Resistance
Every time we grow, evolve or make progress in our spiritual lives –some part of us has to change. And for just about every change, a new way of thinking - a new state of mind - is the first step.

Put simply, as we have mentioned before, to progress we must change.

This is such a simple concept and it lies at the heart of our spiritual life. The more spiritual our lives, the more we change and the more comfortable we are with change.

Nature is a perfect example. It shows us again and again that the more alive something is, the more it changes. A tropical forest is so alive because everything, every single thing within it, is changing every second.

A man-made city however, in our quest to make things constant and safe, is an example of concreting over and tarring up, ‘insecticiding’ the changes nature had in store, resisting the flow of nature.

Eventually however, everything has to change, for we have no choice but to progress.

Straight away this creates a conflict in us as our world says to us that safety comes from constancy and predictability.

For most of us our whole lives are spent trying to make things known, to make things safe -financially, emotionally and spiritually- by trying to make them foreseeable, changeless, or at least impermeable to change.

We even become narrow minded so that we don’t have to think new challenging thoughts.

Even stranger is the quandary science finds itself in. In its quest to label and make everything known, to dissect and reduce, it finds itself coming to a place at its most fundamental (the quantum level) where it has virtually no capacity to predict what might happen

To come back to us and our lives, how do we get more comfortable with change? How do we invite it? Indeed how do we love change?

It turns out that we do not so much have to search for change but let go of our resistance to it.

You see, change is a constant. It is natural. There is a flow to our evolution.

It is always there, the more we resist it, the more difficult our lives become. There is a natural flow and a natural pace to that change.

Our impatience is another form of resistance, telling the universe it is too slow or too fast and it is not to be trusted. We feel we need to inflict our own timeframe, so we disconnect from loving the universe from the natural flow and try and force things in our way and schedule.

How many times have you finally ‘got it’ and felt the release of a pent up block that might have been months or years in the making.

Or seen in others a simple change that would transform their lives but not been able to share it with them because of the resistance you can see in them to it.

This resistance occurs at every level in us, except obviously from our soul. There is physical resistance, mental and finally resistance from the ego.

Many times in meditation classes this resistance is obvious. Someone a little scared, or a little unsure of what is happening, spends their time fidgeting, or moving around, or unable to get their body to sit still whilst the meditation is on, then suddenly is calm and relaxed once the meditation is over.

Meditation is the fastest and best way to open and transform our state of mind by simply letting the flow of change, our evolution, through. We just let go of all of our resistance for a while and allow change through.

The flow of love lies underneath everything. Let go and let it be.

When next you sit to meditate, spend some time really getting physically comfortable and then just completely disarm your physical resistance by being completely still and silent.

See if you can come to a place where you feel as though everything has stopped and is still, your breathing, your heartbeat –everything.

Then just feel that your consciousness is going deeper than your body, that your body is being dismantled and reinvigorated for a while as it has the deepest, most efficient rest, and you become aware of the deeper aspects of your being.

Mental resistance will take the form of all sorts of worries or doubts or fears, perhaps even mundane thoughts about nothing important but enough to side-track us and stop us meditating and changing. “Is this working?” “Am I doing it?” “I can’t meditate!” “I am the only one in the world that cannot meditate.” “Will I lose myself?” “What’s on TV?” “It’s a waste of time.” “What will I have for dinner?”

Our ego will resist with all the things it has to do or wishes it had done. It is all about the “do-do”! Its most fundamental resistance is with time, it resists the now, by imprisoning us in the past or the future.

“After this I will do that and then this.” “Why did I do that?” “I should have said that to so and so.” The ego’s resistance is so tied up in the events of the world, it will try to make us feel that there is something so important to do right now, that even a few moments of meditation will absolutely have to be interrupted, now! “I have so much to do, I can’t sit here for 5 minutes.” “I am doing nothing, when there are so many important things to do.” “As soon as this is over, I have to call ..” “Was that an email?, my phone?”

And also, of course, the ego fears losing itself. Every time it loses its awareness of the passage of time, what it has done or will do, it does not exist.

In the present moment, in the now, it does not exist, so it resists the depth and stillness and ultimately the loving oneness of the now. It says “Where am I?” even “You might die if you go too far with this.” Or “If you become one with everything, YOU will cease to exist.” So sit with your ego and just reassure that it will be all right. ‘There is nothing to do right now, we are just going to relax into this now and be, not do.’

Spiritually, once our resistance has been relaxed, once we get out of our own way, meditation can take place.

The flow of love, the vehicle of the highest change, can gently like a wave, illumine and enlighten any darkness in our lives.

We find ourselves expanding our sense of self, becoming larger than we were. We realise a new, bigger way of thinking and the more we change, the more the flow of love flows through us, the more we feel that we are experiencing through all hearts, thinking through every mind, breathing with every life.

Our resistances seems so tiny, so insignificant – we wonder how we could have ever had such a tiny way of looking at things, or that we could worry so much about so many mundane or ordinary things.

The funniest thing of all of course, is that all change is so effortless, so easy when we can let go of our resistance. In fact, it doesn’t feel like change at all, our evolution becomes so natural, it becomes what is.