What if the parts of yourself you’ve been resisting are what make you whole, and what if you stop resisting? And what if when you stop resisting, you start to become complete?

When I was about 12 or 13, I started to feel depressed. I felt something was mentally, physically, and emotionally off within me. I was beginning my journey with depression.

I went to someone significant to me and shared, “Hey, I think that I’m depressed.”

This person looked at me, and they said, “kids don’t get depressed. So you must not be feeling depressed.”

That moment has stuck with me through most of my life because that moment taught me a lot, on an unconscious level. It taught me that I couldn’t trust myself, and maybe my depression (which I knew I felt) was wrong. So perhaps I need to resist depression with everything I’ve got in hopes of being a whole complete person. And that’s what I did.

Resistance was my mode of operation until I recently started asking myself, “What if the parts of me that I’ve been trying to overcome or resist are actually what makes me whole?

Life Wants to Flow Through You

I want you to imagine with me for a moment. Picture yourself standing entirely still. In front of you is a beam of light. It is a solid, almost laser-like beam of light. And it’s coming to you. This beam of light wants to flow directly through you. It wants to flow through your physical being and out the other side. You’re not walking towards this beam of light. Remember, you’re just standing completely still.

The beam of light is life. Life wants to flow through us. Life wants to bring to us everything that is meant for us in our time on this earth, but we end up trying to resist it. We put up our hands and form this teeny tiny little wall of resistance. You’re trying desperately to keep this beam of light from flowing through you. The more you resist, the weaker you become.

You are becoming tired. You’re losing your energy. You’re resisting things like depression, pain, or grief because you don’t want the hard stuff. And so you’re resisting all of life. You don’t realize that you’re doing this, but you’re resisting all of life. As you push back on life, life is pushing back on you. Except now, there’s this backlog of life, and it’s getting stronger and more intense. The more you try to push against, the more you resist, the stronger it gets.

We forget that life is not either good or bad. It’s both challenging and wonderful. And you have to be willing to let both flow through you because life doesn’t stop. That beam of light doesn’t hit you and stop. Instead, it keeps going out the other side so that more life can come. New experiences, new opportunities, new feelings, new emotions, new thoughts, new mindsets, new personal growth, new relationships will all flow to you. Still, they can’t do that when you’re resisting one (or many) parts of your life.

I resisted my depression for so long because I thought that it wasn’t supposed to be part of my life. So I was pushing back on that depression and, at the same time, pushing back on all of life. I was robbing myself of the whole experience of humanity, which is both good and bad.

I had to learn how to lower my hands to stop pushing back and let life flow through me. When I did that, it was as if this energy that I had been putting into resisting was free to help me become a whole human. When we resist, we use up so much energy, and we don’t have any left for things that life brings to make us whole.

Resistance causes us to fragment ourselves.

Resistance is how we become fragmented. We stop growing when we start resisting because the resistance stops something new from coming into our lives. You think it’s blocking the pain, hard times, or something terrible, but it’s also stopping something new. And so you stop growing at that moment that you start to resist.

In a sense, you become this incomplete version of yourself that doesn’t have all of what life wants you to have. As a result, you don’t have all the experiences life wants you to have, both good and bad.

Most of us want to be a complete version of ourselves. And I think that most of us want to feel whole as human beings. We want to feel alive. We want to feel on purpose. We want to have the experiences that life can bring us. But we have learned to resist anything that is not tied to happiness, joy, or self-fulfillment.

If you’re unwilling to take the good and the bad together, then what you have is just a synthetic version of happiness because real happiness doesn’t come from resisting the bad in your life or pretending it doesn’t exist. Real happiness comes from going through those things and then coming out the other side. Real joy is produced and can only be known when you have experienced deep grief and deep sadness.

So many people walk around half-awake. They go through the motions to produce the emotions that they think they want: happiness, joy, peace, prosperity, abundance, and so forth. But, of course, we can’t always feel those positive emotions, so we try harder.

When you can shift from this idea that life is only supposed to bring you happiness, you will start to feel happy. When you change from this idea that life is only supposed to bring you good things, you will stop being broken down by the bad stuff.

It isn’t that situations aren’t hard. It isn’t that you don’t need to process and work through them. This isn’t a quick fix for any of that. However, if you learn to take all of what humanity is offering you, you’ll see the beauty in both the good and bad. That is when you’ll start to live fully alive, fully awake, and fully present.

Stop Resisting

Let’s go back to the moment when I communicated about my depression as a young kid. I kept trying to resist it and overcome depression from that point on. I was always fighting against it because I believed I was broken or weak every time I felt depressed.

Every time I had to go on antidepressants, something was wrong with me, and this wasn’t supposed to be how life is. So all of my energy went into fighting what I thought wasn’t supposed to be instead of living what was.

When you stop resisting, that beam of light (aka life) can flow through you, but it’s probably going to strike you if you’ve been resisting for a long time. It’s been building up on the other side of your resistance. So all that life has been trying to bring you will hit all at once. Just be prepared for it to feel both overwhelming and wonderful. It’s going to be devastating. And it’s going to bring so much joy and understanding.

That’s what happened when I stopped resisting the depression part of me. Suddenly, it was like life was catching up with me and sending the subtle message that I’d been okay the whole time. So, yes, I have depression, but my depression doesn’t define me.

And the same is true for you. Replace depression with whatever your struggle is. You deal with this very real struggle. But it is only one part of the whole. You’ve been fragmenting yourself by not allowing that one part of the whole to flow through you. As a result, you’ve been robbing yourself of so much opportunity for growth and joy.

I’m now okay with the depression. I still have depression. It is still a part of me. It’s just that now my energy doesn’t go towards resisting it. The energy I used for that can now go to other things that help balance me as a complete, whole being.

Resistance is one of the worst things you will do in your life. It will hurt you more than the thing you’re resisting because resistance becomes your focus and consumes all of your energy. (We even forget that we’re resisting at times.)

You become so accustomed to holding up your hands and pushing back on life because you think that’s what you have to do to survive. It’s time to put those hands down at your side and let life flow through you. Let it bring to you all that it wants to make you a complete human being because that’s where beauty is. That is where the joy is. That is where happiness is.

That’s also where you will experience the hard times, challenges, and pain, but that’s okay because you aren’t complete without the good and the bad. So stop living as a fragmented, incomplete version of yourself and start living whole. Put those hands down, stop resisting, and let life flow through you and see what happens.