# 47 - Naming the Enemy of Resistance

Episode 47

[00:00:00] : Hello there, my friend. This is Rick Lewis with episode 47 of the follow through Formula Podcast. I'm up against a great deal of resistance personally today, feeling really challenged with moving forward in a positive direction or feeling hopeful about all the the the efforts I'm making and the trickle of results that air coming in. And so I've been studying and thinking about the energy of resistance, and I have a book on my shelf. I haven't referred to in some time that I would like to highly recommend to all of you. I don't have a lot of inspiration to offer today, but this particular book is full of tremendous and practical help and identifying and understanding the energy of resistance that we all have within us and that will ironically get stronger and more determined and more difficult to work with as an adversary, the closer we get to, ah, life leap to a change to a breakthrough of some kind. And so I'm taking this to heart. I was reviewing, um this book it is by Stephen Press Field and the title of the book is the war Off Art break through the blocks and win your inner creative battles. Now, this book is not just for creative types. You don't have to be an artist to benefit from reading this book. Whether you're trying to make any kind of life change could be with your personal habits or health habits or something. You are a relationship you're struggling with. You could be an entrepreneur or business owner. Any big life change is going to illicit resistance from forces inside of us that are gonna wanna pull us back into an old safe pattern in orbit and Stephen Press Field. It does such a beautiful job of naming all the various forms of resistance. So I just found it very helpful having a resistance filled day myself today just to refer to his book and, um, get kind of ah, an insider's view. It's sort of like going to the doctor and having the doctor say Yep, you've got strep throat and hear the symptoms you're gonna have. And here's what you got to take to make it better. It's sort of like that. So opening up that book was sort of like visiting the life leap Doctor and having the doctor say yep, you have a strong case of resistance right now and you're probably experiencing this and this and this and this and I'm like, Yeah, raising my hand. Hi. I'm feeling all those things today. Here's a little quote from Stephen Press Fields book just to wet your appetite. And then I recommend you go get it. Quote like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil. Resistance will unfailingly point to true North, meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing. We can use this. We can use this as a compass. We can navigate by resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others rule of thumb. The Mawr important. A call or action is to our souls evolution the mawr resistance we will feel toward pursuing it. Beautiful, huh? And the book is full of this kind of clarity and encouragement to follow in work with and through our resistance, rather than allowing our usual rationalizations for putting things off like another thing I just read in the book was this beautiful distinction he makes about the voice of resistance. Will, for instance, say um, let's say, for example, that you are thinking of getting a new job and you're going to submit a resume. Well, resistance is very clever, so resistance is not going to step forward and say, No, I will not let you submit that resume. What resistance will say is, Oh, yeah, that resume. That's a very good idea that you submit that resume and we really should do that. Let's do it tomorrow. So resistance is very subtle. It's very clever, and it will find and prey upon our weak spots and try and convince us, through various justifications and rationalizations that we should put off the thing we're pursuing or modify it in some way, or wait until we're in a better mood. So today, for example, it's near the end of the day, and I've been working all day with my commitment to deliver something off value to all of you to myself, actually. But to all of us around the pursuit of what matters most, and in the face of this commitment today, all I felt all day long was dread about getting on the microphone and attempting to provide something of value, feeling like I just don't have anything. Who am I to be talking about this Because I am devoid of inspiration or modeling four. Committing and following through today. So this is what I'm speaking into is just what is present for me. What's here is all of this resistance, and I hope you will read Stephen Press Fields book again the title The War of Art because it will help you be able to name what this force is when it arises and have a battle plan for working with it in advance. As they say, forewarned is fore armed, and this book is a beautiful for warning of what's to come if you say yes to pursuing what matters most to you. And it's interesting because I received a beautiful note from a good friend of mine named whose name is Mick and Mick. If if you're out there listening, I've read your article that you sent today and Mick sent me an article about what is called sva Dharma and sva Dharma, while many of you are probably familiar with the word dharma, which in a number of spirituals traditions means truth, and I'm going to read you from a paragraph of mixed article that he sent to me. It defines sva Dharma, he says. Quote sva. Dharma is not readily translated into English. Spa is defined as self and dharma as religious or moral law, right conduct, sacred duty, path of righteousness, true nature or divine order in English. This may be paraphrased as a gift of vocation or the heart's unique and sacred. Calling. Sva Dharma is action taken in the service of our sacred, calling our duty our vocation In Dharma, it is possible to take passionate action without creating suffering. It is possible to find authentic fulfillment off all human possibilities. We might say that every person's dharma is like an internal fingerprint. The subtle interior blueprint of the soul and those last few sentences are a quote from a book called The Great Work of Your Life. The Journey to your True Calling So mixed sent me this article, and it's a fairly lengthy article with all sorts of beautiful quotes and elucidation zones off what it means to follow our hearts calling and mix Article was so inspiring to me it's very interesting and very instructive that the rest of the day, after reading the article showed up as such a tail spin for me, which points back to one of the things that Stephen Press Field says in his book, which is when we get close when we start actually succeeding in pursuing what matters most. That's when resistance is really going toe kick into high gear and pull out its biggest and most powerful weapons of deep resistance to keep us from making that leap. And I think I'll leave it there for today and give you a little extra time that you might have spent with a longer episode to go order Stephen Press Fields book. Or you could probably just get it in a Kindle edition. Uh, some sort of e book edition online. It's a short read. So again I highly recommend it. Okay, that's it from me for today, and I'm feeling much better already, actually, just having gotten into a little bit of motion here today, and I hope you found this useful. My name is Rick Lewis. This has been Episode 47 and I'll be back tomorrow