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DR JOHN DEMARTINI - Updated 19 hours ago

At certain moments in your life, you may feel overwhelmed – where you’re perceiving obstacles and challenges hitting you from every angle. You may wonder if there’s a message behind it all.

Let’s take a step back and look at what may be behind this, and if there’s a deeper meaning behind why you may be attracting these challenges.

Every individual, including you, has a set of priorities - a set of values that is unique to you, almost like a fingerprint. Whenever you are living aligned and congruent with what you value most, your highest value, you tend to be in the flow. But whenever you try to do something lower in your values - often because you’re comparing yourself to other people and trying to keep up with the Joneses, or subordinating to someone you’ve given authority to, or infatuating with someone and trying to live in their values while minimizing yourself - resistance tends to show up.

It's wise to learn that resistance isn’t there to defeat you - it’s a feedback mechanism to guide you back to authenticity, back to focusing on and acting upon what is truly highest in your values.

Your authentic self revolves around what you value most.

Let’s say you meet a woman who is 35 years old and who has three young children under the age of five, and her highest priority is to raise those children. If you asked her the question, “Who are you?” she would likely say, “I’m a mother.”  So, your identity, your purpose, and your area of expertise all revolve around your highest value. That’s where you are most likely to excel, and where you’ll tend to be more congruent and in flow.

But the moment you attempt to live outside of that - in your lower values – that’s when you will tend to encounter resistance. What’s interesting is that, in the brain, when you attempt to live in your lower values, blood, glucose and oxygen move into the subcortical region of your brain which includes your amygdala. So, instead of waking up your executive center for inspired vision, you wake up your amygdala and hippocampus – the seeking impulse and avoiding instinct or more survival oriented area of the brain.

The amygdala also assigns positive and negative valencies to events. When you perceive that there is an emergency or that your survival is at risk, you’ll tend to try to avoid the perceived predator and seek the perceived prey - avoid the negative and seek the positive; avoid what you perceive to be challenging you and seek what you perceive will support you.

As a result, you tend to distort your perceptions of reality, seeking only the positive and avoiding the negative with a false positive orientation. But nature, like a magnet, has two poles. Anytime you try to separate the inseparable, divide the indivisibles, or label the unlabelables, you’ll most likely get resistance.

If you set up a fantasy that you’re going to get a positive without a negative, then when the negatives inevitably come, you may perceive them as being obstacles and challenges. But they’re not. As I mentioned earlier, they’re feedback mechanisms to help you break your amygdala driven addiction to the fantasy of a one-sided world.

When you live congruently with your highest values, blood, glucose and oxygen move into your medial prefrontal cortex, which is the executive center of your brain. In other words, you wake up the part of your brain that is involved in inspired vision, strategic planning, objectivity, mitigating risks, execution of plans, and self-governance. You also become more objective and embrace both sides of life, your expectations become more balanced, and you tend to feel like you’re in the flow because life has a balance.

So anytime you’re faced with challenges, obstacles, and resistance, it’s most likely feedback to let you know that you’re seeking or addicted to a fantasy.

That point leads to the question of what it truly means to have a goal. A goal can range anywhere from a complete fantasy all the way to a true objective.

It may be helpful to think about it this way: a fantasy is a positive without a negative. Imagine you’re in a relationship, and you expect the other individuals to be nice and never mean, kind and never cruel, positive and never negative, peaceful and never wrathful, generous and never stingy, giving and never taking - in other words, one-sided. Are they going to be able to live up to that? No. No human being can.

So, if you have an expectation that is one-sided, it’s most likely a fantasy not a goal. And when the other side inevitably shows up, you’ll likely experience distress and resistance, which may feel like an obstacle or challenge - but isn’t. That challenge is feedback, designed to help you break your addiction to the fantasy and guide you toward a true and more balanced objective.

A true objective is balanced. To reiterate: if you’re polarized and searching for a one-sided world, or if you expect others to live according to your values instead of their own, you’re likely to meet resistance. We call that distress. And distress is not your enemy - distress is also feedback to wake you up, to let you know the path you’re pursuing likely needs adjusting and needs balancing. It’s feedback to help wake you up so you can make the wise shift from fantasy to true objective.

The spectrum of goals you hold in your life determines the resistance and challenges you face. If you are looking for a one-sided world, you’re likely to encounter a great deal of resistance, because you’re striving for a fantasy while trying to avoid the nightmare. But the one cannot exist without the other – the nightmare comes with the fantasy.

Think of a relationship. If you’re infatuated with someone, days, weeks, months, or years later, you most likely discover their other side. Everybody has both sides. So anytime you’re chasing a one-sided relationship, you’ll most likely experience obstacles and distress. But anytime you simultaneously embrace both sides, you experience and confirm true love. You feel in the flow because your expectations are matching what’s there.

The same applies in the workplace, relationships, goals and objectives - you are designed to meet resistances, challenges, and obstacles as a feedback mechanism to guide you from your  lower values to your higher values, from where you are inauthentic to where you are authentic, from chasing fantasies to pursuing true objectives. And in that sense, your challenges are your friend, not your enemy.

Sometimes you may be persistent and addicted to your fantasy and may not want to let go.  But then life tends to keep sending you those challenges, over and over, to help you stop, reflect, and ask, “What is my real objective – one that is aligned with my highest value?”

When you choose to instead balance the equation and begin objectively pursuing something that is strategically planned, foresighted, and where the risks are mitigated, you likely find yourself in flow. Why? Because now what you are doing matches what is actually there. At that point, you’re more likely to self-actualize because you’re pursuing something actual - something that truly can be done.

But if you insist on striving for a one-sided world, you will most likely experience futility instead of flow. Those obstacles and challenges are arising because you’re either not prioritizing and scattering yourself, and injecting the values of others, or because you’re pursuing one-sided events that are not obtainable. That’s when futility sets in. And once again, that futility is feedback.

You live in a self-reflective universe. What you project out there is what tends to come back.

If you set up a fantasy, you’re likely to get back the resistance that comes with it. It’s like a two-sided magnet. You can’t get a one-sided magnet. You can’t have just a positive magnet. You always get both - positive and negative.

The more you strive only for the positive, the more the negative side will tend to hurt, because one comes with pleasure and the other with pain. But the more you embrace both sides of the magnet, the more freedom you have.

Think of it this way: if I gave you a coin and told you that you could keep every coin as long as you embraced both sides of it, you’d most likely want to accumulate them. But if you insisted on having only a one-sided coin - only the positive without the negative - you’d never keep any coins, because every coin has two sides: heads and tails.

Life works the same way. If you want a one-sided life, you’re chasing a fantasy.

That means the obstacles, challenges, and resistance you face are your friends, not your enemies. They are there to ensure you have strategies in place to accomplish true objectives - and to help you transcend and transform fantasies into something more objective and meaningful. And when you pursue what is meaningful, you tend to experience greater fulfillment in life.

That’s one of the reasons I teach in the Breakthrough Experience, one of my signature programs - to show you exactly how to differentiate between a fantasy and a true objective. How to set objectives that are balanced, instead of fantasies that bring resistance, obstacles, and challenges that keep giving you feedback. How to use the world around you and see how it can be on the way, not in the way, when you take a more objective view.

So, if you’re interested in transforming the obstacles, challenges, and resistance you face into flow, there is a series of questions I teach in the Demartini Method that shows you how. It isn’t rocket science. It’s common sense once you grasp it. But it’s about knowing the right questions and knowing how to release yourself from the perception of baggage so you can see it instead as opportunity.

To Sum Up:

• Whenever you are living aligned and congruent with what you value most, your highest value, you tend to be in the flow.
   
• Resistance isn’t there to defeat you - it’s a feedback mechanism to guide you back to authenticity, back to what is truly highest in your values.
   
• Your identity, your purpose, and your area of expertise all revolve around your highest value. Anytime you try to separate the inseparable, divide the indivisibles, or label the unlabelables, you’ll most likely get resistance.
   
• If you have an expectation that is one-sided, it’s most likely not a goal but a fantasy.
   
• Distress is not your enemy - distress is also feedback to wake you up, to let you know the path you’re pursuing likely needs adjusting.
   
• Everybody has both sides. So anytime you’re chasing a one-sided relationship, you’ll most likely experience obstacles and distress. But anytime you embrace both sides, you experience love.
   
• Your challenges are your friend, not your enemy.
   
• You live in a self-reflective universe. What you project out there is what tends to come back.
   
• The obstacles, challenges, and resistance you face are your friends, not your enemies. They are there to ensure you have strategies in place to accomplish actual objectives - and to help you transcend and transform fantasies into more meaningful objectives.
   

When you understand that resistance is not your enemy but a feedback mechanism guiding you back to authenticity, life may look very different. The moment you live congruently with your highest values, stop chasing one-sided fantasies, and recognize that obstacles are on the way, not in the way, you can live a purposeful, vitalized and masterful life.

If you’re inspired to learn how to identify your highest values, dissolve the fantasies that may be keeping you stuck, and transform life’s apparent obstacles into opportunities, then I would love to help you with that. Join me at the Breakthrough Experience, where I’ll teach you how to apply these principles in your own life so you can live with more clarity, objectivity and authenticity.

Are you ready for the NEXT STEP?

If you’re seriously committed to your own growth, if you’re ready to make a change now and you’d love some help doing so, then click on the LIVE chat button bottom right of your screen and chat to us now.

Alternatively, you can book a FREE Discovery call with a member of the Demartini Team.

 

Interested in the Breakthrough Experience seminar?

If you’re ready to go inwards and do the work that will clear your blockages, clarify your vision and balance your mind, then you’ve found the perfect place to start with Dr Demartini at the Breakthrough Experience.

In 2 days you’ll learn how to solve any issue you are facing and reset the course of your life for greater achievement and fulfillment.

Click HERE to find out more

Important Notice:
The content shared in this blog is for education and personal development. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any psychological or medical conditions. The information and processes shared are for general educational purposes only and should not be considered a substitute for professional mental-health or medical advice. If you are experiencing acute distress or ongoing clinical concerns, please consult a licensed health-care provider.

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