Resistance Is Feudal: Modernize Your Mind to Manifest Like a Mofo!

(Moving) Forward

A few years ago, I came across the 7-Day Mental Diet, an idea promoted by Emmet Fox. Fox was one of those New Thought master teachers of the early 20th century and a cohort of one of my favorite Metaphysical Divas of Yesteryear, the late great and sassy Florence Scovel Shinn.

The Mental Diet called for a strict elimination of all negativity for seven days in a row. We’re talking no anger, no fear, no resentment, no doubt, no criticism, no worry—nada. Bupkis. Following this program, or even making an honest attempt to follow it, certainly introduces some positive and eye-opening change into your world. I wrote about my experience with it in a blog post which you can read here if you like.

More recently, I felt drawn to revisit Shinn’s seminal work, The Game of Life and How to Play It. I was feeling a bit stuck at the time but, as usual, I was guided to the perfect solution, which in this case was already residing on my bookshelf. There’s no shame in needing a boost; we can all use regular doses of inspiration to re-mind us how Life really works in this dense time-space reality of ours.

That famous book of hers contains a chapter titled The Law of Non-Resistance, and it bears this opening statement:

Nothing on Earth can resist an absolutely non-resistant person. The Chinese say that water is the most powerful element, because it is perfectly nonresistant. It can wear away a rock, and sweep all before it.

—Florence Scovel Shinn

Though I’d read the book many times before, her words seemed to suddenly jump off the page. I realized that becoming an absolutely non-resistant person would be my personal goal. It was a blanket approach to personal growth—a one-size-fits-all regimen, if ever there was one. And as a former engineer, I’m fond of efficiency. Straightforward, get-’er-done methods are appealing. Some people inherently distrust a thing if it is too simple, but I think we can sometimes make ourselves crazy with that belief system. Often, it’s a dirty trick of the ego-intellect. Simple can be very effective.

When I started putting rubber to the road and practicing Non-Resistance on an everyday basis, it occurred to me that my practice was reminiscent of Emmet Fox’s Mental Diet. But I liked this Non-Resistance thing better—maybe because, as a lover and proponent of hedonism, I’ve never been fond of diets or anything else that smacks of deprivation.

By framing the issue in a positive sense—that is, practicing the art of Non-Resistance, rather than NOT practicing the habit of negative thinking—it gave me a sense of purpose, a benevolent cross to bear. And it’s served me well. So I hope that it may inspire YOU to enact some positive empowering changes as well. I’ve compiled a sizable collection of practical examples and real-life stories (most of the names have been changed for privacy) in order to make this as clear and real to you as I possibly can. Please drop me a line, through www.debbianne.com or post it on my Facebook page, if you have inspiring stories to share about your own adventures in Non-Resistance.

Get ready to feel empowered and to Manifest like a Mofo!

With Love & Levity,

www.debbianne.com

FEAR is a Four-Letter Word

Can you imagine what it must have been like to live in the days of Feudal culture? If you were a serf, you pretty much lived a subsistence existence, filled with FEAR at every turn. There was daily fear of being killed or harmed by other people, fear of starvation and disease, grueling toil, and other unpleasantries. If you were a lord or a lord’s henchman, you too were fraught with fear, because the chain of command could easily turn on you at any time. Then there was fear of invasion and war by the other fear-saturated Feudal peeps from across the way. And yet, as dreadful as their Earthly atmos-Fear was, many also held tremendous fear of death, and fear of not getting into the right after-party club once they finally did exit this mortal coil.

Suffice it to say, those Feudals were all about FEAR, probably even more so than Meghan Trainor is all about that bass.

Fast forward to 2015 and here we are, fancying ourselves as modern sophisticated types, worlds away from that crazy oppressive Feudalism stuff. But are we?

Sure, our lifestyle is relatively evolved, and we mostly refrain from rampant physical violence. But most people who consider themselves civilized and peaceful are still going to war a hundred times a day—mentally and verbally impaling all the things that trigger fear, rather than dismantling the fear itself.

When we react out of Fear, rather than Love, we are being Resistant. And in that moment of Resistance, we are not so different from our Feudal ancestors. We’re still playing out the old programs.

F.E.A.R. =

Feudal Energetic Automatic Reaction

I’m sure you’ve read and heard a great deal about the limbic brain, sometimes called the reptilian brain, that’s involved with triggering our fight-or-flight reflex. Or in certain energy healing modalities, for instance, there is attention given to the ancestral or DNA levels of energy and belief-system encoding within us. Regardless of the intellectual construct used, the point is that we’re still connected to all the other humans—including the ones whose physical bodies are gone. And not just Feudal people, of course (but the book title was just too fun to resist).

The good news is that there’s never been a better time to do some conscious healing of the old fear. We can modernize our own minds to become happier and more self-actualized as we liberate ourselves from fear.

Florence Scovel Shinn recommended that we cast the burden whenever we feel overly responsible for an outcome over which we actually have little control. That’s a fine idea for us modern humans who have taken on the erroneous idea that we must do everything ourselves. We have, in some sense, turned our backs on the larger part of our consciousness beyond the human mind—the part that sees and arranges things in cahoots with other people’s consciousness.

But Fear does have its legitimate uses. Back in the days of cavemen, the sudden presence of a large predatory animal on the scene prompted a human to fight or flee—no doubt, a helpful program to run in that context. If you regularly experience this same red alert reflex as a result of a mere conversation though, or have a meltdown when minor things refuse to go the way your rational mind has planned, the use of Fear is not just a case of overkill, it’s harshing your mellow, man! AND causing your manifestations to run for the hills.

No person, thing or situation is an enemy of yours. Everything serves you. Even if you don’t have access to that perspective just yet—it’s still true. Even the most difficult people or situations in your life provoke you to expand into your true loving unlimited nature. But fearful energy tends to block access to that useful, empowering information. It’s as if some ginormous tall person sits right in front of you and you can’t see the show on the stage ahead.

What you might not realize is that any sort of negative emotion is essentially just a form of Fear. It might look like anger or blame or doubt on the surface, but there’s Fear at its core. Your emotional response to things is triggered by your thoughts—and your beliefs, which are just a selection of well-practiced thoughts—so if you are able to reverse-engineer the not-so-happy feeling, you will inevitably find a fear-based thought behind it. You might say that the man behind the curtain is a Feudal war lord of sorts.

Let’s take an example. If you find yourself feeling angry because someone just cut you off in traffic, you can trace it to Fear-based thoughts like these: I’m afraid of being hurt or killed, I’m afraid of financial disaster resulting from a car accident and insurance claims, I’m afraid I’ll be late for work and get fired, or I’m afraid that it’s true that people are selfish and uncaring toward each other. If your response is downright rageful, you’ve probably endured a history of other people violating your personal boundaries, and so in that case the Fears triggered might also encompass self-worth and fear that your Past experiences will continue indefinitely in the Future: I’m afraid that I’m invisible to others or Why does this always happen to me? I’m afraid that it’s always going to keep happening.

When Fear rules the day, there is a lack of Trust. You’re not really trusting that things are somehow being orchestrated for your benefit. Trust in what or whom? That’s up to you. Call it god, or the universe, or your higher self, or providence, or your superconscious mind, or what-have-you. Something bigger than the fearful part of you.

Do you believe that Life is fundamentally benevolent? Or do you believe that Life is both good and evil, and therefore, a minute-to-minute crapshoot as to which one you will experience? Your underlying beliefs color your everyday choices and reactions to things. In order for Fear to run rampant, there must be a fundamental belief being activated that says evil or ill-being exists.

In my worldview—which you are welcome to borrow—there is only Love. Fear is the phenomenon of intercepting, masking or curtailing Love. It’s a necessary part of our growth-inducing experience here, but nevertheless, we can minimize its unpleasant impact. Love is who and what you are. It’s the source energy you’re built of.

Think of your kitchen sink for a minute. The faucet, when open, allows water to flow through it. The further you close down the faucet, the less water flows through it.

That water is analogous to the Love, or Source Energy, that flows to and through YOU. It’s your life-force—your consciousness. It’s the stuff that everything in the universe is constructed of, and there is no other substance. So when you experience Fear, it only means the faucet is closed off to some degree, and the water flow is restricted. Fear is not a real thing or force, per se—it’s just the blocking of Love. When the faucet is closed, we don’t think that non-water is flowing out of it.

Shinn says: If you are afraid, you are giving in to a belief in two powers, Good and Evil, instead of one. That’s what our Feudal ancestors mostly believed, thanks to the promulgation of religious belief systems. But evil is no more real than the non-water flowing out of your kitchen faucet right now.

When you react to life scenarios with Resistance, you are giving in to the idea that things might go wrong—that some evildoing may occur. It is an automatic program, learned and reinforced by the masses over the centuries. It hinges on the idea that Life is random, and sometimes evil things this way come. But as a student of metaphysics, you suspect that your mental focus guides your experiences, right? And in that case, the only way evil-doing can creep into your life is by your energetic focus. So, it comes full circle, and the infamous words of Franklin D. Roosevelt ring true: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

We are all affected by this fearful Feudal energy to some degree. It can fire off so rapidly that you scarcely realize its presence in your consciousness. So the key here is to increase your awareness. Bust out the fine-toothed comb and the white gloves.

Awareness is your friend. Becoming aware of the places where you tend to shut down your cosmic faucet is the first and most powerful step. Once you see more objectively what you’re doing, you are in a position to make changes. And the more you recognize Fear for what it is—and what it isn’t—the less power you’ll continue to hand over to it. With each day of practicing Non-Resistance, you’ll grow stronger and more capable of refraining