18/07/2025
DAYS 51, 52, & 53
Ah, so there it was, after a sustained run of days of posting on gratitude, the slide into posting every other day... here came the great unravelling!
Today, I’m choosing to be grateful for resistance 😝
Over the past few days, I felt resistance rise up strongly, building up like a wall between me and my daily gratitude practice. It's been a challenging few days in which nothing terrible has happened, but there have been some frustrations, some setbacks, some hurdles to overcome, not much time to sit back and smell the roses and I have a cold that's made me feel a bit run down and depleted. When I came to write my gratitude post yesterday for Wednesday and Thursday, I totally put it off. I didn’t really want to look for the good. I felt weary and it felt forced, even fake.
The part of me that can almost always finds some light and joy in the littlest of things had gone all quiet. My mind was blank. My body stiffened. I could feel myself closing up. I just didn't want to go there.
Another part of me became more vocal - urging me to push on. It even started to shame me for failing to 'do the work'. And my inner critic (who I've worked hard on befriending) also piped up. How embarrassing! To commit to posting daily publicly and then not do it.
In amongst all of this, I sat back and I pressed pause. Resistance is something we all face at times in our life, towards all sorts of things. It's not a sign of weakness or that there is something wrong with us. It doesn't show up by accident.
Resistance is often fuelled by fear, and can act as a powerful guide that can point us towards something important. Fear often appears in the form of resistance when we get closer to something that matters, and in particular when we are doing something that involves personal growth... when we’re about to meet those tender edges of ourselves. It’s our psyche’s way of protecting us from discomfort, from being vulnerable and from change. Something inside of us is afraid and is saying “Not now, this feels like too much.”
So instead of pushing through, trying to fight my resistance and struggling to overcome it, I softened. And I chose to be curious instead. Why was I resisting being grateful? What was behind the resistance? And I met my resistance without judging myself for it, because when we hold it gently instead of trying to crush it, we make space for a deeper truth to emerge. And that goes right to the heart of doing inner work. Not being perfect, not pushing through. Just being present and accepting and radically kind to ourselves by simply being with what's there.
I realised that I was resisting gratitude because there was stuff happening that I wasn't thrilled about and I wasn't happy with my involvement in some of it either. A part of me felt that trying so hard to find things to be thankful for was somehow trying to ignore or bypass all of that. And I couldn't.
So I allowed myself to reflect on all the things that were really bugging and irritating me and to acknowledge that I was hacked off. I welcomed in all my emotions and allowed myself to really feel and express all of them.
There is no such thing as 'negative emotions' - all human emotions are valid, and emotions are just energy. It's how we process them and express them that matters. Giving all of our emotions constructive airtime is both healthy and necessary.
When we are resisting, we are in a blocked state where nothing can flow. Moving into a state of acceptance about how we feel and experiencing the fullness of that helps us to become unstuck and create space for movement and new ways of looking at things.
So I’m grateful for my few days of resistance today. It has reminded that I still need to show myself softness and self-compassion.
Gratitude isn’t only for the bright and happy days where everything is going well. It's for the messy, stuck, and darker ones too, and I think perhaps, it’s in those moments where being thankful for what is being stirred up or showing up, no matter how challenging, really matters the most.
