To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.
~ Steven Pressfield, The War of Art.
Many of us highly sensitive people and empaths are masters of procrastination, of distraction and avoidance, which keeps us playing small.
Guilty, I hear you say.
I’m about to throw several questions your way, feel free to journal your answers to create more awareness and therefore more control over your behaviours, choices and actions this week.
What are you running away from?
Warrior energy is confronting. It faces a challenge. It shows up.
What have you been resisting lately?
Where is the loudest noise being made inside of your body?
What are you not paying attention to that requires your compassionate discipline and attention?
What is the TRUE priority you have been avoiding?
This is the journey into the dark feminine emotional body landscape that we must take to receive the nourishing light that we crave.
Robin Sharma writes, ‘The activity you’re most avoiding contains your biggest opportunity’.
In part as we practice yoga, we become aware of and befriend the dark places within us that hold the resistance and avoidance of what we truly desire to do; the goals that are in alignment with the soul’s purpose.
Yoga practice is itself a training in warriorship. However, modern life (colonial patriarchy and all systems of harm) have taken us out of our natural equilibrium with rest and activity. Most of us are depleted and dissatisfied in our minds, bodies, hearts and spirits.
How can we possibly show up to life in full glow and energy of acting in synch with our desires in this weakened state?
Our modern culture of forcing, pushing, striving and ‘hustling’, only deepens this angst to meet our wildest dreams.
Yoga sutra II.47 states that “asanas are perfected over time by relaxation of effort with meditation on the infinite”.
Only when ‘effort’ is abandoned do we reach the state required for non-resistance. Forcing the body into rigid postures with focus on athleticism, which is common in the western yoga-industrial complex, is quite toxic for the sensitive bodies in need of healing, re-fuelling and de-stressing.
In many cases we need the nectar and cooling nourishment of ‘soma’ than the burnout and misuse of ‘agni’ which is what pervades the dominating neo-colonial masculine-centred approach to thinking, being and moving.
We must begin the work of uncolonizing the body, the mind, the heart and the spirit in order to soften our inner resistance.
JOURNALING QUESTIONS & PLAN OF ACTION
⫸ When you let go of forcing, of the holding on to resistance, what are you afraid of receiving? The question we could ask ourselves is why might I be afraid to receive what I desire?
⫸ What will change? Spend time reflecting on this. What am I afraid of?
⫸ Make a list of EVERYTHING you’re avoiding doing right now!
Glance over this list.
Breathe deeply.
On exhale, identify your top priority — not what is easiest to complete but what your body is telling you IS the priority.
Your biggest desire.
The activity that brings you into alignment with your true self and path.
⫸ Start to organise the list and create a plan of action. Commit to the first priority this week. Just begin and go to the place that you have not yet dared to step.
To ease resistance, approach this intention with a sense of relaxation in mind and body: find a practice that helps you enter this state, be it meditation, free form movement, a walk etc.
In the words of Bruce Lee, “The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be.”
Rise Up, Warrior.
Payal
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