As the X-Men movies once said, every few hundred millennia evolution leaps forward…
Well we can make that leap within us everyday by pushing through the dreaded enemy known as resistance. I’m currently reading Steven Pressfield’s the War of Art which this post is very influenced by. As with all life, if we choose to look at it as such, things happen when they are meant to. Known as a synchronicity, a term coined by the great psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung. That is what my reading of this book is now at this point in my life for I am coming up against resistance that is ready to be released. Resistance, which for me takes the form of fear, self-doubt and judgement towards my writing and/or OCD behaviours and anxiety around food and eating. You see, I was once anorexic, bulimic, you name it. I ran the eating disorder gamut and while I am “over it” in many ways it still lingers. The behaviours, the fears etc. and they rise when I’m stressed — or when I’m falling into doubt about myself as a creative — they are my go to comfort zone when I cannot cope with life. This awareness in itself is a feat for there was once a time when I could not even see what I was doing to myself and now I can.
Once we gain awareness of our issues we can do something about it, but awareness itself is not enough for awareness has no effect on the situation it is just there witnessing it all. To truly change, to shift the old paradigm takes work, and I’m sorry to say it’s not just like flicking on a light switch. Though those revelatory moments do come, and they are magick. The magick of breaking through resistance. But to truly break out of a destructive habitual behaviour takes doing it.
Simple right? Not. This is perhaps the hardest thing we will ever do. Even if the behaviour is something that seems so simple — like eating normally. What we have been conditioned to believe and worse, conditioned ourselves to believe takes hold and the longer we do it the harder it is to get out of. My dalliance in my disorder was about a 15-year ordeal at the worst of it. And as I’ve said it is still not fully gone and maybe it never will be As with creative resistance maybe I will just learn to rise above it in the day to day battle. But something inside is telling me these things can be beaten for good and I choose to listen to that voice. The quiet one just beyond the loud voices — the voices of Resistance.
Those voices are easier to beat when we understand their role, their purpose. And their purpose, as Steven says, is to destroy — to destroy creativity. To keep us from our work in the world. Whatever that may be. And the only way to beat it is to push through it and keep pushing through it until the voices are not so loud. Until that behaviour, that pattern you’re trying to break is suddenly not so much in your way. Then you have risen above it, you — the real You — is louder than it. But don’t be fooled just yet, resistance is still there and will sneak up on us if we get complacent. This is not to instill fear — for fear is just another form of resistance. This is to strengthen our witnessing awareness, so we are prepared when resistance rises to bite us in the ass. It may be easier to think of our work in the world as the Universe’s work that we are expressing through the lens of ourselves. Our purpose shining through in our own unique ways. Whatever that thing is for you let it shine bright through all that makes you You.
Even though we all have things to “fix” let that not stop us in our pursuit. For as with writing (which is my work in this world) the story reveals itself in the writing of it, just as we reveal ourselves in the doing of life. We are all characters facing our own conflicts the Universe has put before us to reveal who we really are and rise to who we are meant to be. And really, fixing ourselves is just a coming back to something we once were, an innocence, a knowing. So why do we have to live at all why not stay the same innocent beings we are at birth? Good question. I believe it’s the growth aspect. When we are born we are innocent and pure but we don’t really know anything. We have to get a bit fucked up by life, then in the un-fucking of ourselves we grow in the ways we are meant to in this life. And I am grateful for my growth. I have suffered through other lives where the growth was perhaps not so great. More hardships, less quality of life. So whenever I am feeling low I remember to be grateful for my first world problems for they are just that and by overcoming them I can shift my focus to helping others and helping the world grow too. I am doing that by being and growing myself but I know I can do more and perhaps that is the frustration I find myself in now, a knowing that there’s more within that’s just not quite ready — yet. Never forget that yet for we can grow beyond our limits, even when it seems impossible. Especially when it seems impossible for that’s when this enemy we call resistance rises the most for it knows it’s about to be beaten. So when the hardest moments fall upon you know that the light is just within reach beyond the shadow you can’t see past — yet.
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