Let me first remind you this again, and I say ‘remind’ & ‘again’ because I’ve told you this many times. Every blog of mine is the result of the knowledge I’ve acquired by various means, but more than that, and more importantly, it’s the offspring of my seemingly everlasting contemplation i.e, reflections, that are based on various experiences of my life. And resistance is one of them. I’ve experienced resistance, especially as an artist! I’m sure you too have experienced it. And the reason I’m writing the blog is resistance itself.
Yes, it has been the subject of my contemplation for a few days to weeks now. By the way, let me tell you about what is resistance first. Well, I came to know about the term resistance when I read the book ‘War of Art’ by Steven Pressfield in June of 2021. It’s basically the opposite force or the drive that you feel whenever you want to do something meaningful, something you know you have to do. Well, until then, yes I hadn’t heard anything about it anywhere, especially articulated in that way. But I knew the feeling, I connected as soon I read about it. And I know you too have already experienced that feeling of ‘resistance’.
It’s the feel before you’re going on the stage to perform, it’s the feel that drags you to bed when last night you’d decided to wake up early and study from tomorrow, it’s the feeling before and after you make art. The self-doubt, procrastination, perfectionism, overthinking and self-beating mental talks, and many things. Resistance can take many forms. Because it all cares about is to stop you from doing the meaningful work.
That being said, I hope you now resonate with the feeling that’s resistance. I’ll come to the core of this blog. We need to resistance for sure. And I’m always trying to come up with strategies and technics to trick my brain into beating the resistance without even knowing it. Starting a new project and finishing it before it’s ready, that is before the resistance starts to beat me down telling me that the work isn’t good enough. Because I know that, as I already told it just wants to stop you from growing, it’ll use your weaknesses to do it, it doesn’t care for your growth. But the core of this blog is not even that.
It’s this surprising solution to beating resistance. And that is, sometimes it becomes very hard to beat resistance that you lose every commitment you’ve made to yourself, your life starts to go haywire. And all you’ve got to do is this, first of all, be aware of Resistance and its doings. And then, let go. Yes, that’s right. You let go into wherever the resistance wants you to go for a short period of time, maybe a week, or a few, and then sneak out of it when it’s happy you’re spoilt. And I’ll have to caution, you may slip for years if you’re not aware. The other thing I should tell you is, the reason I call it the ‘it’ is not because it has its own identity. Your ego is itself the resistance. I articulate it that way so that you can understand better what I’m trying to convey.
Well, that’s it. Actually, this blog was about Resistance, because I’ve been beaten by it lately, it’s been a week or 2. But then I realized this surprising solution. I was trying so hard to overcome the resistance that as Steven Pressfield mentions, it empowers resistance when you do that. Yes, it also holds good for Newton’s Third Law – Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. F1 = -F2 right?
I had thought I would write the things I would do when I need to overcome resistance, and how you also can beat resistance by doing them. But this realization gave me more and something better to write about. And I’m so grateful for that. Just let go, with the resistance, with awareness and sneak into your studio and start working!!
Thank You,
Yours Loving,
Sanath Kumar Naibhi
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