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The more I learn about resistance, the less I know. A while back I wrote on “walls of resistance“, talking about a scenario where you start moving in a new direction, and eventually, you reach a critical point where the resistance pushes you off-target and you lose progress. While that is an observed progression of events, it ignores some much subtler elements at play:
When you try something, you’re likely to get a small burst of resistance, but your willpower and/or enthusiasm are usually enough to squish that flat. It may be so small that you barely notice it. What happens after that is the amount of resistance you have to deal with rises in a logarithmic fashion until you hit the wall. The thing is, most of us never even get to the wall.
This is actually one of the more insidious things about how resistance works: If you were to actually run into the wall, you’d probably recognize it for what it is. What happens instead is that as you get nearer and nearer the wall, the resistance starts nudging you away, then pushing, then shoving. The time that internal resistance is at its most dangerous is when it is below the threshold of your awareness.
The more acute our awareness of our inner world, the sooner we can detect the resistance and deal with it before it throws us off course and/or becomes oppressive. It is a lot easier to let go of the resistance, and let it melt away if you aren’t banging your head into it all the time. As you learn to smell the smoke before a fire breaks out (metaphorically speaking), the greater leverage you will have in dealing with your inner resistance.
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