Our Mindset Unlocks Our Mastery

Last weekend, I had this moment of feeling deeply proud of myself.

As I sat on my meditation cushion and let out a final exhale after having successfully completed 40 days of meditating daily for 31 minutes, I felt an immediate sense of relief and awe all at the same time.

I had *finally* accomplished this practice that I had resisted for years.

Meditation was a practice I told myself wasn’t for me, that I couldn’t do, and just wasn’t my thing for more than a half-decade…

But deep down, I knew that it was an awareness practice I wanted to integrate into my routine. I had known that for years. Separate from the research speaking for itself, it was a practice I had always been curious about.

It was a practice that I felt jealous of others who had integrated it into their morning routines. If you’ve been here for a while, you know that I have a very positive relationship with jealousy.

In my experience, the feeling of jealousy is simply an indication of something we want that we haven’t yet committed to.

This pattern speaks to a very common disempowering feedback loop I see with clients:

We set our eyes on something we want.

We experience resistance in the form of self-sabotage, jealousy, deceiving ourselves, setting unrealistic expectations for ourselves, or telling ourselves that we “can’t” do it.

We avoid acknowledging our resistance and being with what is.

This can be a challenging pattern to interrupt because it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where we continually reinvent the same disempowering feedback loop for ourselves.

One of the ways you can begin to interrupt it is through noticing that you are in a disempowering feedback loop and recognizing that you are choosing it. I chose for years not to empower a meditation practice. I experienced resistance and I allowed my resistance to win.

It’s important to recognize that our resistance doesn’t control us as soon as we stop giving our story of resistance the power to.

For me, I allowed my resistance to speak louder than my commitment for years.

It didn’t make me a bad person. I had countless other morning routine practices I empowered daily. It was simply one I hadn’t made the choice to commit to and integrate into my routine.

I believe it’s really important to separate our value judgments from our resistance. We are human after all, and resistance is a human experience we all encounter.

The practice of judging ourselves or making ourselves wrong for our resistance only delays the possibility of overcoming it.

Overcoming resistance starts by separating our value judgments in the way of our desires, accepting our resistance, and acknowledging what we want.

An empowering feedback loop may look like this:

We set our eyes on something we want.

We commit to the practice and take the power of our actions and habits into our own hands.

We implement the support structures and accountability methods sufficient to our level of resistance.

For me, it took signing up for a yearlong kundalini yoga teacher training program that had a meditation practice required to graduate to overcome my practice. See, that was a lot of resistance. 😉

For the women in my UNBOUNDED mastermind, they’ve implemented a 30-day challenge. They have to integrate the morning routine practice that would make the biggest difference in their experience of their day. They all put $25 in a kitty. Those who complete the practice for 30 consecutive days split the cash prize.

I can appreciate both examples because when we choose to have our commitment be louder than our resistance, we can get creative and start to have some fun through exploring what the accountability structures are that would have us fully commit.

For today’s reflection, journal on the following:

Consider what is something you feel jealous of in others that you want and simply haven’t yet committed to?

What is the flavor of your resistance? How have you been deceiving yourself from what you most deeply desire?

What would fully committing to this practice shift for you in your day-to-day? What do you choose?

What are the support structures and accountability practices sufficient to your level of resistance?