A few days ago, in a yoga class, we were preparing the body for an advanced variation of half pigeon involving a deep twist and a turn onto the back.
We weren’t expected to perform the final pose. The preparation was the practice.
I watched the demonstration, tried it—and got the legs wrong. My body said, quite firmly: this doesn’t work. And something in me quietly decided, right there, that I didn’t particularly want to go where this was going.
Notice what happened. One wrong attempt, and a conclusion had already been reached—before any real evidence had arrived.
For a moment, I noticed the resistance rather than automatically obeying it. Then I sorted out my legs and joined in. Nothing dramatic happened. I simply discovered that I could do considerably more than my first reaction had suggested.
I’ve been watching resistance all week, as it happens. My own—not only in the class, but in a reluctance to loosen my grip on things I’ve been trying to control. I can see the changes that would follow if I did. Yet part of me remains loyal to the familiar arrangement, even when I know it is no longer helping.
It made me wonder how often we reach a verdict before we’ve allowed ourselves any new evidence.
We decide not to begin the conversation. Not to send the application. Not to test a different way of working. Not to consider the change too seriously, because considering it might require something from us.
Sometimes resistance is loud: I’m not doing that.
More often, it has a perfectly reasonable voice:
I need to think about it properly.
This isn’t quite the right time.
I’ll do it when things calm down.
Resistance can sound remarkably like good judgement.
Resistance is not always the enemy
We tend to treat resistance as a weakness to overcome. We know what needs doing, we don’t do it, and we tell ourselves to be more disciplined.
But resistance is rarely laziness. It is usually protection.
Something in us anticipates that the next step may bring discomfort, exposure or loss—and avoiding it lets us remain with the familiar. The familiar may no longer feel good. It may even be exhausting. But at least we know who we are there.
And our discomfort with uncertainty is not simply a character flaw.
In a University College London study, people completed a task in which they faced varying probabilities of receiving a mild electric shock. They reported the greatest stress when the likelihood was 50/50—when they could not predict what would happen. Certainty, even the certainty of a shock, was less stressful than maximum uncertainty.
The study was about uncertainty rather than life change. But it offers a clue as to why a known difficulty can sometimes feel easier to tolerate than an uncertain alternative.
This is why someone can be deeply dissatisfied with her work and still resist changing it. Why someone can spend months researching options without choosing one. Why she can say she wants a different life while filling every available space with the responsibilities of the current one.
Why an intelligent, capable person can make difficult decisions all day for everybody else—and remain unable to answer a much simpler question:
What do I want now?
The resistance is rarely to the action alone. It is to what the action might reveal.
Yoga philosophy has long recognised this instinctive clinging to life as we know it—even when the present life no longer fits. We hold on because it is the life whose shape we recognise.
What the resistance is really guarding
Modern psychology gives us another way of understanding what may be happening.
A recent study in the European Journal of Social Psychology examined why people can genuinely want to change and still resist it. Across four studies involving nearly two thousand regular smokers, the researchers found that change became harder when giving up the old behaviour felt like a break in the continuity of who they were.
When people were helped to see the new behaviour as consistent with their underlying sense of self, they identified more strongly as ex-smokers and became more engaged in stopping smoking.
The study concerned smoking rather than careers or life decisions. But the question it raises travels further:
What happens when a change does not simply ask us to behave differently, but seems to threaten the person we understand ourselves to be?
In other words, perhaps you are not only resisting the change.
You may be resisting the discontinuity.
If your identity is the capable one—the one with answers, the one everyone leans on—then the real resistance may not be to a new direction, a conversation or a decision.
It may be to the question underneath:
Who am I if I’m not holding all of this?
The familiar self, however tired, feels safer than an unfamiliar one. So the diary stays full, the research continues, and the decision waits for things to calm down.
Things never calm down.
That is rather the point of them.
But the research also suggests something hopeful. Change may become easier when it can be understood not as a rejection of who we have been, but as a continuation of something that has always mattered.
You do not necessarily become yourself by breaking with yourself.
Sometimes the thread does not need to be cut.
It simply needs to be picked back up.
Productive avoidance is still avoidance
Resistance does not always look like doing nothing. It can be extremely busy.
We answer emails. Help other people. Rearrange the diary. Read another article. Research another course. Refine the plan. Wait for more certainty.
The machine keeps running beautifully. We may even feel virtuous, because we are getting so much done.
But the one conversation, decision or piece of work that might change something remains untouched.
I recognise this in myself. There are times when my mind develops a sudden enthusiasm for almost anything except the thing that requires my attention.
It doesn’t announce that it is resisting. It produces reasons—many of them entirely plausible.
That is what makes resistance hard to recognise.
It wears the clothes of responsibility.
Or patience.
Or high standards.
Occasionally, it is those things.
But sometimes it is fear with an excellent vocabulary.
Three questions worth sitting with
Bring to mind something you have been putting off.
You can probably see it clearly: the unopened document, the unsent message, the decision that follows you into Sunday evening and waits beside the bed at three in the morning.
Notice what happens in your body when you imagine taking the next step.
Then ask:
What am I actually resisting?
It may not be the email. It may be the reply.
It may not be the conversation. It may be the possibility that once the truth is spoken, the existing arrangement cannot continue unchanged.
What does not doing it protect me from?
Failure?
Conflict?
The loss of an identity you have spent years building?
Is that protection still needed now?
A protective response may have made complete sense when it began. But protection can outlive the circumstances that created it.
One difficult experience becomes a rule.
One rejection becomes a prediction.
What once kept us safe quietly begins making our choices for us.
Not every no is resistance
One distinction matters here.
Not every reluctance should be pushed through.
Sometimes the answer really is no—the body signalling that something is unsafe, unsuitable or simply not ours.
The work is not to override every objection. It is to learn the difference between a true no and a familiar no.
A true no has a clean quality. Even when it is inconvenient, something settles.
A familiar no is restless. It circles, delays and argues. It keeps generating explanations while leaving the original question unresolved.
One closes the matter.
The other keeps returning.
The next step may be smaller than you think
Moving through resistance rarely requires a leap.
Sometimes it means exploring the preparation without demanding the final pose.
Writing for ten minutes rather than completing the whole piece.
Sending one enquiry rather than deciding your entire future.
Speaking one honest sentence rather than resolving the relationship.
Resistance grows when we make the first step carry the weight of the whole future.
It softens when the next movement becomes small enough to explore—small enough, you might say, to still feel like you.
The point is not to become someone who never resists.
It is to notice when resistance is wise, when it is old protection—and when it is allowing the familiar to keep making choices that properly belong to you.
If you can see what yours is protecting, I’d genuinely like to hear it. Reply and tell me. I read every one.