The Invisible Factor That Lowers Vibration
The Invisible Factor That Lowers Vibration
How do we create resistance in our lives without knowing? Examining how resistance diminishes vibrational frequency and thwarts our ambitions.
*For your listening pleasure there is also an audio version of this article read by the author. It may include a few sidebars ;)
Updated April 2024
How Do We Create Resistance?
Imagine walking in to the winds of a hurricane. An ordinary task transforms in to an epic struggle. We can create similar invisible resistance that lowers vibration in our own lives without knowing it. Resistance that damages our vibrational frequency and quality of life. Let’s explore how we inadvertently decrease frequency.
When we engage in behaviors that aren’t fulfilling there’s no wind at our back. The proverbial wind beneath our wings is missing. Our sailboat is bobbing aimlessly in the water. We are missing the momentum created when we’re engaged in life.
Forcing ourselves to do things we don’t like introduces resistance. Staying married when we know it’s over, playing on a softball team to please a friend, saying yes to an extra group project at work, eating salad dressed with lemon juice- these actions all contain resistance. Only part of us is on board.
This is not to say the person eating salad should gorge on pizza, but could they accept a slower rate of weight loss and enjoy dressing? Could the person playing softball have practiced setting boundaries with their time? Said no, and ended up proud of themselves instead of resentful? It’s about knowing when we are creating resistance in our lives and trying to find a higher path.
Our bodies help us identify when we are creating resistance. Resistance is typically marked with tension and constriction. We don’t usually feel light of heart accepting a job we don’t want. Necks don’t often tense when we’re in a creative flow while working.
I used to throw up every day before kindergarten. Thankfully, my wise mom realized this was my body communicating I wasn’t ready. She pulled me out, put me back in at six, and I sailed through. The cues our bodies send as adults are more subtle, but just as present. Unfortunately, we’ve mostly learned to push through them, or pop a pill to silence them.
There’s a danger in silencing our body’s vibrational communications with us, even when it’s uncomfortable. Without the feedback, we lose our barometer for when we are making things worse, or improving. We run the risk of our body popping up another symptom, worse than the first, to express displeasure.
Silencing this next symptom becomes roulette as the body escalates, trying desperately to communicate for change. This can be a path to serious illness. The symptom is not the problem; our lifestyle is often what’s creating resistance, and trouble for the body.
“The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.” ~Dr. Gabor Maté
Friction & Avoiding Blind Trades
Resistance is not supposed to be as prevalent in our lives as we have become accustomed to. This isn’t to say we want to remove all friction from our lives. There’s healthy friction, and there’s resistance. The difference is does it create growth or stagnation?
Healthy friction promotes growth. A child excited about learning to play soccer, encouraged to keep going after many missed goals, is friction. A child forced to play soccer because their parents played soccer, looks more like resistance.
There’s value in struggle; a life with no struggle can lack growth. It’s also beneficial to understand our capacity. How much friction can we manage so growth is still promoted? Perhaps we don’t want to be a novice at eight things simultaneously. That could cross the line from friction to resistance.
We want to identify where we are unknowingly creating resistance for ourselves. After that, we can decide if we want to do anything about it or not. It’s about knowing when we are making a trade-off so we can decide if we want to make it, instead of blindly taking a trade-off without understanding we’re warping our lives under a pressure we didn’t realize we accepted.
“You have two choices; either resist or flow.” ~Deepak Chopra
How To Avoid Compounding Resistance
As noted in my article on how conflict impacts vibrational frequency we can compound resistance with our responses to life. Let’s say we don’t like it when certain relatives come to Thanksgiving dinner.
There’s friction in inviting people to our table whose company we don’t enjoy, because we feel we “should.” (“Should” is a huge indicator of incoming resistance.) If we pile on to the initial discomfort by complaining we’re doubling our losses.
I’ll use myself as an example. I heart working out. When I started slowing down and listening to my body more, I realized I’d been overdoing workouts.
I was living a life of huge resistance, swirling with tension. To release that tension I worked out. Too much. Great for my heart and triceps. Not worth exerting more energy than I had to release the stress. A trade-off I didn’t realize I was making until my vitality started ebbing.
I’m currently taking some much needed rest. It’s been challenging because my mental patterns tell me I shouldn’t be resting. I need to be up and doing something. I should try a short workout. I should at least hold a plank every day. Does this sound healthy? Kinda, but not really. It’s obsessive. It’s not allowing myself to just be. It’s feeling I must achieve, or do things, to have value.
“We will be more successful in all our endeavors if we can let go of the habit of running all the time, and take pauses to relax and re-center ourselves. And we’ll also have a lot more joy in living.” ~Thích Nhất Hạnh
When we berate, guilt, shame, resent or complain about our situation we double our resistance. Complaining to a friend about not going to Pilates is me compounding resistance.
I have the original struggle of not working out. If I add unhealthy mental thoughts of questionable veracity like, “I’m wasting my free time if I’m not working out” (instead of accepting my current reality graciously) that’s another layer of resistance.
Now I have guilt to process. If I complain on top of this, that’s a layer of frustration. I now have disappointment, guilt and frustration, when it could have been only disappointment. Or if I was gracious with myself…nothing at all.
Conversely, If I work on my belief pattern creating guilt in the first place, (“free time is not for resting it’s for doing things”) I understand a technique for how to raise vibration in the mental layer of my vibrational frequency. Not only am I not dog-piling resistance, but I’m consciously working out a belief system that’s keeping me in struggle.
If I choose to shame myself, feel guilt for resting, and complain to others, it’s a yucky cocktail of low vibration emotions. These seriously impact my vibrational frequency, as shown in the emotional frequency chart.
A middle path is feeling frustrated about my situation. Noticing my values and mental patterns make me feel guilty. Choosing not to complain about it. I feel the guilt instead of avoiding it. My frequency is impacted by the low vibration of unnecessary guilt (I’m the one making myself feel guilty), but it’s transitory because I don’t store the guilt, and I don’t complain and increase resistance.
Can Complaining Be Valuable?
I’ve actually been on the fence, pondering if complaining is valuable. I believe in releasing emotions, and being real that life is balancing struggle with gratitude. Feeling happy and positive all the time is not realistic or helpful. It smacks of creating a false state of being I hazard to say, no one experiences.
Suffering is innate to the human experience. To never complain feels dangerously close to suppression. Plus, it feels sooo good to vent to a friend when we’re upset. I don’t want to take that luscious feeling from anyone.
Here’s the balance I’ve currently struck. We can speak uncensored about an annoying relative who came for Christmas, kept eating Cheetos, and touching things around the house. It’s fun to share stories of ridiculous places that ended up covered in orange dust.
Ideally we pick one person to vent to, and avoid personally disparaging commentary. If we say something unflattering we balance it with something positive about the person. If we sh*t talk people behind their back it diminishes our vibrational frequency.
Where we run amok is complaining repeatedly about suffering we create for ourselves with stories or false interpretations of events. Let’s say I get upset because a friend isn’t calling me back. I tell myself it’s because she doesn’t appreciate me, and complain to three other friends about how rude she is.
My unclarified interpretation of events is the problem. This is where I want to focus my attention, not on complaining and making myself a victim. Complaining about emotional states my stories create is a negative spiral. If I continue complaining about this every time I don’t get a response I consider timely, it’s seriously lowering my vibration.
Something I found amusing to watch when I worked in tech was when someone complained about something in a meeting, without a solution, they became responsible for fixing it. Complaining colleagues seemed slow to realize this pattern, landing tons of extra work. I suspect it’s the same with life. Complaining creates resistance, which is equivalent to extra work.
How We Can Warp From Resistance
Venting without self reflection is where we go awry. If we balance the amount of time we complain with an equal amount of self reflection, I suspect much of society would elevate. Similar to how we can warp vibrational frequency if we don’t balance giving and receiving.
That said, we often need to tell a story a certain amount of times, and be truly heard, before we move toward healing.
Being seen and understood is part of the journey. Listening is more valuable than many give it credit for. However, if we choose to remain part of a cycle, life choice, or pattern that doesn’t work, and do nothing about it but complain, repetitive complaining will lower vibration.
To be clear, we aren’t meant to live blissful lives with zero resistance. Military personnel on a mission are likely well served pushing through resistance. It’s often called courage. However, when the mission is over the body gets to recover. There’s an end date. Resistance as a lifestyle is problematic.
Constant resistance is sitting on the buoy of one’s frequency, keeping it underwater. I posit it even accelerates our aging process. We aren’t meant to live a lifestyle we sigh about Monday morning.
The sigh is a sign of low grade resistance. Too much resistance can even become depression; life just becomes too hard. Signs of a life not lived in vibrational alignment with one’s inner voice and intuition.
“Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress: working hard for something we love is called passion.” ~Simon Sinek
When we are going with the flow of life, and following our inner voice, that’s when the wind is at our back and resistance is gone. This is how to raise your vibration and begin to increasingly experience states of flow, and more synchronicity in life.
Our bodies can even warp out of form in response to facing resistance. The same way pine trees on a cliff bend permanently in the direction of the wind. Once I started reorganizing my life to remove resistance I noticed I didn’t need to visit the chiropractor at all anymore. Nor did I need acupuncture to sleep, or two yoga classes a week to feel relaxed. The muscles in my face relaxed.
It appears I was spending hours every week undoing the effects of not following my inner wisdom. My body was holding the knowledge for me, waiting for me to pay attention.