things through your day that completely transform your inner experience. Our resistance loves to make tasks look like big barriers, so everything will be bite-sized and do-able!

No matter what your obstacles are, you’ll find effective ways to see through them and transform them into good fuel, for progress you can feel great about.

And the brilliant thing about this process is that it’s designed to work even if you’re resisting the program itself!

Personalized Coaching

Whenever you’re dealing with resistance, it’s good to remember that things are being actively hidden and kept buried in your subconscious in order to keep you safe and happy.

That’s why I’m including direct, personal coaching time with me, so you can get straight to the bottom of what’s been blocking you and save yourself years of hunting and struggle.

AND, you’ll have a half-price discount on additional coaching hours for the duration of the 5-week program and for one month after, as well.

Community Support

One of the favorite and most common strategies of resistance is “divide and conquer”. That means your resistance likes it when you’re isolated, cut off from support and thinking you’re the only one who’s feeling this way.

So one of the things I’m the MOST excited about is the community forum that will be a part of this teleclass program.

You’ll be able to get direct feedback from me, but when you get a taste of the support available from the rest of your fellow students that will probably become even more valuable to you.

Together we’ll create a resource for each other filled with wisdom, camaraderie, insight and laughter.

And I’m going to keep it open for an additional month after the program ends so you’ll have a transition time before you start “flying solo” with all your new habits and skills.

Plus, YOU Get to Help Design the Program!

This is the first ever offering of The Wisdom of Your Resistance Teleclass program. And because of that, I’m going to be seeking your input and advice on what you need, what order to do things in and what formats will work best for you.

So you get to help me create the program that will work the very best for you!

What’s the Free Offer?

This is actually a moment I’ve been waiting a long time for. I struggled so long with my own resistance that I had moments when I seriously thought I would never really accomplish anything.

And I know from intimate experience that one of the areas resistance likes to go after is money – making sure the resources are never there to get what you need to move forward.

Now, finally, I have the chance to take that limitation off the table for you.

That’s why I’m offering three scholarships to the readers of this blog. The three lucky winners will get the entire program absolutely free. Winners will be notified two days before the course opens to the Early Bird List that they have won their spot in The Wisdom of Your Resistance teleclass program.

How Can You Get in for Free?

To enter to win a free scholarship, here’s what you need to do. At the bottom of this page, add a comment, and tell me:

• What’s your biggest frustration around dealing with resistance and obstacles to your goals and dreams?
• Where would you like to see yourself after The Wisdom of Your Resistance Teleclass program? (You don’t have to give specifics if it feels pretty personal – just tell me in a general way.)

Do you have questions about the Wisdom of Your Resistance teleclass? Please let me know those, too! I’m happy to answer them.

Tell All Your Friends

Do you know someone who could benefit from The Wisdom of Your Resistance Teleclass program? Click on the Share button below to share it on Twitter and Facebook and wherever you like. You can also use the Retweet button to tweet it out to your peeps.

Remember, you just need to tell me:

• What’s your biggest frustration around dealing with resistance and obstacles to your goals and dreams?
• Where would you like to see yourself after The Wisdom of Your Resistance Teleclass program?

And if you have questions, let me know about those, too!

Best of Luck!

Our contest is now closed and congratulations go out to our 3 lucky winners, Eva, LaVonne and Sang-Gye. Thank you all for your participation and comments! For more program info, previews, discounts and access to a FREE Intro Teleclass July 27th @ 8 pm Eastern, just put your name on the Early Bird List.  I’ll also be sending the mp3 recording of the teleclass, entitled “7 Sources of Resistance and How to Make Friends With Them, to everyone on the list!

(Note: Even though this was published for the Mar.10-22 time frame, you can still jump into our e-course at the bottom of this post!)

As some of you know, I LOVE astrology. It’s been the best antidote in my life for taking my own shifting energies too personally. And I get really fascinated with the global astrological “weather”; the shifts that move all of us collectively, and we’re definitely in one of those now.

My favourite astrologer is Eric Francis of Planet Waves. He’s a former journalist and he has a gift for telling the larger stories in the current sky and for presenting the shifts as doorways and opportunities that we can take great advantage of in our lives.

And we’ve got a doozy of a doorway getting ready to open next week!

Since last December 21st, Mars, the planet of desire, passion, energy and movement, has been in retrograde. That means, from the perspective of the Earth, it appears to be moving backwards in the sky and what we experience is a slow down or a challenge with all that it represents.

In Eric’s words:

Now that we’re at the dregs of the retrograde, the sensation ranges from not being able to get anything done, to determination to accomplish exactly what you need (which may or may not be working)…In psychological terms, you may be feeling frustration over direction, initiative and/or desire.

I read someone speaking on her blog the other day about feeling like she’d been “sucker punched” over this winter. For some of us, this is what Mars retrograde has felt like. It’s also had a “frozen” quality to it, like all the heat has gone out of everything.

Well, it’s time to get ready, because things are going to heat back up starting next week!

And Mars is turning around and moving forward again in a very particular place on the astrological wheel – the first degree of Leo, one of the most fiery spots in the whole zodiac. Again, in Eric’s words:

Mars stationing direct in the first degree of Leo is all about desire, motivation and identity — and the place in awareness where the three meet.

What’s especially in our faces right now are all the things that try to tell us what we’re “supposed” to want and who we’re “supposed” to be and all the ways that we’re limited in our desires without even realizing that we let go of something that’s deeply meaningful to us.

So it’s like there’s a big wind coming next Wednesday and, if we want it to take us somewhere good, we’ll need to have our course set and our sails up.

Interestingly, I’m noticing as I’m using this wind metaphor that we’ve had one wind storm after another here in Atlantic Canada. The last big one a few days ago blew down a tree very close to the house (a near miss) and covered our front yard in roof tiles!

I feel like that’s the kind of power and energy we’re talking about here, and it’s going to be important to have a way to harness it AND some conscious intention around both moving the obstacles we might have piled up over the winter and which way we want to go with it.

That’s why I’ve created a FREE 20-day e-course called
“Ignite Your Desires”.

This is exactly the kind of process I often take myself through when there’s a big shift or doorway of this kind being offered. And, to be honest, it never occurred to me that others might like to go through it too.

But a couple of recent conversations convinced me that it’s time to get out of the closet with both my own process and with the astrological stuff that I get juiced about.

It’s time to get really clear about what we REALLY want!

I’ll be sharing 10 easy to apply e-lessons, 3 audios and 2 guided meditations between now and the end of March. The course will take about 25 days from whenever you sign up, and it will take you from obstacles to clarity to action steps so you can use all this great Mars energy to make great progress on your most important desires.

Go sign up here: Ignite Your Desires E-Course.

Then come back and tell us what you’ve been noticing about your desires, your obstacles and where things have felt thwarted these last few weeks and months. (It’s SO great to know that it’s not just you, isn’t it?)

And yes, it is free, so please share the link with others so that as many of us as possible can use this wind for the greatest good!

And I’ll be posting about this for the next few weeks, so if you want to follow our dialogue, you can sign up to receive the new posts by email.

You can also follow me on twitter at :
http://www.twitter.com/susanjohnstone

Looks a lot like our driveway....

I’ve been curled up in the house all this week  watching it alternately rain, blow and snow and I keep coming up with more things to share with you. So I’ve decided to offer you a goodie bag of New Year’s treats.

But first let me say that I hope 2010 is transformative and grace-filled, for each and every one of you! And I want to thank you so sincerely for subscribing or just stopping by to read or comment once in a while. It makes an enormous difference as I’m growing in finding my own voice and learning how to truly be of support to you. I hope to hear from you in the coming year about what you need and desire and how I can help.

To our deepening journey together! I hope you enjoy these:

1. Who Did You Become in 2009?
   I was recently moved by a comment from someone about what a terrible year they’d had and I have a hunch it may have been a tough one for many of us. So I wanted to offer a year-end review that didn’t leave any room for feeling bad about it and would actually help us to see how we’ve been transformed through the challenges we’ve had.
2. Five Questions to Ask About Any Resolution
   This is an updated version of a topic I looked at last December where I wrote about why head-based or “good idea” resolutions often fail and how to bring them down into the heart to access the fuel of desire to follow through on them.
3. Word of the Year Discovery Tool
   I downloaded this recently from Christine Kane’s blog  and I think you’ll really like her approach to finding a transformative theme for your year. She starts with your “WHY”, which will really resonate with all you Way of the Heart folks out there!
4. The End of Procrastination
   This is a really fascinating article by Bill Giruzzi where he takes apart the very idea of procrastination and looks at banishing it entirely as a way to help us be more honest about what’s going on BEHIND the label. We also had a pretty interesting time in the comments section!

And I’d love to hear YOUR comments on how you liked the worksheets and any insights you’ve had for your year.  You can get things going below.

If you enjoyed this article, and you’re not signed up yet, go ahead and subscribe to receive free updates by email or in a reader.

And if you’re a Twitter user, you may not have noticed the recent addition of the Follow Button in the top right corner. Yes, I have jumped into the glorious adventure and community that is Twitter, so feel free to join me there!

Happy 2010!

I’m starting to find out what kind of fun things can happen through blogging!

Some of you may remember that I wrote a post earlier this year about Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art.

It’s a truly brilliant journey into all aspects of our inner resistance and all the ways that it tries  to keep us from the desires that are closest to our heart.

It’s written through Steven’s journey as a writer through all the years that he tried to resist his calling and his art and how he still faces it every day before he sits down to actually write. And it’s incredibly complete and insightful.

Well, a little while after that, I got an email from Steven Pressfield’s publicist. Just that alone, plus the fact that she liked the post, was pretty cool.

And then she offered me the chance to have a written dialogue with Steven himself! But I need your help.

I get to ask Steven Pressfield any three questions I want about the War of Art and resistance and receive his answers in writing and share them with you! Wow!

Then, of course, my very next thought was, “OMG, what three questions will I ask?”

So I’m putting it out to you. Help me figure out what three questions to ask Steven Pressfield about resistance.

You don’t have to even have read the book to come up with a question. I’m sure you’re pretty familiar with the ins and outs of your own resistance. Think of what you’d like to ask someone who has struggled with resistance and triumphed.

And, just to make it juicy, I think I’ll throw in a bonus 1 hour teleclass  on resistance for everyone who submits a question.

(and if you can’t make it you’ll get the recording anyway.)

So go ahead. Submit your ideas below. My motto is “there’s no such thing as a stupid question”. All questions open doors. I can’t wait to see your ideas.

(And if you want to stay in the loop when Steven sends back his answers, go ahead and subscribe to receive free updates by email or in a reader.)

There’s a pretty good chance, if you’re sitting in a house, with a computer, reading this in an email or on a web browser, that you have all your basic needs of food, clothing and shelter met, with some income left over to pay for internet and pay some attention to things beyond your own backyard.

This “luxury” we have, of having the time, space and money to pay attention to what we want to is not available everywhere in our world. And the gift of our awareness plus the availability of so much global information is showing us things we never even knew we wanted to change.

And if we’re living from our hearts to any degree at all, the plight of others and our world as a whole provokes a response in us – a desire – to help, to console, to soften the pain or address the need in whatever way we can.

But what to do from there?

Andrew Harvey, a modern day mystic, writer, teacher and student of the worlds mystical traditions,  offers a handbook for answering that very question.

I’ve been following Andrew for a long time, ad his book The Son of Man opened my eyes to the mystic essence available within the Christian tradition and helped me shake some of the dogma I was still locked into at the time.

I actually haven’t read Andrew’s new book, The Hope. It only just released on September 15th and I just ordered my copy online, so I hope it gets here soon!

I heard a portion of a talk he gave played on cassette years ago and just a few minutes of listening to him absolutely set my heart on fire!

And I believe it was Andrew who talked about becoming a “radical radioactive nuisance for love”, a term that has stuck with us in The Way of the Heart community.

So if Andrew has written a handbook for what he calls spiritual activists, I have no doubt that it will be passionate gasoline for any fire in us that wants to change the world.

Saturn

As some of you know, I follow astrology pretty closely and I pay particular attention to major planetary transits and alignments.

I knew we were into some pretty big and powerful cycles lately, so I started reading up on them and discovered that the current astrological dance is something that many astrologers have been waiting their whole lives to watch.

This past week, we’ve just experienced our third Saturn/Uranus opposition in a series of five and they can definitely bring up some stress. However, when I sought to find out how to interpret this event personally, something I read from master astrologer Eric Francis led me to look back to the time when Saturn and Uranus were conjunct, or in alignment, in Feb. 1988.

I’ve been shown this past week how this can be a profound opportunity for us  to look at what’s been seeded in our lives and what kind of harvest we might be aiming for.

To get a sense of what this cycle is about we need to look at the 2 players.

Uranus is a planet that’s all about energy, electricity, technology, anything new and novel, sudden insights and opportunities, a quickening or sudden shift.

And then, in the opposing corner, we have Saturn, all about structure, limitation, foundation, “doing the work”. Most people think of Saturn as a bit of a downer, all work and no play. But I’ve come to think of Saturn as the life lesson no one wants to go through, but everyone wants to have the benefit of.

These two planets can also be seen as the ‘New Way’ facing off against the ‘Old Way’.

To highlight this even more, the first Saturn/Uranus opposition in this current series occurred on election day last November, the day President Obama was elected. A New Way was most definitely ushered in that day.

Personally, though, I found the clues to my own transition when I looked back at February 1988.

In fact, on Feb. 13th, 1988 the Saturn/Uranus alignment was exact, and it was the morning of the Calgary Olympic Opening Ceremonies. I remember because I was dancing in the stadium that afternoon!

A really interesting thing to know about that particular Olympics, is that it was very first time that seating had been built for the athletes (they usually march into the stadium and then right back out again.) So on that particular day, the “world” all took a seat together, 57 countries or more, in that stadium, with another estimated 1.2 billion watching.

In looking back at this, I’ve realized that I experienced something of my heart’s ideal that day. I was standing in the middle of exactly the kind of world I wanted – full of hope and anticipation, standing together in belonging and collective celebration. It was so tangible to me.

And now, the opposition of these 2 planets puts us halfway to completion of the New Way that was seeded in 1988.

So where were you in 1988?

There was actually a series of 3 Saturn/Uranus conjunctions that year, on Feb.13th, June 26th and Oct. 18th. In a series like that, something often begins in our life and then continues through the rest of the series and beyond into the next year even.

Can you remember where you were, who you were with, what you were doing, what your desire was? Was there a major theme for you that year?

These will hold clues to what is ripening in your life now and what New Way you may be moving towards, or how your life fits into the New Way that we’re moving towards collectively.

This past week, I’ve had a strong sense of being called to remember my ideal from 1988, what it was I dreamed for the world. I had no idea then how I might play a part in making it happen, but now I do.

And suddenly, I can see really clearly where I was going all along and I’m realizing that I need to make a few course corrections to be really on track again.

And since the Saturn/Uranus opposition is exactly halfway into the “growing season” of this cycle, and Saturn is all about doing the work, it feels like I’m being shown that “the work is half done” and it might be time to re-commit to working right through to the harvest.

If you’d like to take a look at your astrology chart for the different dates I’ve mentioned, try out Astro.com. You can set up a free profile there to look at your natal chart + transits and see which houses Saturn and Uranus were in during these events.

And if you’d like to find out more about the planets and the houses they’re affecting, Bob Marks offers a really good basic set of Astrology Lessons with all the descriptions you’ll need.

I’d love to hear what you discover!

A while ago I picked up the book ‘The War of Art’ by Steven Pressfield. He’s the guy who wrote the book ‘The Legend of Baggar Vance’ which became a movie of the same name, and one of my all time favorite life mission movies.

‘The War of Art’ had been highly recommended to me, but I avoided it for years because I made the big mistake of thinking that it was about the art world.

It’s not!

It’s the distilled essence of Steven’s immense experience battling his resistance to writing and being a writer over the course of many years… and it’s pure gold.

One of my favorite concepts in the whole book is his discovery that resistance always points to the true north of our heart’s longing and our soul’s greatest desire.

In fact we can actually measure the strength of our desire by the strength of our resistance to it!

In my experience that’s been true over and over again, but I could never see it at the time.

So the person who long’s to be a writer will resist writing more than anything else in her life. And she might even resist all the other things that would support her being a writer – taking a class, joining a writer’s group, getting a new computer, etc.

In my way of understanding resistance, what I’ve often found is that

…resistance often works to keep a new self from surfacing.

In Steven’s compass metaphor, resistance actually points toward our most authentic self as it’s seeking to emerge!

So for our writer, the question is not “Why isn’t she writing?” The question is “Who will she become in the writing and what part of her is defending her against becoming that?”

That brings us right back to remembering that all resistance is a wise messenger with a message that needs to be heard and fully addressed. In my own inner work, I find that once the message is fully acknowledged and received, my inner messenger can finally stop working so hard to get it through.

It might be that our resistance remembers a time long ago when expressing ourselves fully got us into big trouble, or in our family that quality was definitely “not welcomed”.

This is how we end up burying parts of ourselves and our gifts and these parts collectively become our “shadow” or our unexpressed self.

And our safety brain (fight or flight system) gets very engaged whenever we try to bring a shadow part of our authentic self out of the closet. It will do whatever it takes to get us AWAY from the dangerous possibility of our authentic self fully surfacing.

Now…are you ready to have some fun?

Take a look at where your resistance is strongest and try out these questions:

1. What desire or longing is your strongest resistance pointing to?
2. Who would you become if you fully followed that desire?
3. Why does your resistance think that would be dangerous for you?

I have to thank my teacher Kimberly Herkert at The Way of the Heart for question number 3. Her body of work called “The Shadow of the Beloved” has taught me many of the incredibly insightful questions that get right to the root of this kind of resistance and claim back all of our beautiful qualities.

Remember to breathe and hold compassion for your resistance as your answer these questions. Softening our tug-of-war is always the first step.

I’d love to hear your insights as you work with your truest compass…your resistance. Thanks Steven!