Resistance or intuition?

We live in a small house and have for a number of years. It’s really not that bad, but it wasn’t the long-term plan.

As a family of people who do things and make things, we need more space. So, for the last five years, we’ve been on the hunt for a forever home. Which has turned out to be more difficult than we thought.

For one, we want a bit of land, which has been less and less easy to find. My gardening habit is constrained to a small yard. With a larger space, I could manifest my homesteading dreams. We would also love the space for our son to be able to play sports or walk through the woods.

Another thing that we are looking for is a good-sized outbuilding such as a barn. My husband is teaching himself how to blacksmith (seriously) and I could benefit from a larger studio space.

We have looked at a lot of properties. I mean, a lot. But, for a variety of reasons, we’ve come up empty handed. Nothing seemed to fit what we were looking for. At least not something that isn’t outrageously expensive or that requires architects and contractors.

Just last week, however, a new listing popped up. A house with more space. In the country. Almost 2 acres. There is a heritage barn on the property. So, we got out there and took a look.

As we walked through the house, the barn, and the property, I mentally checked the boxes on our list. Plus, the price was right. My husband looked at me when we got in the car. I could tell he was ready to put an offer on this one. This was it.

On the drive home, we talked it out. We discussed how we could use the space, what would need to be done to restore a barn. We talked about how we could configure a garden and the small improvements we could do to make the house perfect for us.

On paper, objectively, this was it. We should totally go for it. When were we going to find another one like this?

But…a part of me was feeling hesitant. Even after talking it out and sleeping on it, the feeling persisted.

I sat and wondered what it was. And I puzzled about it. Was this a gut feeling? Or was this what author Steven Pressfield would call Resistance, with a capital R?

Resistance appears whenever a person might decide to make a change in their life. To begin a new project or make headway on a dream. Resistance is a force that works within us; it is a manifestation of our fears in many ways. It keeps us from writing that book, or learning to sail, or getting on the damned treadmill.

But intuition, that gut feeling, that’s something different. It’s more of a “knowing” beyond mere objective facts or information. It’s a primitive sense in the body.

And as I pondered about the house, I realized just how difficult it is to know the difference between Resistance and intuition.

So, naturally, I decided to read about it.

I wanted to know if I was having a fearful reaction to a new endeavor or a gut feeling that should be honored.

There is a whole lot of woo woo internet garbage out there, and I had to sift through a lot of it to get to the gold. So, I am going to give the simplest and most basic answer I could come up with.

Fear is emotional.

Intuition is Neutral.

Our self-preservation technology has been finely honed after millions of years of evolution. Fear, once activated, churns out a great number of downstream signals that prepare your body to act quickly for an impending and potentially life-threatening event. Which is great… in truly life-threatening situations.

So, if you are having a fear response, and you are truly in a life-threatening situation, then your response is appropriate. And it’s meant to save your life.

In modern humans, we have a prefrontal cortex which allows us to consider what might happen in the future…and to also get fearful about that. Our storytelling left brain can get in on the action and create an entire novella about something that hasn’t even happened yet. Fear and anxiety can explode.

With the ability to activate this fear response also comes the ability to avoid things. Again, this is great in the wild, but not so great if you are considering a new project or creative endeavor. In the case where there is no actual threat, fear might just be a manifestation of Resistance with a capital R.

So, what about intuition? When does that come into play?

So glad you asked.

Intuition forms from our sensing the environment and integrating the information without the activation of the fear cascade. The most difficult thing to wrap my head around on this one, is that it is both highly individual and highly objective.

What I mean by that is that each of us might be able to recognize how something feels to us about a situation. If my gut is telling me that a person might not be telling the truth, that feels a particular way to me. It might feel a little different to you. That’s the highly individual part.

But it is also objective. As in, there is no drama associated with it. It’s neutral.

Another thing- intuition is consistent. If you consider the situation on more than one occasion, you will continue to get the same specific neutral feeling about it.

When I put all this together, it was helpful, but I didn’t know how to put it into practice. What was a practical way that anyone could use to tell the difference between Resistance/fear and intuition?

It was then that I stumbled across the idea of something called the “Whole Body Yes” technique.

So listen, remember when I said I sifted through a lot of woo to figure this out? Well, we are going to circle back for a minute. It turns out that the only real way to get the whole body yes, is if your head, your heart, and your gut are all in alignment about something. And the only real way to sort that out, is to close your eyes and “feel into” your body.

Which sounds really, really woo.

But, the more I’ve swum in the waters of spirituality and meditation, the more I realize that many of us do this all of the time without really knowing it. Because intuition can be automatic and instinctual, just like fear. Having a specific system is helpful when you find yourself, like me, trying to figure out a particular situation.

For a whole body yes, the head, the heart, and the gut need to be in agreement with one another. The head needs to feel that something is logical, that it makes sense. The heart needs to feel a sense of emotional fulfillment. The gut needs to feel that something is instinctually solid or correct. In order to get a “whole body yes” each center has to say yes in alignment with the others.

(There is a great short tutorial from Tim Ferris here.)

We all know what this is like. Take dating for example. Have you ever met someone who was “good on paper” but didn’t feel right? Your head, the logic, was in agreement but the heart and the gut knew something was off.

My husband was itching to write an offer letter on the property, so I knew I needed to try this technique. I closed my eyes and thought about the potential new house. My head, unsurprisingly, was all for it. So was my heart. But my gut was pumping the brakes.

I got curious about that sensation and sat with it for a little while. I sensed that the barn wouldn’t be able to be used how we might like unless we invested a great deal into it. Which meant that I would still be working in a small creative space, much like the one I have now.

Sure enough, after doing more research, it would have been highly likely we would need an architect and another $300-400k of investment to restore that barn. Yikes.

In short, this property isn’t “the one”.

I can put the idea to rest knowing that it wasn’t Resistance. Rather, it was not something I was fully aligned with.

I plan to leverage this technique more as things come up for me. Give it a try and let me know what you think!