Can You Sit With the Resistance?

I don’t know what to write today. Often, I am overflowing with ideas I want to share, but today, there is a blank space where my inspiration should be.

But I’m trusting that the lack of inspiration is where the inspiration is today – or that it’s where I need to be.

I can tell you that wandering off to facebook didn’t help me get inspired, nor did listening to a call I missed from Monday night. Distracting myself didn’t take me forward (who’d a thunk?). Filling my head with more ‘noise’ didn’t allow beautiful ideas to come forward. (you don’t say?!)

Sitting with it, experiencing the discomfort of not knowing what to say, exploring that not knowing, allowing it, is bringing to the forefront a glimmer of an idea.

Funnily enough, I had a similar conversation today with a client about resistance – that you get your sleeve snagged on a twig in a forest, but instead of looking to see why you’ve stopped, you just stay stuck, in resistance; instead of looking, seeing it’s just a twig, unhooking yourself and moving on.

We live in an age where distraction is all around – texts, e-mails, social media, auntie google, uncle youtube, games, downloads, news, 500 channels of tv, websites by the million – if you want to get away from an uncomfortable feeling, you can, with ease.

But too often, you realise, it didn’t help. You’re no further forward and an hour, a week, a month, a lifetime has passed. The distraction took you away from the uncomfortable feeling for a little while, but it didn’t get your Dream moving forward, your task done, or your article written.

That’s still there, waiting for you, waiting for your attention. Waiting for you to stop distracting yourself and be here, with the uncomfortable feeling, exploring, accepting and moving through it.

Perhaps you have something you aren’t doing. Something that’s waiting for you, something that ‘you don’t know’ what to do with. Something you’ve been putting off.

No judgement, no criticism, no blame. We all do it, it’s human.

Perhaps now is the time to stop running from it, to turn and embrace the blank page, the resistance, the not knowing and explore it, accept where you are, and in doing so, allow yourself to move through whatever is snagging at your sleeve.

It might be just a twig.

But you’ll never know until you allow yourself to immerse and embrace the hesitation, resistance and avoidance.

Go, now and spend 20 minutes solely on the thing you’re avoiding – one of 3 things will happen:

1. You’ll find yourself writing an article you didn’t know was waiting to be written! Or your equivalent – you’ll just find yourself doing something unexpected.
2. You’ll find you’re stuck on more than a twig…but that’s good, if you can see it, you can name it. If you can name it, you can get past it.
3. You’ll spend 20 minutes being with the project and realise the energy really isn’t here today…so you then have permission to go do something else!​

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