I’ve noticed something significant this year.
Christmas is still a load of old pony as far as I’m concerned, not in any anti-religious sense but in the slightly psychotic conditioning around it. This hasn’t magically changed and I’ve not had a lobotomy.
But what has changed is my resistance to Christmas has lessened.
For as long as I can remember, December has carried a particular weight. Expectations, memories, noise, logistics, emotional undercurrents. Even when things are fine, there’s often an internal bracing, a subtle tightening, with my nervous system preparing for impact.
This year, though, something is different. Not because the circumstances are perfect, but because my relationship with them has just eased.
There have been some very real, practical shifts. I no longer have children at primary school. No nativities, no endless calendar of events, no pressure to be everywhere and everything all at once. That alone has felt like a long-overdue exhale. A reprieve.
But there’s something else too. Something less visible, but more profound in my response.
There’s less internal arguing with what just is. Less wishing December would hurry up and be over. Less tension in the body. Less internal and external dialogue about how hard it all feels.
It struck me that this is a lesson for me about resistance. Resistance often disguises itself as strength.
We tell ourselves we’re coping, managing, holding it together. But underneath, there’s often a constant internal push against external reality.
This shouldn’t be happening.
I shouldn’t feel like this.
I just need to get through it.
The nervous system interprets of that as threat and becomes activated. Resistance almost always makes things feel longer, heavier, more exhausting than they need to be. Like swimming against a strong current.
When I tune into what’s different this year, it’s not that Christmas has suddenly become easy. It’s that I’m not fighting my own experience of it.
In my mind, which makes its own logic, it sort of reminded me of childbirth!
I’ve birthed four children and I know how fortunate I was to have comparatively straightforward births. But looking back now, I can see something that feels resonant.
There was an intuitive trust in my body; a willingness to meet the intensity rather than brace against it. A deep knowing that my body already understood the process. Birth is intense and there’s no pretending otherwise. But I never experienced it as something to resist. I didn’t try to control the waves. I didn’t tighten against them. I allowed them to move through me, trusting myself. And because of that, the process flowed.
Not painless. Not passive.
But with relative ease.
That’s the paradox we often miss. Surrender doesn’t mean collapse. It doesn’t mean giving up. It means allowing life to move through you rather than fighting to hold it back.
We resist far more than we realise.
We resist emotions we don’t like.
We resist lessons we’d rather skip.
We resist endings, beginnings, grief, joy, change.
We tense around anger.
We suppress sadness.
We rush past discomfort.
And yet, the moment we stop resisting, something different happens.
The emotion moves through us.
The moment passes.
The body settles.
The ‘path of least resistance’ isn’t a lazy one, it’s a wise one.
When we allow an emotion to be felt fully, without judgement or suppression, it almost always completes itself more quickly.
When we accept an event as it is, rather than how we wish it were, we reclaim enormous amounts of energy.
When we surrender to a lesson, rather than battling it, we find ourselves on the other side sooner than expected.
As an experienced criminal justice practitioner, I have always been able to ‘roll with resistance’ for my clients, to meet them where they’re at as we know that progresses things so much more easily than getting into conflict. I’m now just applying that to myself.
We reach the other side faster when we stop fighting.
Christmas is still layered and complex for me.
But without resistance, it feels lighter, weirdly much shorter.
More navigable. Occasionally even cheerful!
There’s space for tenderness without overwhelm.
Honesty without collapse.
Presence without pressure.
And this pattern repeats everywhere.
In healing work.
In emotional processing.
In relationships.
In change.
What we resist, persists.
What we allow, moves.
Surrender isn’t about liking what’s happening. It’s about trusting that you don’t need to harden yourself against it.
Just as the body knows how to birth a child, the nervous system knows how to move through life’s intensity when we stop interrupting it with fear and control.
If something feels heavy for you right now, I wonder:
Where might you be resisting rather than responding?
What would happen if you softened, just a tad?
What if you trusted that your system already knows how to carry you through?
Not by pushing harder.
Not by numbing out.
But by allowing the wave to crest and fall.
Sometimes the quickest way through is not effort, but surrender. And on the other side of that, there is often more ease than we ever expected.