Resist Nothing
Resist Nothing
Podcast Summary
I have to be honest with you. When I first sat with the phrase resist nothing, I was not entirely sure what I was getting into. I knew the origin, Eckhart Tolle, the beginning of The Power of Now, that moment when he was at the absolute bottom of his depression, so consumed by suffering that he thought to himself: I cannot live with myself any longer. And then he caught something strange in that sentence. I and myself, as if there were two of him. In the space that opened between those two, a voice said: resist nothing. What followed was an awakening that changed the course of his life and, in many ways, the lives of millions of people who eventually found that book. I have been working with surrender for a long time now. David Hawkins’ Letting Go has been my companion for years. My children tease me about that yellow book. I have read it at least thirteen times. I have sat with Sally Kempton, I have meditated, done breathwork, gone through recovery, motherhood, and things I did not know I could survive.
And still, when I sat down to prepare for this conversation with Louise, I found myself asking: what is the actual difference between resisting nothing and simply allowing? Because there is one. Allowing is an action. You choose it. You decide, consciously, to let something in rather than fight it. That is meaningful and real and hard. But resisting nothing is not something you do. It is something you are. It is a state of being, a felt experience, arrived at rather than decided upon. It is, as David Hawkins would say, surrender as a natural state rather than a technique. That is what Louise and I sat down to explore in this episode. And what came out of that conversation surprised even me.
What It Actually Means to Resist Nothing
Most of us will only touch this state in flashes. A second here, a moment there. Eckhart Tolle and Ramana Maharshi seem to live there. For the rest of us, it arrives like light through a crack. You feel it, and then life happens, and it is gone. But you know it happened, and that knowing is enough to keep you moving toward it. Louise described her experience of it during the yoga class she taught before we sat down to record. She had been carrying a lot, going through her divorce, feeling the weight of her children’s pain, aware of her own reactivity and stress. And yet, in the middle of guiding her students through a yin yoga sequence, something shifted. The tightness in her chest dissolved. She described it as becoming a drop that merged into the ocean, suddenly lighter, suddenly present in a way that had nothing to do with effort. That is what resisting nothing feels like. Not a decision. A dissolving.
I know this feeling from my own practice, though it took me years to find words for it. When I touch it, I become intensely present, not thinking about yesterday or tomorrow or what I should have said, just here, just this, the body the first signal, something releasing that I did not even know was held. The nothing in resist nothing can be confusing. What is nothing? I think of it through the lens of Kashmir Shaivism, the tantric philosophy my teacher Sally Kempton has shared with me over the years. The central premise is radical and simple: everything is consciousness. Your anger, your grief, your joy, the difficult situation, the beautiful one. All of it is Shakti, the creative force of the universe. If that is true, if everything is already held within something vast and unbroken, then there is nothing to resist. The drop is already the ocean. You are not separate from the thing you are fighting against. You never were. I am not claiming to live this completely. But even entertaining it for a moment creates space. And space is where surrender becomes possible.
Why We Resist
I was wired for resistance for most of my life. All of it. If life did not cooperate, I fought. If someone disagreed with me, I pushed back. For years in early recovery, my default setting was to resist whatever came my way. I did not even know I was doing it. It was just how I operated. The need to control is survival. At the most primal level, the human nervous system believes that if we can manage outcomes, we are safe. If we stop managing them, something bad will happen. The ego is built on the same foundation, on attachment to being right, to being seen, to having life unfold according to some plan we have decided on. And when it does not, we resist. What I have come to understand, slowly and over decades, is that so much resistance also lives in the unconscious. Louise was triggered by the phrase “resist nothing” the night before we recorded and did not fully understand why. That is the unconscious sending up signals in the form of reactions we did not choose, sudden anger, the need to convince someone, defensiveness that arrives before we have even processed what was said.
I experienced this in a way I will never forget when my daughter had surgery that stretched from six weeks of recovery into three months. Setback after setback. The day before we were supposed to go home, something happened that extended our stay by another six weeks. I had been living around doctors’ appointments and treatments and whatever the next day required. And at some point I stopped asking when we could go home. I stopped making plans beyond the next few hours. Time became almost irrelevant. That, I later understood, was surrender. Not because I chose it but because there was nothing left to resist against. I had no control. I had never had any. And in letting go of the illusion of it, something lightened. Even in the midst of the hardest weeks of my life, there were moments of laughter, lightness inside the darkness, something that felt almost like grace. The control was always an illusion. I just needed life to make that undeniable.
Finding the Way: Breath, Body, and the Everyday
Louise brought the most grounded, practical framework to this conversation and it begins exactly where I believe all real spiritual work begins, in the body. She works with the five bodies of yogic tradition: the physical, the mental, the emotional, the energetic, and the spiritual. And she invites a single question across all of them: where am I holding resistance right now? In the physical body it might be the familiar tightness around the heart, or tension in the belly that has been there so long you stopped noticing it. In the mental body, it is the thoughts that loop back again and again. In the emotional body, it is what we push down before it can surface, the impatience we do not want to feel, the grief we have not yet allowed. And in the energetic body, it lives in the breath. Can you breathe all the way down into the belly, or does something stop you before you get there? The breath is the bridge, and this is not a metaphor. Louise used pranayama in her yin yoga class the very morning we recorded, asking her students to let the breath soften what the mind could not. When I breathe into the resistance rather than away from it, something changes. The body begins to lead the mind toward surrender.
And then there is just living, which is where I find this practice the most challenging and the most alive. In the moments when someone says something I disagree with and every part of me wants to correct them. In the moments when my child is upset and my instinct is to fix rather than feel. One thing Louise and I both keep returning to is curiosity. When something triggers you, when you notice resistance rising, get curious instead of defensive. Ask why. You do not need an answer right away. The asking itself is the practice. It creates space between the trigger and the reaction. And in that space, as I have learned from years of meditation and working with Hawkins’ teachings, is where something can begin to shift. To resist nothing is to be curious. I think that is the most practical instruction of all.
Conclusion
At the end of our conversation, I offered this as a contemplation to take into the day: is there even a small piece of you, one tiny corner of your being, that could for just one second believe that everything is consciousness? And if so, could you let go of resistance, just for that second? Not as an achievement, not as a destination, just as a question to carry. I want to be clear about something, because I think it matters. Neither Louise nor I have figured this out. I am in the middle of my life, doing the work the way I always have, showing up, falling short, coming back, trying again. Some days I touch that place of resisting nothing and something in me remembers what is possible. Other days, life happens and I am back in the grip of the old patterns, the familiar urge to control what cannot be controlled. But I believe, because I have lived it, that the work is worth doing. Not because it brings you to some final destination, but because each time you touch it, something changes permanently. The seeds accumulate. The practice builds.
What I know from decades of meditation, from recovery, from the work of Hawkins and Tolle and Sally, and from the deep kneading of this path alongside someone I have known since I was four years old, is that the resistance you feel right now is not your enemy. It is your teacher. It is showing you exactly where the next layer of opening is waiting. After winter, comes spring. We keep going. We keep growing. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, in a breath, in a moment of laughter inside a hard week, in the dissolving of a tightness you did not know you were holding, you find it. Just for a second. And that second is everything.
