For years I thought that once I worked through my past wounds and traumas, I’d be happy and free. Once I established a sense of security, safety, I’d be happy and free. And once I had deepened my spiritual connection, I’d be happy and free.
Through my commitment to my personal growth and my spiritual path, happiness and freedom did set in. My outside world and whole life began to shift & reflect my positive internal state, and life began to flow beautifully. But still then, like clockwork, the presence of fear within me did everything it could to resist the trust and light I had newly created in my life and grown to rely on.
I looked closely at this resistance in order to understand and acknowledge its presence. After a lot of exploration, I came to understand that it’s our resistance to love and to trust that keeps us in the dark. This resistance is the reason we stay stuck in patterns that keep us from thriving.
You may have already experience this yourself. Connecting back to trust, feeling good and positive about the future when you commit to your self care practices such as meditation, journaling, positive affirmations, or any other type of personal growth, only to sabotage that great feeling with a limiting belief, old fear coming right back, negative comment or thought, or same old addictive pattern right after. This experience continues to occur because the moment we lean toward the light, the darkness within us resists it. Our ego doesn’t want to give in, no matter how much our soul is speaking.
Even when we make a commitment to trust and happiness, we often find it hard to give up the fear we’ve grown to depend on. We give purpose to our pain – because that’s what we learned to – believing struggle and strife are necessary to attain success, lasting joy or a meaningful life, and we feel safe in a state of conflict and control.
You may not have recognized this pattern before, but when you do, you can begin the journey toward freedom. That’s because the primary reason for our unhappiness is startlingly simple: we are resistant to being happy.
HOW TO STOP RESISTING?
Once you make a commitment to awaken from fear and get in sync with trust, your life can begin to change. But again, the presence of fear (your ego) within you will do whatever it takes to resist it and keep you stuck in pain and darkness. This fear is the root cause of all our problems and feelings of disconnect from our potential, our true self, our soul.
To truly say yes to trust and surrender means you have to look at your resistance and give up a thought system that you mistakenly identified as safety, security, and the foundation of your life.
TO BE HAPPY WE MUST ACKNOWLEDGE OUR RESISTANCE
We must recognize that while we have a trusting, surrendering mindset side within us that wants to be at peace, we also have a wrong mindset side that says, “I don’t want to be free. I don’t want to give up my old patterns. I don’t want to release control.”
The most profound way to practice releasing resistance is to see clearly how we don’t want to let it go. When we accept that we are addicted to fear, we can let ourselves off the hook for anything that occurred in the past and for the detours into fear we will continue to make on our spiritual paths. We can forgive ourselves for not doing things perfectly, and we can forgive ourselves for holding onto old patterns.
Honoring this shadow side of ourselves is the way to heal our resistance. We must remove all the barriers to trust.
“What will serve you most is to look at your fear with love and decide that it’s not a thought system you want anymore. Making this decision will clear the path to happiness.”
Releasing your old thought system and welcoming in a new one takes practice, but it’s a lot less “work” than you may think.
