Your internal resistance is a message

So this week I saw similar patterns of resistance showing up with multiple clients. Different words with a similar shape: "I already did this work, I don't want to feel it again." "I don't get it, I don't like writing." "I don't learn that way." Underneath all these is the same message — some part of you is resisting change, even when that change is what would actually produce the peace you're looking for.

My answer was similar each time, because the mechanism is the same each time: resistance isn't simply a problem to be solved. It's information. It's telling you the step you just tried to take is challenging your mind's sense of reality. It's your mind trying to "protect" itself from change.

When this happens, you can of course listen to the fear that's arising and simply do nothing.

But a better approach is to take a baby step. Give yourself permission to do one thing, even if it seems ridiculously easy, so that you show yourself you can make progress.

If a deep letter writing exercise feels like too much, find something lighter to address instead — lower stakes, but there is real progress. If even that's too much, here's the version I actually give people: write four lines about how much you hate doing the thing that's been asked. That's the whole assignment. Not because the four lines matter, but because finishing them proves the task is completable, and that's what the resistance was actually arguing against.

This isn't about pushing past the feeling to get the exercise done. That's the opposite of what I'm teaching — we don't heal without the feel, and skipping straight past what's uncomfortable to get to "I'm fine now" is just bypass wearing healing's clothes. The point was never to avoid feeling something hard. It's to stop mistaking the size of the step with the size of the block.

Most of the time the block is smaller than it looks. You just tried to clear it in one jump instead of three.

If you're stuck on something right now — forgiveness work, a conversation, a practice you keep avoiding — ask yourself what the four-line version of it would be. Start there.