Freedom Through Resistance

With Jiu Jitsu and The Ego days away from publication, I thought it appropriate to revisit my last book, Jiu Jitsu and Resistance. Below is an excerpt on the pivotal change in one’s identity and perspective which can provide endless fuel in the face of Resistance. I hope you enjoy!

From Jiu Jitsu and Resistance:

“You sought the heaviest burden – yet found yourself.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Identity and Resistance

Tony Robbins is a tremendous source of pragmatic tools to change one’s experience of life. He has a maxim which is pertinent to this discussion: the strongest force in the human personality is the need to be consistent with one’s identity.

I believe it is this need, when properly understood, which can be the support system for the changes we wish to embody, specifically with our relationship to Resistance. At its root, the experience of inner conflict manifested as Resistance – the impediment to voluntary movement forward toward a goal that comes from some unseen place deep within – is the attempt to maintain one’s identity.

Because, simply put: if you create the change you seek to make, confronting Resistance in the heroic manner and experiencing a death and rebirth, then the part of you which dies has fallen away, thus creating a change in identity. And your identity – your sense of self, the ego, the “I,” does not do well with less. It seeks stability. It will sabotage your attempts forward out of self-preservation.

Evolution is a conservative mechanism. Our genes adapted to an environment of scarcity in which survival was the primary goal, made possible through a conservation of resources. We were either actively seeking resources or we were resting. With our basic survival needs met, our biology often is still trying to rest, to conserve the resources which our genes do not realize now are abundant. So we stagnate. We delay. We experience Resistance as an impediment to our goal because we have a conflicting deeper goal of preservation.

Thus, in order to create effective change and bypass this hard-wired circuitry of stability and maintenance, we require a shift in identity. Luckily for us, all the difficulties that come with the creation of a new identity can by bypassed, for we do not need to create anything new, we must simply rediscover something old.

Reconnecting With Our True Identity

Consider again the archetype of the hero: the one who voluntarily works for the betterment of being, who confronts the difficult challenge and through that process is transformed into something wiser, stronger, and better, who then returns to his or her people with this newfound experience of being and shares what he or she has become. This process of death and rebirth is very much an experience of a shift in identity. Behavior patterns and beliefs which originally served the initiate are left behind in the journey of personal transformation. Those aspects of the identity have died off.

This change in identity is constructed by two components: 1) the environment demanded this evolution, and 2) the hero was willing to sacrifice what one is for what one had to become in the pursuit of the goal.

This is where Jordan Peterson comes in. Are you on the side of who you are or on the side of who you could be? Do you identify with what you are or with your potential? Or better still, do you identify as the thing which exists across the transformations?

That’s the pathway to a new life and to self-enhancement, and the surefire way to transcend one’s current identity in the pursuit of a more profitable sense of self. This is the principle behind a growth mindset which is the source of tremendous transformation for countless human beings across disciplines. This is in the linchpin in befriending Resistance.

Resistance: A Source of Confidence

Perhaps we should not define ourselves by what we are. Maybe we shouldn’t even define ourselves by what we could be. Maybe our best bet is to derive a sense of self from the behavioral pattern who continually embraces transformation, who willingly lets go of that which does not serve him and continually upgrades his mode of being to become increasingly better suited to productively confront potential and manifest blessings out of its possibility.

We must identify as that which seeks Resistance.

I would consider this meta-identity the greatest source of self-confidence and strength for the individual engaged in elevating their position in life. In every arena – whether personal, relational, professional, or financial – the being who defines his- or herself as the one who lets the insufficient die off and who seeks the Resistance which is the prerequisite for growth is perpetually in a state of productive confrontation with reality.

This is the pathway to success. This is the road to elevation. It is also the way to properly navigate Tony Robbins’s maxim which, as far as I can tell, is a hard and fast rule of psychic life:

“The strongest force in the human personality is the need to be consistent with one’s identity.”

If this is immutable, we had better adopt an identity which serves us. And I use my worlds purposefully. I say adopt, rather than construct, because you cannot construct what is already present. That foundational identity of the hero is at the root of our consciousness.

Consider this through a Darwinian lens. Only the fittest survive. This holds true just as much for the immaterial as the material; patterns of interpretation, identities, and ideas all are subject to this law. The hero myth is the fundamental human story, the “fittest” inner narrative, demonstrated by its prevalence in all cultures across all times. This is the behavioral pattern which is the source of man’s triumphant success against the primordial dragon of chaos. This is the “semi-conscious” identity we possess when we respond to difficulty productively.

Our inner monologue points at this indirectly. Consider that inner voice which pushes us on during difficult physical exercise: “You’ve got this. You’re doing it. Keep going.” And the countless variations of these trite words of encouragement which bubble up in consciousness amid physical discomfort.

Physical exercise is a case study for this, because it reveals something deeper: we are at our best in physical comfort when our relationship is one of being a predator, rather than prey; of seeking rather than being sought. The weak man or woman sees the workout as an outside force happening to them. The strong, the one who embodies the predatorial role, is the one who is voluntarily seeking the discomfort and moving toward it; the one who sees the Resistance as a gift to be received rather than a burden to be survived.

This is the manifestation of an identity which voluntarily pursues worthwhile struggle, because inherent within that is the recognition that the struggle produces favorable adaptation.

Our working model is that the strongest force in the human personality is the need to be consistent with one’s identity. To work with the laws of the psyche, rather than against them, we must return to our deepest sense of self which has allowed man to conquer the nature world and keep chaos at bay: the one who voluntarily seeks out struggle on behalf of the better.

This identity is our birthright. It lies dormant in our genes. We must “awaken the ancestors” and return to that relationship with experience in which we are the hunter, not the hunted. It’s an entirely different response both psychologically and neurologically.

It is this identity which completely changes the experience of Resistance. Resistance no longer is something painful that happens to us which we desperately seek to avoid; Resistance is the pathway to our continued evolution and a source of tremendous Freedom.