Your resistances have a reason.
“Why am I afraid of being awesome?”
I was talking to one of the students in the Property Games last year. We did a lot of work with the kids mindset, and we were talking about how we all have these blockages that stop us reaching our full potential – these patterns that we run that keep us locked in place.
But to him it just didn’t make sense. “Why wouldn’t I want myself to be awesome? Why wouldn’t I want to be out there being awesome and doing awesome things, and being rich and getting the girls and all that?”
“If I could, why wouldn’t I?”
It was sweet. It felt like a moment where he got to meet himself. Where he learnt that like every human, he was a mess of contradictions and conflicting drives.
Its something that is easier to appreciate as you get older. Once you’ve been able to witness yourself in action for a while, you get to see the same patterns playing out. You get to see the same fears and self-doubts creep into your dialogues.
And you get to see how your negative patterns can get the best of you, no matter how hard you’re fighting or wishing they wouldn’t.
There’s a unique sort of heartbreak that comes with knowing that you might actually be your own worst enemy.
But to this young fellah, full of confidence and bravado, who saw himself as something between Thor and Spiderman, it was hard to get his head around.
To me, the easiest way to get a handle on it is to bring it back to the body. More and more it seems to me that every aspect of our psyche is written in the ledger of our body.
(and vice versa!)
So imagine you put an acupuncture needle in your shoulder muscle that pulls your shoulder up towards your ear.
For a while, this is going to be very uncomfortable. Your shoulder will feel like it’s out of place. That sense of unfamiliarity is the signal that something is “wrong.”
But over time, as you get used to your shoulder being up there like that, it starts to feel normal. The signal fades and you get used to.
Now, take the pin away and let the should relax again. What happens?
Well, as the shoulder starts to return to its original position, you get the same sense of unfamiliarity. The shoulder doesn’t feel like it’s in the right spot (even though now it is!)
This new sense of unfamiliarity is the signal to the body that something is wrong, even though it’s actually right.
The resistance to being ‘awesome’ is the same sort of thing. It’s a resistance to being put in a state that is unfamiliar.
Unfamiliar is value neutral. The most immediate layer of body awareness doesn’t care about right or wrong, it only cares about familiar or unfamiliar.
So as you move to a way of being that is more awesome (more optimistic, or positive, or loving, or abundant or whatever your definition of awesome is) if that move is into unfamiliar territory, then it will trigger resistance.
And since all growth by definition involves moving into a new way of being, all growth will meet resistance.
I mean all this very literally. Take the mindset that goes with believing that the cosmos is ultimately an abundance place that is seeking opportunities to rain beautiful experiences upon you. The body that carries this mindset around is a totally different place to the one that carries the belief that the universe is out to get them and then laugh at their failures.
They live very differently in the body.
And so moving from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset necessarily involves moving into a physically new way of being. It might not be perceptible to people on the outside, but the felt experience is different.
And therefore, it will meet resistance.
And so at each layer, as we gently coax our soul bodies back into alignment, we need to do the tender work that makes the unfamiliar familiar, the uncomfortable, comfortable.
This is slow work. You can’t snap the soul body back into shape without breaking something (as frustrated as we might get).
So as you wrestle with your resistances, do it with a loving kindness, and an awareness that your poor body sometimes confuses familiar with safe
And then steadily, bit by bit, bring yourself into a new state of being. Live in a new you.
This is the path of awesomeness.