Have you ever experienced any of these situations?
- Your project at work is due on Friday. Today is Wednesday and you’ve been procrastinating. There is no way of getting it done on time.
- You are supposed to meet a colleague for lunch. It’s an important meeting but you realize that you are going to be late – again.
- Your term paper is due Monday. It’s Saturday and you haven’t even started it.
- You told yourself you would start eating well at the beginning of the month. It’s one week into the month and you are in total resistance.
- You keep planning to exercise before work, but it never seems to happen.
- You promised your partner to get something fixed by a certain date. The date is past and it isn’t done.
- Your partner has asked, a number of times, that you call when you are going to be late, but you keep ‘forgetting.’
And so on…
How do you feel when you resist? Anxious? Angry? Depressed? And, is there a part of you who feels like you’ve ‘won’? Who feels like you’ve managed, once again, to escape being controlled?
How often do you hear a voice in your head judging you and pressuring you to get something done? Whose voice does it sound like – your mother? Your father? Someone else who tried to control you as you were growing up?
The problem is you’ve integrated that controlling, judgmental voice into your inner critic – your ego wounded self – which is creating an inner power struggle. One part of you is trying to control you and another part of you is resisting being controlled – which is what creates the immobilization.
Loving Yourself Heals the Inner Power Struggle
When your intent is to control and not be controlled, you get stuck. When your intention is, instead, to love yourself, and to learn more about loving yourself, the inner power struggle doesn’t occur. Instead of pressuring and judging yourself – which is very unloving to yourself – you are kindly and compassionately asking your higher self – your inner wise self or your source of spiritual guidance – what is in your highest good. When you really want to know what is loving to yourself and in your highest good, you will receive information about what actions are loving to you. And if your intent is truly to be loving to yourself rather than resist being controlled, you will naturally take the actions that are in your highest good.
It’s a Matter of Intention
When your intention is to control and not be controlled, you will automatically judge and pressure yourself to try to have control over yourself, and then you will automatically resist being controlled, just as you likely did as a child, in some areas, to not be controlled by a parent or other authority figure.
When your intention is to be loving to yourself and to support your highest good and the highest good of others, you will naturally be open to learning about what most supports your own and others’ highest good and you will take the high road – the loving actions.
Our behavior follows our intention, and our intention is our free will choice. In fact, choosing our intention is the essence of free will. No one can choose your intention for you – it’s dependent on what’s most important to you. As long as it’s most important to you to control and not be controlled, you will likely find yourself in resistance. When being a loving human being, starting with yourself, is most important to you, then this is what you will be focused on. We focus on what is most important to us.
We are in either in the intent to control or the intent to love at any given moment, so when you find yourself in resistance, notice that your intent is to control and not be controlled, rather than to be open to learning about loving yourself and others.
You can change your intent any time you want! It’s a moment-by-moment choice.
Join Dr. Margaret Paul for her 30-Day at-home Course: “Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships.”
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