On Resistance

I’ve been reading The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.  It’s a good thing, too, because lately everything has felt like a battle.

My almost two year old. Writing. Getting out the door on time. Cluttered corners.

Pressfield, who also wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance and The Authentic Swing, is such a great encourager of artists and writers and human beings. War of Art feels like the universe delivered up the exact book I should be reading, giving me precisely what I need to know right now. I love it when that happens. So on the off chance that you need a nudge too, I am sharing it with you.

In it he describes the universal force of resistance, which is defined as self-sabotage, and it is like gravity, a constant pull or oppositional force towards achieving something. Anytime you want to grow, physically, spiritually, mentally, resistance will be there to meet you and try to stop you. It is impersonal, indefatigable, and the closer you get to your goal, the more resistance you will feel. It is a battle inside ourselves whenever we try to grow or create.

It symptoms are procrastination, bad habits like too much TV, food, drugs, alcohol, porn/sex, and I am going to add internet. These sound a lot like Bene Brown’s list on how we numb ourselves from vulnerability – oh wait, because they are the same list. Resistance loves to make us feel vulnerable.

But you know what? I’ve felt super vulnerable this week, with agents and school boards and relationships, and I am starting to breath through these moments, when fear and resistance want to take hold. And it’s working. What used to send me under the covers with heart palpitations is now a feeling that I notice as anxiety, resistance, fear, and then I invite peace to come in and fix it. And it usually does sooner or later.

The really familiar sound track of my inner critic still plays in my head (I love Kristen Armstrong’s latest post on Runner’s World, where she calls it her roommate, and how she is trying to evict her if she is not kind this year). But now I recognize it for exactly what it is – resistance. And I can conquer my fear over it when I recognize it.

Today I sat through my daughter Sophie’s belt test in Karate. And watching this sweet, easy-going girl shout out imperatives, move her arms and legs with discipline and authority, all with a surprisingly steely look in her eye let’s me know exactly what it looks like when resistance loses. When you want a new belt, you fight it hard.

So maybe the best cure against resistance is desire. That hunger that hits you when your feet hit the floor in the morning and your head hits the pillow at night, the one that says you want everything in between to really matter? That’s your biggest weapon against resistance.

But that doesn’t seem to be enough either, because that hunger alone drives me crazy. Just bonkers. And it hit me as my daughter bowed down to her Sensei. We need discipline too. We need to surrender to rules and order and principles that are time tested. Set our clocks to work out or write. Go to church or whatever meeting we need to attend. Find a teacher or mentor.

Discipline and hunger invite a different force in. One that wants us to succeed.

I know I have to do battle again with resistance on my next writing day. And we are still at a stalemate on somethings, like the piles of clutter my house seems to collect in the corners, but I guess if you’re reading this, you know who won, in the end, at least for today.

Just ask Sophie.