Resistance and Trauma as a Lifestyle And 3 things you can do to help yourself Thaw

Every ounce of defending for your point of view, or against someone else’s point of view, is resistance.

Resistance is the superglue of the Universe.

What you resist, persists.

What you resist harder and harder, you become, and that adds a whole other layer of unpleasantness.

Try this: put your palms together /|\ and push, push, push with equal force from both hands. Harder… harder… push with both hands in opposite directions till you feel the muscles all the way up your arms and back and when you can’t take the strain anymore, stop and drop your hands.

Notice how the palms of your hands feel… light? Tingley? Empty?

Notice how your arms and shoulders feel…

When your palms are together, pushing and pushing, that is resistance. Notice how you can’t move one hand without the other following exactly along… that’s resistance.

You can’t do anything without the thing you’re resisting.

What you resist you stick to you, like white on rice.

So in practice, what you resist you feed your lifeforce energy to — you feed the very whatever you’re resisting.

Living in resistance is hot, frazzling, all consuming, burns off anything that is not in resistance, and it is exhausting.

The high cortisol levels literally burn up your insides.

It clouds your perception of everything. You see everything in terms of win or lose, so you’re blinded to what is really going on.

Your perception of everything is shaded by the assumed threat, so everything is a threat.

Your judgement is clouded by survival, so there’s not real choice, just binary, black and white gross oversimplifications of right and wrong and good and bad, meant to keep you on high alert, an altered state known and documented for its bad decision-making qualities.

When you’ve been living in resistance for a long time, you’re effectively frozen there, because it is the conclusion of that point of view — threatened survival — that any other point of view is just kidding yourself or being a Pollyanna or a variety of other discrediting judgements, that make it seem impossible to stand down and take a breath.

If you can never take a breath, if you can never stand down, you are stuck in fight-flight-freeze resistance, a trauma response.

You’re stuck in a loop of resisting being you, unless you stay in the trauma rerun state, which is not your natural state, it’s not a real you. It is a heightened state that you got stuck in.

We’re only supposed to be in fight-flight-freeze resistance for short spurts.

We are built to be in grow, play, actualize and rest mode most of the time — for years, decades at a time.

The way society and social definitions and beliefs are structured these days, standing down is labeled lazy, slacker, inefficient, unprofessional, irresponsible, and shamed out of everyday living. Assault is the name of the game 24/7. These days ads, music, movies, sound, visuals, smells assault our senses as a matter of course.

If you stand down at all, “you’re a wimp,” or “you’re not paying attention,” or “you’re not taking things seriously enough,” etc. That right there is psychosis-making.

These days to fit in with how normal everyday life is supposed to go, you have to cut off parts of you, shut them away, don’t listen to them cry or yell or even hear anything they have to say, because they will tell you that the world has gone mad and they don’t want to go mad, too.

But the world — your corporate culture, your supervisor, your peers even — tells you, over and over again that if you want to get ahead you have to run this sprint — for a marathon, and any slowing down, any taking a breath is a lazy loser thing to do.

And next thing you know, slowing down, breathing, taking time to enjoy something/anything becomes almost painful, because you know you can’t stay there, you can’t live there, so then you don’t want to go there at all, like on the weekends, because it’s too temporary, so you cannot tolerate resting because you can’t have more of it, you are not allowed enough of it to actually stand down, so it’s best not to do it at all.

The funny thing is, the more you do slow down, breathe more often, deeper, sip more water, go for many mini-walks throughout the day, the more you nurture and hear all the parts of yourself, and value what they have to say, and hear the contribution they are making to your awareness of the environment, the more you are — by being you, however “imperfectly” — the more you are able to focus, be more productive, actualize what you set your sights on, enjoy your life and even your work more, laugh more, not get pulled into office politics or gossip as much, and find it easier to absent yourself from those and other behaviors that are uncomfortably illicit, or slimy.

Those around you may not like your changes, but your brain/analyzer will threaten and attack you less, and you’ll start to sleep better, and what others think about you, how they judge you, will become less and less meaningful and valuable to you.

Your own serenity and sanity will become more and more valuable to you, as you’ll grow into experiencing how much sanity, physical wellbeing, mental and emotional health, you gain from it.

It is not easy to stand down. There is a ton of heavy programming, webs of beliefs and logic that substantiates, proves out the idea that standing down, resisting, fighting, and distrusting others and self is the only way to be safe. None of that is true, and in fact, the more solidly these beliefs are held, the more likely you are to bring the very things you dread into actualizing in your life. A self-fulfilling prophecy cycling around and around, proving itself to be true and real more and more, so you believe it more and more, making it very hard (because soft and easy are bad and wrong and a lie to this trauma mindset) to stand down for a moment, much less for all times.

The easiest way to make the changes is little by little, baby step by baby step, which is never satisfying for the analyzer/brain, which gets frustrated — “this is too easy,” and, “this is taking too long,” and, this is stupid,” and such, and it is absolutely the surest way forward.

Some things to start doing, to institute into your daily living are:

I

Set your timer for 20 or 40 minutes.

Every time it goes off, take 5 nice, deep breaths, like you have all the time and oxygen in the world.

Then take a few sips of water, too.

When possible, take this opportunity to get up and take a walk around your office, or to the kitchen or bathroom and back. Many mini-walks help more than you know.

II

As you go through your workday — when to pause to breathe may be a great time to do this one — ask yourself, “Am I doing my best right now?”

If the answer is no, change what you are doing till you *are* doing your best in that moment.

Notice I’m talking about doing your best, not yours or someone else’s ideas of perfect.
Perfect does not exist and is a manufactured idea so it does not count.

If the answer is yes, you are doing your best in that moment, then say, “Good job!” to yourself, try to mean it, and keep going.

The more times a day you do this, the more you can identify when you are and when you are not doing your best in any moment, and it gets easier and easier to adjust to simply doing your best. It also will help you build the muscle to acknowledge when you’re doing good and be comfortable appreciating and validating that you’re good at things. A very important part of rehabilitating your system from trauma/freeze to not-trauma/ease.

III

Practice making this statements/choices:

Time is on my side

The Universe is on my side

My body is on my side

I am an infinite being with this amazing body

I am On My Side

My Higher Self & the Universe are constantly conspiring for on my behalf, for my greater good

I get to be me all day long — how does it get any better than that?

Write them down and look at then often and repeat them to yourself 3 x 3 x a day.

And repeat over and over, when you’re waiting, when you’re on hold, when you’re in traffic, when you’re bored:

Yes, I can. Yes, I can. Yes, I can. Yes, I can. Yes, I can. Yes, I can. Yes, I can. Yes, I can. Yes, I can.

Make a song out of it and sing it to yourself, no matter what comes up that says otherwise.

“All these things are too simple, too time-consuming to make any difference!” You may say.

And I say to you — using and doing these things have changed the course of thousands of people’s lives. You’ll never hear about it on CNN or in Wired, but doing these things work, and I suggest you try doing them for yourself, and see what results you get. Do the science experiment: what happens when you do these things and participate in your life in this way? And take notes.