Releasing Resistance and Learning from Life

By Wes Annac, Culture of Awareness

When was the last time you had to go through something stressful or frustrating, only to realize by the end of it that you learned a valuable lesson? If you’ve experienced this, then you aren’t alone. We all go through difficult, stressful and painful things, and most people don’t realize that these experiences are actually teaching them.

If you want to take it even further, you could say that everything we experience is a lesson. Every moment – from the joyful to the sad or stressful – has some kind of teaching for us, and we just need to open up to find the lesson. Openness will help us understand that our difficult experiences are teaching us, and our knowledge will skyrocket pretty quickly when we open up to these constant teachings.

Depending on how you think, you could say there are higher forces that intervene in our lives whenever possible. You could say these forces have been tasked with guiding us through this often difficult life, and they constantly send us messages we can decode, lessons we can learn and experiences that are meant not only to challenge us, but liberate us. You could say these higher forces are passionate about helping us expand our consciousness, and if we could only open up to them, we’d receive a lot more direct assistance and learn our lessons more easily.

These forces want to help us, but we have to be sufficiently open and clear in mind before we can consciously receive their assistance.

The best way to increase our openness and finally start learning from life is to release our resistance. Resistance can keep us from having new, challenging experiences that help us learn, grow and elevate our consciousness, and we won’t learn anything significant if we resist every lesson that comes our way. As soon as we stop resisting, everything will seem to change.

Things might actually get easier, and not only will we learn more – we’ll be able to let life be instead of trying to control it. The moment we try to control life is usually the moment things get harder, and if we think about it, we can see how these two things are related.

It’s safe to say that most people don’t want life to be so hard, and the ironic thing is that their need to control their life is usually what makes it so hard in the first place. If we can do away with this unnecessary tendency, we could create the kind of life we want and learn valuable lessons along the way that help us grow.

We won’t stop being challenged when we release our resistance, but our perspective on it will change entirely. We’ll understand that challenges aren’t meant to keep us from making progress, and their actual purpose is to help us reach the next stage. Think of it like a video game. We can’t go to the next level until we learn how to solve our current level’s puzzles, and similarly, we can’t advance to the next stage in our growth until we learn the lessons life is giving us right here, right now.

As long as we leave the overactive ego behind and learn to live from the heart, these puzzles will get a lot easier and more fun.

Ego-centeredness usually causes us to resist life’s countless lessons, and it’s one of the biggest inhibitors on the spiritual path. The ego’s helpful in some ways, but it can severely prevent progress if we let it influence us too much. We can use it without listening to its every command, and it all comes down to the understanding that in our true, silent, empty form, we exist far outside of the mind, the ego, and the physical body. Spirit is our true form, and the word ‘spirit’ doesn’t even do justice to its description.

We can’t learn from life or discover who we truly are if the ego’s still at the wheel, and leaving the ego goes hand-in-hand with releasing our resistance and opening up to life. The two are really one and the same since resistance comes from the ego, and releasing the ego will allow us to release all resistance.

I should also mention that we’ll make the most progress when we’re centered in love, because we’ll no longer be or victims of the ego or our own self-created thought forms. We’ll no longer be susceptible to the ego’s influence when it’s under the control of the heart, and if more people understood the benefits of heart-centeredness, they could discover the key to enjoying life and getting the most out of its lessons.

In my opinion, most spiritual practices pale in comparison to opening the heart. We learn compassion when we’re centered in the heart and willing to help anyone who’s struggling, and the selfless service that can result from our heart-centeredness will teach us even more about our world and the people in it. We’ll obviously learn more about the world by getting out there and helping people than by staying home all the time, but we can help others and learn about the world even if we don’t get out.

Even if we just help our loved ones a little each day, we’ll learn a lot of new things about them, the issues they require help with, and ultimately, ourselves. Our responses to their concerns will teach us about ourselves, and they might learn a thing or two about us as well. If we have trouble finding compassion in a certain situation, for example, we (and they) will learn that we have a blockage in that area for some reason.

So ultimately, heart-centeredness will teach us how to go with the flow and learn from life, how to help others, and how to learn new things about ourselves. For these reasons (and plenty of others), I think it’s essential to stay in the heart, but we don’t want to try so hard to be heart-centered that we bring our resistance right back up. We want to call on our love in a way that doesn’t require the mind, and like everything else, it’ll get easier with practice.

Life has an abundance of lessons to teach us, and along with rooting ourselves in the heart, releasing our resistance will spare us untold amounts of unnecessary difficulty. Nothing has to bring us down or take us out of our center anymore, and we’re responsible for how we handle life’s lessons. We can learn these lessons with joy and centeredness, or we can angrily resist them and wonder why life seems like an uphill climb.

The hill will smooth itself out as we learn to go with the flow, and the things we learn from there on out will help us more than our resistance ever did. This is reason enough to release it and let life become our teacher, and no matter what we experience each day, we can be sure there’s some kind of lesson in it. We’ll learn a lot if we embrace this mode of thinking, and with heart-centeredness, our knowledge and experience will become infinite.

 

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I’m a twenty-two year old spiritual writer, blogger and channel for the creative expression of the inner universe, and I created The Culture of Awareness daily news site.

The Culture of Awareness features daily spiritual and alternative news, articles I’ve written, and more. Its purpose is to awaken and uplift by providing material about the fall of the planetary elite and a new paradigm of unity and spirituality.

I’ve contributed to a few different spiritual websites including The Master Shift, Waking Times, Golden Age of Gaia, Wake Up World and Expanded Consciousness. I can also be found on Facebook (Wes Annac and The Culture of Awareness) and Twitter, and I write a paid weekly newsletter that you can subscribe to for $11.11 a month here.

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