Breaking Through Resistance

Day 38/366 writing pieces in 2024.

Where you are right now is giving you exactly the information that you need to evolve.

Let's talk about uncomfortable feelings and the beauty of how you can use them as sacred fuel.

My healing journey.

20 years ago I was numb to feelings. I grew up in a home with addiction, dysfunction, and abuse and learned to not feel or speak; I learned to keep out of the way. Feelings were not safe to express or feel in my family and were never discussed or talked about. And so I found myself in this strange and unusual hell in my twenties where there was SO much coming up and I had no idea what I was feeling, or how to manage it. It was then that I began a journey of seeking to understand myself and what the fuck was going on. This was the beginning of my healing journey.

Along the way I began to unpack trauma in my body through many different healing modalities which led me to where I am today, coaching others through this process.

Let's talk about pain.

I was feeling resistance recently and was reminded of a time in my life when I was feeling deeply resistant to what was going on in my life.

In 2014, physical pain taught me more about my mind and the power of my mind than anything else. It also led to a quantum leap in my healing. I took a fall and my sciatic nerve locked up. My whole life changed. At that time I was tending bar in a high-end wine bar and building an online business. Suddenly I had to take a leave of absence from work because I couldn't walk for four months. I couldn't even sleep in my bed; it was too painful to get up into it.

I slept on an air mattress for four months. I couldn’t drive. I would get rides to physical therapy, the chiropractor, myofascial release, acupuncture, every single modality that I could. I refused to get surgery. I told myself I would overcome this holistically. I charged up my credit cards for holistic ways of healing myself since insurance doesn’t cover those things. The western medicine doctors used language that didn’t sit well with me. Words like ‘fuse’, and ‘surgery', and ‘long recovery time’. I opted out. I’m not saying this is what one should do but it was what felt right for me to do and looking back it was the greatest decision I ever made in my life. During these four months, I got more silent than I ever had in my life. I wasn't seeing friends and so I had to be with myself, my thoughts, and my feelings.

I fast-tracked this time to learn even more about mind/body connection than I ever had. I had already studied the work of Louise Hay for years about healing the body and how every single physical ailment has an emotional cause. I think I started diving into the work of Inna Segal and her book The Secret Language of the Body is to this day like a personal bible for me. Uncomfortable feelings hold the key to healing yourself, moving forward, and evolving whether physical or mental if you can get into the right headspace to understand this.

Stop fighting what is.

One night in the middle of that four-month period I woke up in a panic. My leg was numb. It felt like my leg was paralyzed. This was near the beginning and I hadn’t moved to sleeping on the air mattress on the floor yet. I was in my bed and woke up and I had to go to the bathroom but I couldn’t move my leg and so I started panicking. I started hyperventilating. I got myself onto the floor and started slithering like a snake to the bathroom, hyperventilating all the way. I could not feel my leg or my low back. I felt like I was dragging a bag of lead. I started yelling for my roommate. I was screaming that I was scared and that I couldn’t move.

Luckily my roommate was a massage therapist and healer and very knowledgeable about the mind/body connection. She came out in the hall and I was in deep panic on the floor. My heart was racing. And she said to me, “You are panicking. Come back to your breath. Focus on your breathing. You are okay. Come back to your breathing. You are fighting it.”

I started breathing more slowly. She talked me out of my panic. Out of my hysteria. My breath started to slow down. And as my breath started slowing down I started to feel my leg again. It was all coming back to me. It seemed like forever but was probably only a few minutes and the sensation completely subsided. At that moment I realized my panic was making it 100 times worse. I became the observer of how my own fear took me into the place of hysteria and how much power my mind had. My own resistance made the feelings of paralyzation seem more intense. My own fighting against it.

Anger and grief.

It was a terrifying experience but also one of the greatest teaching moments of my entire life. For the next 4 months I started to play with this deep observation. One day when I was having a particularly better day and I could stand and walk with a cane I went into the kitchen. Even though I could walk and stand I felt immense anger.

Prior to this I was an athlete. I was running half marathons. I was dancing all the time. And I couldn’t do any of those things. I had to just be with this and be with myself. I felt this immense anger come on as I stood in the kitchen. I noticed my roommate had purchased a bag of lemons and instinctively I started grabbing the lemons out of the bag and yelling and throwing them as hard as I could at the kitchen floor. No one was home. I needed to get this immense anger out. And I just let myself follow intuitively what felt right.

Screaming, throwing bright yellow lemons, pegging the floor and watching them splat. It was incredibly empowering allowing this anger to be expressed fully without hesitation. Without making myself wrong. Without judgment. After this was over I fell to my knees and started crying. I allowed the anger to move through my body and because of this I could access sadness. And the sadness was released through tears. And under that sadness was grief. I was grieving the things I missed. Dancing, running half marathons, tending bar, all the little things we take for granted each day that I was not able to do.

There was a night sometime after this where I woke up and the pain in my leg was excruciating. By now I was slowly getting better with all the modalities I was doing, the meditation, the sound frequencies and sleep hypnosis, and how good I was taking care of myself but sometimes the pain would shoot up and be unbearable.

On this one particular night the pain was excruciating. I remember thinking I wanted to cut my leg off. I was rolling around on the air mattress crying and wanting to cut my leg off. I was basically saying FUCK YOU to my leg. I texted a friend. My friend several years earlier had been in a car accident and broke her neck and was told she would never walk again. She walks just fine now and overcame her diagnosis and I knew that she was the person I needed to talk to. I called her while I was in excruciating pain. I was crying and was telling her I wanted to cut my leg off. It hurt so bad. And she listened to me. And then she said the most important words I would ever hear in my healing journey to this point.

“You are rejecting yourself. Every time you say you want to cut off your leg you are rejecting a part of yourself. Your leg needs love and understanding. It's trying to express something that you just don’t understand. You may not understand what it is going through or why it needs to express this perceived pain but it needs your love not hatred, not rejection. You have to keep talking to it like an understanding friend/parent. Leg, I don’t understand what is going on with you but I”m here for you. I’m here for you to express whatever needs to come out. I love you and support you through your expression.”

Becoming the noticer.

At that moment I stopped talking to my leg with hatred and anger. I did exactly what she said. I started to do this daily. I started to “observe” the pain, not claim the pain. I was also devouring just about all of Wayne Dyer’s work around this time. He was my favorite spiritual mentor for years and I was just plugging into anything and everything that I could. One line in one of the audios from that time that I listened to has stayed with me through the years. “You are not that which you notice. You are the noticer of what you notice.”

This same concept is in the book “The Power of Now '' by Eckhart Tolle which I had read many many years before. “We are not what we feel. We are the noticers of what we feel.” We are God State. The I am. What we are is not what we feel. What we feel is our human experience. What we are is our spirit. Imagine a centaur but instead of part animal imagine yourself as part human and part spirit. I am healthy but I feel pain. I am supported but I feel afraid. I am whole but I feel hurt. As a master teacher of the Universal Law of Polarity (which is at the core of Shadow work and what I'm here to teach) I know that we move on a continuum from human to spirit. From unconscious to consciousness.

As I started to speak light language over my leg my leg began to miraculously heal. Without pain pills. Without surgery. Without anything. Shortly after I started speaking this language to my leg things began to change and fast. I remember the day I moved back up to my bed. I had started to feel my muscles atrophy and it was hard to pull myself up. I made a decision that I had to start sleeping in my bed. That even if it hurt I would be fine. I pulled myself up into bed and it hurt really bad but I just kept observing. I am not my pain. I am the noticer of a physical sensation that my body is expressing. That's all this is. I don’t have to claim it as the truth of who I am. I can love myself through this pain. I can be with myself through this and heal.

From Resistance to Acceptance.

We can do this with our mental pain too. I am not my trauma. I feel the effects of trauma and repressed feelings expressing themselves but I am not that which I notice. I am the noticer of what I notice. As I mentioned, I was feeling resistance the other day around a situation that I was in. And I love to look up the etymology of words, synonyms/antonyms, etc. Our word is our law.

I identified the feeling I was feeling. Resistance. And so I did what I always do when I feel a feeling. I got curious. I looked up the antonym to resistance. Acceptance/Receptivity. Interesting. I was showing up in the shadow side. Through Law of Polarity, Acceptance and Receptivity are what were on the other side of the resistance. I wanted to be somewhere else instead of accepting where I was. I was fighting it. Just like when I was hyperventilating on the floor when my leg felt paralyzed. What's the part I play? I ask myself this question often and also ask my clients to think about the part they play in scenarios that seem difficult.

When I am resisting where I am and I want to be somewhere else, I am not allowing. I am not accepting. We play roles in our divine movies. I was playing the role of resistance even though another play and the role of acceptance was available to me on another stage. And through what I know about parallel realities, acceptance and receptivity are available to me right now no matter what I feel. Hence the question; what's the part I play in this drama, in this comedy, in this movie that I’m vibrating with? That's for another article later.

We have the power to create ANYTHING. We have the power to heal. We have the power to love ourselves through any and ALL feelings. We just haven’t been taught or haven't taken the time to teach ourselves. Very few take the time to seek. This is why I do the work I do. To guide seekers of truth to move from the darkness to the light. Because in each moment there is light available to our perceived darkness. The shadow shows us where we can become more conscious but WE have to pay attention. WE have that right and that power when we decide to turn to it and activate it. I am living proof.

Where in your life are you feeling resistance? When you stop and notice it rather that become consumed by it, what is your next move?

Where can you show more acceptance and lean into your healing?

How is your current situation pointing towards your evolution?

You have everything you need to evolve inside of you.