04/24/2026
Resisting change sounds like a flaw.
We’re taught to see it that way, like if something new shows up and we push against it, we must be closed, rigid, or stuck, so we learn to question ourselves the moment we feel resistance…We start asking if we’re getting in our own way, if we’re blocking something that’s meant to unfold, and in that process we can lose sight of something important…But, not all resistance is dysfunction.
Sometimes resistance is awareness…Sometimes it’s the part of you that can already feel the misalignment before you have the words to explain it.
I didn’t understand that for a long time…
From a very young age, I remember one of my mother’s favorite sayings…
“All good things must come to an end,”
I know now she was trying to prepare me for change, trying to teach me not to build my life around things that wouldn’t last, but that’s not how I heard it…I heard it as a warning...don’t trust what’s good because it won’t last...And without realizing it, I started organizing my life around avoiding change altogether.
When I was 15, I had the chance to go to an agricultural high school, and looking back now it was one of the clearest aligned choices available to me, but I didn’t go because I didn’t want to leave my friends…I stayed with what was familiar, with the people I had grown up with, and within a few years those relationships fell apart, some of them becoming toxic and even abusive, so the thing I tried to preserve didn’t hold, but the pattern did...And I carried that pattern into other relationships, staying longer than I should, telling myself I was being patient or committed, when the truth was much simpler…I didn’t want the change that leaving would require.
So now I find myself in a different setting, but on a very similar edge…
Several weeks ago, Emil came to the sanctuary…He’s not a 'bad' horse, but he's got some medical issues that make it difficult for him to self-regulate…He’s coming into a herd that’s already working, a system that’s calm, regulated, and aligned, and he can’t meet it…He escalates, and once he escalates he doesn’t come back down...As that pressure builds, it lands on Sunny, a horse I spent years helping to find his confidence and step into a grounded leadership role…And what Emil brings isn’t leadership, it’s intensity...If I leave that unchecked it doesn’t create something better, it just applies enough pressure to displace what’s already working.
Here’s where doubt creeps in…
Part of me asks if I’m resisting change, if I’m trying to hold onto something because I don’t want to see it shift, and there’s truth in that, because I don’t want to watch Sunny lose ground, I don’t want to see something I helped build get undone...But there’s another part of me that’s much cleaner, a recognition that what’s happening isn’t a natural evolution…it’s a dysregulated system trying to impose itself on a regulated one.
That’s where most people get tripped up…
They assume that if they feel resistance, it must mean they need to let go, that the right thing will rise if they just step back and allow it to happen, but that only works when the environment supports something true emerging…In any system, whether it’s a relationship, a business, a political landscape, or a herd, the strongest vibration wins…not the best, not the most functional, not the most aligned…the strongest…And if you don’t understand that, you’ll mistake intensity for truth and call it growth when it’s actually distortion.
In a herd, that doesn’t look philosophical…It looks physical…It looks like one horse applying pressure until another moves…And if you don’t understand what you’re looking at, you might call it leadership when it could actually be dysregulation taking over.
So when I feel resistance now, I don’t automatically try to override it…I get curious about it, I slow it down enough to actually look at it and ask a better question…Is this resistance coming from fear, from an old pattern that doesn’t want things to change, or is it coming from alignment, from a part of me that can already feel that something isn’t right?
Because those two things feel very different when you’re willing to be honest…One contracts, it protects what’s familiar even when it’s not working…The other clarifies, it holds the line on what’s true even when it’s uncomfortable…Learning to tell the difference between those two has changed the way I make decisions in every aspect of my life.
Because my responsibility isn’t to make sure change happens, and it’s not to stop it either…It’s to the field itself, to what I’m allowing to shape the environment…If I ignore that and step back in the name of not “resisting change,” then I’m not being open or evolved, I’m just handing control over to whatever shows up with the most intensity.
So, the question shifts…
Not “Am I resisting change?”
But “What is this resistance showing me?”
Because sometimes the most aligned thing you can do isn’t to open the door wider…
It’s to recognize what shouldn’t be let in at all.
