How to Become Immune to Your Resistance

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?