Holiday Resistance: When Your Mind and Heart Are Out of Alignment (and How Energy Work Helps)

This post is about challenging themes that arise during the holidays when our minds are out of alignment with our hearts (meaning simply that your heart and head are feeding you opposing stories.)

Identifyingi Resistance

The most common iteration of misalignment is when the mind resists a heart-felt truth by telling the famous story called "It's Impossible." (Or it's too disruptive. Or it's plain unsafe.)

See if any of these holiday resistances apply to you:

• You're angry that no one else offers to host, but you'd feel bad if you refused to do it this year.

• You know your migraines occur when you take on too much, but you can't trim down your shopping list or decline a couple of invites to holiday gatherings.

• A certain family member incites resentment — not joy, not fun, not anything close to holiday cheer — but extracting yourself from the relationship seems unimaginable. 

Breaking Free

To begin shifting resistance, ask yourself:

✨ What am I resisting?

✨ What truth about myself am I hiding?

✨ What could I let go of to invite lightness into this situation?

What did you come up with?

***

How Energy Work Helps

During sessions of reiki or eft tapping, clients often come face to face with their truths and related resistance. This is uncanny, though:

It's sort of an aha moment, but part of the aha is that they really aren't all that surprised!

They are not surprised by the truth. When it steps into the spotlight, they realize it's no stranger. It's actually been circling their thoughts steadily for days or months or years.

What does surprise them is the resistance. They realize it's been living in their body as chronic pain or anxiety or lack of motivation.

Somatics and Resistance

So so many people now have read books like The Body Keeps the Score. They're familiar with phrases like:

• somatic therapies,

• listening to your body,

• mindbody wellness,

• heart-brain coherence,

and they agree with the concept that our bodies contract in response to noxious events, thoughts, and feelings. And that holding the contraction relates to physical and emotional pain.

Here's the problem, though:

If the pain of resisting your heart is not strong enough, you will hold tight to the story of your mind which is often → "I have no other choice."

The fear of change is stronger than the pain of staying the same, because staying the same is familiar. We say we are blocked, or beat ourselves up for the crime of "self sabotage."

Isn't it more accurate, though, to say we are keeping ourselves safe? And if we've been keeping ourselves safe, could we agree with ourselvses that maybe that wasn't such horrible choice? Staying safe?

Shifting your beliefs about safety

When you do energy work, it's funny how the tables turn. You realize you did have another choice all along. You were just energetically closed to it. Now new choices are not only available, but safe and even exciting! They become the new non-negotiable!

If you stay the course, you wake up one day with the story of your heart pounding so loudly in your head it drowns out the objections of the worried little mind. They may still blather vaguely in the background. But you no longer allow it stop you from moving forward into alignment with your full and happy heart.

How it works

For any of this to work, you must

• Concede that the presence of your resistance is real.

• Be willing to take any small step proposed by your heart, even if the step seems too small to solve anything. (It is solving the great divide between heart and mind. Usually, the greater the divide, the smaller the step you are willing to take.)

• Be willing to let small steps be ok (or more than ok if, you can swing it :-) )

• Let a small step be the focus of your attention. Make the excitement of it overshadow any part of your day that you still don't like.

• Keep going. You WILL swing back into resistance. Now you recognize it, though. Accept it as part of the process. And keep going.

In conclusion, remember:

Alignment doesn’t come from forcing yourself to be braver, better, or more positive. It comes from softly loosening the grip of resistance, one small — but honest — step at a time. Let the voice of your heart slowly drown out your chattering worries. Let it happen in your own time. Your heart is patient. Let it all be ok. That's the trick.