Your Resistance is the 'Medicine'.

Trusting the wisdom of 'freeze'.

When we feel ourselves to be ‘stuck’ there is a reason we are not moving forward.

Maybe we are scared, sure, but even if that is the case is it wise to push against that fear? Has fear ever shifted from being bullied into submission or do we find ourselves again and in the boxing ring with our ‘shadow’ only to get our asses kicked?

We cannot ‘conquer’ our subconscious. It only know us, so when we set up battles against our own underlying motivations we wind up becoming our own enemy.

So we have to ask, “Is overcoming what woes us really how we want to live?”

We do not drive our deeply seeded patterns into submission. More often than not they recede to the corners quietly observing, becoming more sophisticated means of defense until they pop up again unsuspectedly having reformed under the pressure, but not having actually healed, not genuinely having changed. This cycle may occur many times to greater degrees of frustration. Us thinking we are moving forward only to hit what feels like another ‘wall’—another round of resistance. At this point, many people start to come down on themselves.

“Why can’t I get the momentum that everyone else has?”

But my question is: When will we stop comparing ourselves to impossible and unhealthy standards in the name of ‘progress’? When will we realize that life is cyclical, not linear? And when will we learn to honor our bodies over our artificial ideals of success?

I see so many posts, blogs, and even courses about ‘overcoming your resistance’.

Whereas I understand that dwelling in limbo in any area of life is uncomfortable, we seem to not only forget, but to completely disregard the innate need for pauses in life as well as the deeper physiological reasons that we may not be moving forward in the way we think we are ‘supposed’ to.

I had a quick new client discovery call yesterday, and what the man I was interviewing wanted me to know about what he called his “self sabotage pattern” was that he had been “working on it a long time”. He informed me that he had been “into Tony Robbins” since he was a teenager and had been “going to therapy” for years. My take away from that short interaction was that not only is he carrying shame that after all these years he is struggling with a ‘pattern’ that causes him pain—how bloody human!—but, more importantly, that he has been diligent in ‘battling’ it.

This ‘fight it’ mentality creeps into so much of our lives, but nowhere is it more destructive than in our health and healing modalities.

Constantly ‘driving’ our bodies and psyches into ‘fight’ mode keeps us in sympathetic nervous system function. So very often the things we are trying to “overcome” wind up growing in response to the onslaught of energy and information that we are constantly bombarding ourselves with and being bombarded with.

What is the underlying root of the majority of these ‘conditions’, be they personal or collective? Trauma. And the thing about trauma is that it is the effect of events having happened too quickly for our systems to have processed or put into correct context. So, it is an every deepening conundrum to me why we think we can ‘push’ or battle our way out of something that exists in the first place because we were overwhelmed by feeling, sensation, information—not compassionately witnessed through it—and subsequently had to ‘shut down’ to survive it.

Make it make sense!

I take a particular umbrage to people who use the term “overcome addiction”. Does anyone actually overcome an addiction? Not if we are being honest with ourselves. The same goes with overcoming anxiety, cancer, any chronic illness, or even a cold. We didn’t “overcome” the pandemic. We don’t overcome obesity, diabetes, poverty, war, or anything else that is set up as a ‘crisis’ for us to interact with—to overcome.

In contrast, my own experience is that I did not overcome my addiction to meth. I actually let it in. First I let in the awareness that I was out of control. Then, once that was established, I slowly let in the pain that had been building up for years. Only, to be more accurate, I let the pain and fear that had been imprinted into my very cells slowly thaw to the warmth of my own loving awareness over the course of many years. It was a backlog of things I experienced when I was ‘using’, but also things that had happened long before in my childhood. Some things which have only surfaced in the last few years, many years after I quit using meth.

My body was locked around those events protecting my psyche from the somatic memory until it had caught up enough to be able to ‘process’ them. I can’t tell you how many times I berated myself for “not moving forward”, but in retrospect I can see the innate gnosis acting in and through my life biding me to wait my time to allow all my ‘parts’ to catch up to the present.

Even now, I have learned to feel into my body when there is an action that needs to be taken, a communication that needs to be initiated, a process that requires engagement. I check for tension in my body. I check to see if I am ‘holding’ my breath. I pause for signs of dissociation, and gently bring myself back to the task as hand. What I do not do is push my system when it is feeling resistant.

This is the wisdom of the ‘freeze’. When something happens that is too much for us to process all at once we ‘shut it down’. We freeze the feelings, the sensations, we may dissociate. Part of us may leave as a means of insulating ourselves from too much fear or pain. To reunite with that part we do not ‘overcome’ what happened to us. We integrate it. And when all of our ‘parts’ are on board with what we are doing or trying to accomplish or at least have a ‘voice’ in how we move forward we can do so much more graciously.

Slowly we begin to thaw to the warmth of our own presence, to the cadence of our heartbeat and the rise and fall of our belly and chest.

Slowly we let the sensations rise in us, we allow the tides of feelings to begin to move again a little here, there. We start to ‘thaw’ beneath the loving gaze of the Gawd force within us and all around us. We unclench our jaws, relax our limbs, drop our shoulders and find we can open our chest, our heart a bit more. We release the tension in our hips and find sanctuary in our pelvis. 

We learn to ‘root’ into our bodies and into the moment and allow ourselves to grow, bloom, and fruit and the rate that is right for us. We know that sometimes we are going to grow quickly and produce vast amounts of ideas and products, and at others we will grow slowly, imperceptibly, or not at all—and that is okay as well. 

When we release the idea that there is anything for us to overcome, we can embrace the ways we move, the places we come from, and enjoy the journey of our becoming as much as we relish in arriving at the destination.

Much love to you,

~Justice