Resistance is a part of life… overcoming it is how we live fully.

Resistance is good news because it means we’re getting close to something important…

There is an epidemic in our society of avoidance - avoiding pain… avoiding discomfort… which leads to resistance.

Resistance is just a sign that you’re about to tap into a new paradigm. Resistance happens because the outcome is unknown… or, more accurately, how we’ll feel in the new outcome is unknown.

Let’s take weight loss for example…

Often there is resistance in new behaviors that would lead to weight loss/better health. It’s not that these behaviors are necessarily more difficult than what we have been doing, it’s just that they’re different… and anything new takes more mental energy to complete because we have to come off of autopilot. This is one reason resistance can happen… there’s a fear in us that we won’t be able to sustain the new energy, so we quit before we see/feel the results… if the fear of failing is strong within us (i.e. perfectionism) it will prevent us from even trying in the first place.

There may also be resistance because of a fear of success…

With the weight loss example, there may be an unconscious fear of attention we would receive from our new bodies, because we live in a society that praises smaller bodies. There may be a fear of loss of identity… if we’ve always been bigger, or have been for a long time at least, we may have formed an identity around our larger bodies… or around health problems we may have developed.

There are so many reasons for resistance.

Getting friendly with resistance, instead of condemning it, can help you move through it.

Very often, when working with clients, as they hit resistance, the critical voice comes in… because they genuinely want change in their lives, but there’s a part of them that wants to self-sabotage.

Self-sabotage is simply misguided self-love.

There is a part of them (usually a younger part of them that experienced pain in the past) that is trying to protect them from the unknown.

This is where we reframe, and instead of being critical of, or angry about, resistance, we get curious…

What is the fear underneath this resistance?

By compassionately approaching the fear we can then work on creating internal safety… with that embodied safety, lasting change can occur…

This can be applied to any resistance we feel around change in our lives, not just weight loss… because resistance can happen in relationships, jobs, or any other area of our lives where we get “stuck”.

Resistance is a part of life… overcoming it is how we live fully.

Change takes intention & effort, and that can be hard… but, so is staying somewhere you’ve outgrown.

When the pain of where you are becomes greater than the pain of the unknown, you make the decision to change… but, to actually change, you have to change your patterns. You first have to be willing to let go of what no longer serves you, and only then you can embody the new.

XO,

Stacie