Resistance are the obstacles and negative patterns that prevent you living your best life
Resistance is the opposite side of the coin to natural flow and boy does it come in many forms. There are so many types of resistance that I will only be scratching the surface in this article. Giving you a broad introduction to resistance and we can dive deeper into specific resistances in future articles.
When you live your life following resistance patterns, you become increasingly trapped in bad outcomes. Even if you think you have made the right initial decision, or that it would lead to a great outcome – if that decision was a resistant one, the direction in your life will inevitably get worse.
The old expression, the road to hell is paved with good intentions is absolutely true – and resistance is a sneaky wily fox that creeps up on you long before you realise. Understanding the negative patterns in your life allows you to better align yourself with natural flow and in turn receive the massive positive outcomes of operating in flow.
What is Resistance?
Whereas natural flow is fairly easy to recognise but extremely difficult to master, resistance is the opposite. It is often tricky to recognise, and you might be accumulating resistance without realising at all. It is however fairly straightforward to reduce resistance once you have completed the difficult task of understanding where resistances are in your life.
The best way to think of resistance is as sediment in a river. It is at first small and largely indistinguishable from the riverbed but over time it accumulates in specific areas. This sediment has the potentiality to grow exponentially, creating large obstacles or trap water in stagnant pools. The river that once flowed freely and optimally becomes sluggish and inefficient.
At its worst, resistance in this analogy can form entire dams in our lives, preventing us from progressing. Eventually nature always wins and in our actual life, when the dam breaks it is devastating – leading to emotional turmoil and physiological collapse.
How Resistance Shows Up in Life
Right now, the way I have explained it is very abstract, so let’s look at a list of examples of resistance in life – hopefully to help you understand exactly what I am banging on about.
It is crucial to understand that resistance is any action/thought or decision that breaks the natural order of things. By no means is this list exhaustive, you could fill entire encyclopaedias – but it gives you a little overview.
Modern Daily Resistance Patterns
- Overreliance on digital technology such as phones, social media and the television.
- Eating processed foods that make us feel sluggish instead of healthy and satiated.
- Continuing conversations that are going nowhere (forced social interactions).
- Working against your natural rhythms, such as trying to stay up later or go to bed early when you are not tired.
Emotional Resistance Patterns
- Resentment.
- Fears.
- Procrastination.
- Staying in relationships that don’t serve you or that you have naturally outgrown.
Systemic Resistance Patterns
- Staying in an unfulfilling job.
- Living situations that don’t feel like home.
- Financial decisions that create stress.
- Habits that you have built up over a lifetime that don’t serve your natural flow.
Why Resistance Can Sometimes Feel ‘Easier’
You will notice that many of the examples I gave are what would typically be seen as easy options. After all, it is far easier to stay in bed and put the TV on than get dressed and go out for a walk in nature.
Resistance as I mentioned earlier is a tricky fucker.
The natural world is always in motion; it never stops moving. Resistance patterns often allow you to ‘stay’ where you are, requires no effort, no change and no risk. Humans are especially good at staying in a situation where they can know the problems rather than navigate into a situation where the problems don’t exist, but the possibilities are unknown.
We like knowing things, and nature operates in a way we can’t know.
Social Reinforcement and Easy Resistance Patterns
Going beyond the individual scale of resistance patterns, society as a whole, likes to control people through social reinforcement of negative patterns. Those who stay trapped aren’t judged by society. You can sit and doom scroll on Instagram for hours for example and no-one is bothered.
Entire societal structures are put in place to create artificial resistance patterns and anyone that operates away from those structures or strays, is immediately judged – sometimes in extremely harsh ways.
The Life Cost of Living in Resistance Patterns
You might be thinking at this point, well why would I leave this lovely resistance filled comfort zone? And that is completely fair if you are willing to sacrifice your time on earth to the resistances you embrace.
I am not in any way telling you that you must break away from resistance patterns – you have free will and sovereignty and it is your life to experience and do with as you please.
The costs of this seemingly comfortable arrangement are extraordinarily heavy though, so I will lay bare those costs so you can at the very least, make an informed decision.
- Life goes off course – resistances build over time, and years of your life pass without meaningful progress toward what matters. Childhood dreams are viewed with cynicism and aspirations are trampled all over. Better to be safe than sorry.
- Mental exhaustion – it is no secret that the more artificial crap we fill our lives with the higher the mental cost. Living against your nature depletes your ability to cope and function as a natural being.
- Pain of regret – we start life with no regrets. Living in resistance patterns always means that you will be taking sub-optimal decisions on a wholesale basis, regrets compound and accumulate. All those roads not taken – it grows heavier and weighs on your psyche.
- Loss of who you are – Your authenticity is always under attack by resistance patterns; it is little wonder the majority of people in society have a lack of self-identity and people increasingly report feeling disconnected from who they feel they should be.
- Blindness to opportunities – I mentioned earlier about known and unknown outcomes, well resistance itself prevents you from seeing possibilities. When you lower resistance, those previous unknowns become knowns.
Why Resistance is So Convincing
There are many reasons aside from ease that resistance can take hold in our lives. The core reasons why it convinces us so fully are:
It’s Disguised as Rationality – Resistance patterns fit into the materialist world that science has us duped into believing. For this reason, everything resistant seems rational or logical.
Social Validation – Aside from societal structures, our resistant decisions are often supported by those who are closest to us. A great example of a resistant decision is doing something ‘because we should do it’ or ‘because it is the right thing to do’ even if it is completely contrary to what we naturally want to do.
Past Evidence – Taking the natural option can feel challenging and then we can easily stray into accidental resistances like self-sabotage. If we have tried to make natural decisions in the past and didn’t understand the resistance structures we were navigating, it can feel extremely challenging. For this reason, people tend to stick to existing resistances.
False Sense of Fear – Most problems in our lives are not really that bad, however most of us tend to catastrophise and build fear around potential outcomes without considering benefits fully. There are numerous wisdom quotes with interchangeable endings such as “Fear is the enemy of hope,” and “Fear is the enemy of aspiration.”
For good reason too, our fears will keep us confined, trapped in irrational resistance patterns and unable to navigate toward a better life.
Timing Excuses – Have you ever heard someone justify a bad decision by saying ‘now is not the right time?’ I know personally I can pinpoint moments in my life where I have said exactly that. The truth is, nature decides when something is the right time and combatting that by creating artificial time restrictions is a strong resistance pattern.
Common Pitfalls – The Voice in Your Head
Let’s look at some really common expressions that I am sure we have all dealt with at some point in our lives (including me) and how they cause resistance.
Be Realistic/You’re Being Unrealistic – A very common self-limiting pattern that conditions us to think of possibilities in life as unlikely or impossible.
I’m Going to Play it Safe – We know we have an opportunity for growth or an authentic decision but opt for the resistance choice of playing it safe.
I’m Not Ready – Another self-limiting resistance pattern where we can sense a positive potential outcome, but fear has taken hold and paralysed us from moving forward.
What Will They Say? – Allowing other people’s opinions impair our sovereign decision making.
You Tried this Before – Using past unsuccessful resistant attempts to justify not trying again.
The truth is, that self-doubting, self-limiting voice in our heads is a strong resistance pattern that we have built up significantly over time. It started at some point as a seed, and it grew into a forest of trees that we can’t see the wood through.
The Cumulative and Compounding Effect of Resistance
You will notice in the above analogy I used that resistances tend to start small. They are often little patterns of behaviour we don’t catch early or even situations that happen to us in life as a result of other people’s poor decisions that embed themselves in how we view the world around us.
Before long, we have layered resistance patterns on top of the initial resistance and over time not only is resistance cumulative – it grows, but it also compounds with other resistances piling onto the growing resistance.
The longer you allow a resistance pattern in your life, the stronger that resistance becomes. You start to see yourself through the lens of the negative patterns that come to define your life. The friends and colleagues that you get on with most reinforce the same resistances. You avoid challenging yourself, you fail to grow as a human being, and opportunities dwindle.
You become a plant without water, and your identity becomes one of struggle, drought and hardship.
Breaking the Pattern
Unfortunately, this next section is going to be a sweeping overview because breaking resistance patterns takes a lot of understanding and being able to identify resistances within resistances. Don’t worry, I will create in depth blog posts about all manner of resistances and how to remove them from your life systematically.
For now, you should know the overarching process of breaking resistances.
- Name it – identify what the resistance is.
- What’s the narrative – what is this trying to prevent you from doing?
- Identify the true cost – what are you potentially giving up if you continue to follow the resistance?
- Initial steps – what small steps toward natural flow can you make to diminish the resistance?
Once you set yourself correctly down that path, resistances begin to break down rapidly. What’s more, you will find yourself better attuned to your authentic self and able to pick out other resistances with more clarity.
Resistance vs. Flow State Decision Making
Sometimes resistance will push you to make bad decisions. Even if you feel they are ‘risk free.’
Aligning with natural flow doesn’t always mean acting immediately. Instead, it is about trusting your intuition about the best move to make and when to make it.
The key is resistance is made through force whereas natural flow – well it flows effortlessly. That doesn’t mean natural flow is ‘easy’, in fact as we have discussed, natural flow can lead to difficult decisions being made.
Crucial to this point is even if a natural flow decision has a high difficulty, it will always lead to an optimal outcome. Finally, the more resistance patterns you can identify in that decision making process, the easier the natural flow becomes.
Your Personal Signature
We are all sovereign human beings with free will and the ability to navigate our lives on our own terms.
As a result, resistance patterns will differ from one person to the next. Everyone has specific areas where resistance patterns are strongest. Everyone has different resistance trigger points in the past (remember the small seed where resistance was sowed).
Likewise, we all have areas in our life where we have managed to navigate without accumulating too much resistance – areas where we naturally operate in better flow states.
Part of the process and reading further articles about my framework is about identifying what your resistance/flow signature is so you can optimise your life on a purely individual basis.
Liberating Yourself – Identifying Resistance in Your Life
Now we have a broad overview of resistance, let’s begin to wrap this up.
To summarise, your resistance patterns are not you, they are patterns you experience.
Resistances are never fixed as you can pivot away from them once you understand them. The trick is to really understand them on a very specific level.
Everyone experiences resistance, and you can never eliminate ALL resistance. But you can significantly reduce resistance in your life to the point natural flow becomes a permanent state and positive outcomes and abundance reign supreme.
Resistances Can Teach You and Develop Better Flow Alignment
Understanding your resistance patterns can actually show you where your authentic path lies in life. For example, if you have a negative pattern identified, such as eating artificial processed foods, your authentic path will be the opposite, eating natural foods without (or with limited) processing.
It is also the case that the resistances that are strongest in your life could represent the greatest opportunities in your life. Like telling yourself you must always be in employment because it is ‘safer’ when you might have tremendous success being your own boss.
That’s all for now and I promise I will create some really interesting and eye-opening articles about resistances to help you better understand – so make sure you either subscribe to our free newsletter or bookmark this page to check back regularly. If you want to do something in the meantime over the next week or so, start consciously paying attention to resistances in your life. No need for self-judgement, just the basic awareness of them for now is the first step toward natural flow and ultimately freed
