75 : Whatever You Resist Will Persist | How to Stop Fighting Your Own Life
💫Episode 75 : Whatever You Resist Will Persist | How to Stop Fighting Your Own Life
"The harder I pushed against everything in my life that wasn't working, the more it kept presenting itself. The more I tried to white-knuckle my way through the discomfort and the pain, the more exhausted I became. The more I tried to outrun it, the faster it seemed to catch up to me."
In September 2013, Charla Goodnight heard a phrase that stopped her cold: what you resist will persist. It landed so deeply that she wrote it on her bedroom wall — the first thing she'd see every morning during one of the hardest seasons of her life.
In Episode 75 of Collective Guidance, she brings that teaching forward in one of the most personal, practical, and spiritually grounded solo episodes she's ever recorded. If you're in the middle of something you've been pushing against — a relationship ending, a feeling you can't face, a truth you keep outrunning — this one is for you.
What Resistance Actually Is
In the spiritual community, the word resistance gets thrown around constantly. But Charla wants to make sure we're talking about the same thing — because resistance is not laziness, and it's not simply fear.
Resistance is the act of refusing to allow something to be what it is.
It's the mental wall you build between yourself and an uncomfortable truth. It's the part of you that looks at a painful situation and says: not now. Not ever. Not me. It's staying so busy that you never have to sit with a feeling long enough for it to become real.
And resistance shows up in more ways than most of us recognize:
Anger at someone you won't forgive — because forgiving them feels like letting them win
Numbing — with food, wine, scrolling, Netflix, anything that keeps the ache at a comfortable distance
Obsessive future planning — because being in the present moment is too intense
Toxic positivity — good vibes only, can't be mad, can't be hurt, smile through something that genuinely breaks your heart
All of it is resistance. All of it is energy. An enormous amount of energy — spent holding something back, pushing forward, never fully processing what actually happened.
And here's the thing about that energy: it doesn't just dissolve when you ignore it. It stores itself in your body. It waits.
Why We Do It — The Ego's Well-Meaning Lie
Resistance has an author. It's the ego.
Charla doesn't frame the ego as the villain — she's clear about that. The ego is the protector. The survival-oriented part of the mind that formed when you were young, that looked at pain and said: if I just don't let this in, it can't touch me. The ego is trying to keep you safe. It believes that feeling everything — the grief, the sadness, the anger, the shame — is the same as falling. That fully experiencing the pain means you've failed.
But here's the spiritual truth that changes everything: emotions are not threats. They are messengers.
And when you resist the messenger, it doesn't leave. It knocks. And it keeps knocking. And it knocks louder. Until eventually it's banging on the door, refusing to go away until it's been heard.
Carl Jung spoke of the shadow self — the parts we push into the dark because they feel too big, too shameful, too much. His teaching was simple and unrelenting: what you refuse to look at will constantly resurface. The anger you suppress turns into resentment. The grief you outrun turns into chronic numbness. The truth you avoid turns into a pattern that keeps finding you in every relationship, every job, every circumstance that mirrors the original wound.
Resistance as Stored Energy in the Body
This is the piece that Charla returns to again and again — and it's supported by both spiritual tradition and modern somatic science:
What you resist doesn't disappear. It lives in your body.
When a relationship ends and you resist the pain of releasing those energetic cords of attachment, you carry that lower vibrational energy with you. Into the next relationship. Into your work. Into your body — as tension, inflammation, exhaustion, illness.
And karmic patterns — the recurring themes that keep showing up across relationships, jobs, friendships — are, at their root, the lessons we keep resisting. The thing you haven't been willing to feel or face keeps returning in new costumes, new people, new situations, until you finally turn toward it.
Charla shares one of her own karmic lessons with striking vulnerability: complete and unconditional love for herself. Not as an achievement. Not contingent on performing, on having it together, on being the fitness professional with the studio who looks like she has it all figured out. Just love for herself as she is — spiritual, imperfect, human.
And she knows this is a lesson she has resisted. In relationship after relationship, in her fear of showing the parts of herself that weren't polished, in the times she allowed others' definitions of her to outweigh her own. The resistance kept bringing the lesson back. And it will keep bringing it back until it's learned.
The Near-Death Experience That Made a Promise
In one of the most sacred moments of this episode, Charla shares something she rarely speaks about publicly: a near-death experience at 21, during which she begged to come back.
Her father was very ill. She was not ready to leave before him. And in that moment between worlds, she was asked: what are you willing to do?
Her answer: I will share the message. The message of spirit. Of God.
That promise — made at the threshold between life and death — is the soul contract she carries. The reason this podcast exists. The reason she keeps showing up, keeps going inward, keeps sharing what she finds there.
Sharing that here, in the context of resistance, is profound: because resistance is ultimately resistance to our own soul's purpose. To the path we agreed to walk. And the soul will keep bringing us back to that agreement, one way or another, until we stop fighting it and begin to live it.
How to Work With Resistance Instead of Against It
Charla offers a practice that is as simple as it is transformative:
Become the observer of your thoughts.
When a resistant thought arises — when the anger comes, when the grief surfaces, when the uncomfortable truth knocks again — instead of white-knuckling through it or bypassing it with positivity, try this:
Step back. Notice the thought. And say, "Huh. That's interesting."
Not: I shouldn't be feeling this. Not: get it together. Just: huh. That's interesting. What do you need? How can I love you? How can I show up for you right now?
Then go into your self-care toolbox and give yourself what's needed. Not to fix the feeling. Not to make it stop. But to meet it, acknowledge it, and move through it — rather than spending enormous amounts of energy holding it at bay.
This is what allowing looks like. This is what releasing looks like. Not one grand moment of letting go, but the small, daily choice to stop fighting what is — and to trust that you are strong enough to feel it.
A Writing Practice to Begin
Charla closes with a simple, powerful invitation:
Write it down.
What are you currently resisting? Not what you think you should be resisting or what sounds spiritual to say you've released. The real thing. The uncomfortable thing. The feeling that keeps coming back.
Write it down. And then write beside it: how can I stop resisting this? What would it look like to turn toward it instead of away? What would it feel like to allow it to be exactly what it is, just for today?
That page is the beginning of the release.
Whatever you resist will persist. But whatever you allow, you can move through. And on the other side of that movement is something the resistance was always trying to protect you from finding: yourself.
✨ If this message resonates with you, please share this post with a friend, subscribe to the Collective Guidance podcast, and join me on Instagram @charligirl7 or @collectiveguidancepodcast . Let’s create a world where sensitivity is celebrated.
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Sending love, remembrance, faith, and creativity,
