I’ve been pondering resistance.

I happen to have a fair amount of it. I resist sleep (always have) until I’m over-tired. I resist being organized (even though I crave it). I resist setting up a creative space in my home because then I’d have to actually show up and paint (hello fear and judgment).

It hit me today, in a moment of blinding clarity, that I’ve started resisting some of the very things that grief taught me to soften into, and that I’d better return to those lessons before life hands me another kick in the pants. This was after I woke from a dream where I got a phone call that my daughter had been killed in a car accident at the age of 22. (She’s currently 5)

I talk often of life – and grief – being a spiral. We revisit situations, feeling their familiarity and the frustration of not having it all figured out (I thought I dealt with this already!). But we do it from a different vantage point on the spiral. We’ve changed. Life has changed. We’re ready to release, or learn, or heal on a deeper level.

Which brings me back to resistance.

What if, instead of judging ourselves (okay, myself) for feeling it, and trying to talk myself out of it (you KNOW you need more sleep Alana, what’s wrong with you?!) we fall head first into it. Why not feel the resistance fully, even if it means throwing a tantrum like a tired two-year old, and get to what’s underneath it?

I can figure it out, in my head, which does me little to no good. If I allow myself to feel the resistance in my body, to drink it like a camel at an oasis, to scream at the sky, my cluttered desk, my bed “I don’t want to!”, I wonder what I would discover.

How about you? What are you resisting right now? Are you willing to find what lies underneath? I’d love to know.

Wishing you an enjoyable + enlightening tantrum.
With love,
Alana