Befriending Resistance: A Response to The War of Art
In his 2002 book The War of Art, Stephen Pressfield argues that the greatest enemy of creativity is a force called Resistance.
Resistance, in Pressfield’s telling, appears whenever we try to do or create something with meaning and purpose. Its goal is simple: to prevent us from doing the creative work we’ve set out to do. Whenever you aim to paint a painting, write a musical, or start a business, Resistance will soon arise.
Resistance is nefarious. It can take many forms: fear, avoidance, doubt, distraction, addictions, even sex. Worse still, it appears in equal and opposite magnitude to the significance of the work we’re trying to do is. As Pressfield puts it,
The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.
When a friend and collaborator shared The War of Art with me six years ago, I was blown away. From the moment I read the word “Resistance,” I knew exactly what Pressfield was talking about. I had often struggled with the forces he describes, but until I read his book, I was unable to name them.
So I read the book multiple times, digested it, and began using the aggressive approach he suggests for defeating Resistance. Yet as I put his ideas into practice over the years, I began to have some doubts. Not about the existence of Resistance itself — frankly I think Pressfield deserves a Nobel Prize for naming it — but about Pressfield’s characterization of it, and especially about how to work with it.
Questions began to come up. Questions like: Is Resistance actually an “enemy?” Should we be approaching Resistance — a part of ourselves, after all — like we were Spartan warriors?
And, perhaps more deeply, is art truly a war?
Resistance is not your enemy
One of Pressfield’s a priori claims is that Resistance is an enemy. Which makes sense, after all, because it looks and feels like an enemy. Any energy that is trying to stop us from growing and becoming must be, in Pressfield’s words, “the most toxic force on the planet.” As he explains,
Resistance aims to kill. Its target is the epicenter of our being: our genius, our soul, the unique and priceless gift we were put on earth to give and that no one else has but us. Resistance means business. When we fight it, we are in a war to the death.
I deeply, profoundly understand this impulse to see a Resistance as an enemy. Indeed, for much of my life I have characterized many parts of myself — feelings, desires, voices in my head — as “bad,” “problematic,” “wrong,” and “unworthy.”
Many of us were taught to do this by our parents, and most humans in the West were born into a Judeo-Christian superculture that believes in original sin: innate badness in each of us. Even worse, those of us from historically marginalized groups have a more specific, personal senses of wrongness programmed into our very sense of self.
Yet looking externally brings us back to a central feature of Resistance that Pressfield elides: while Resistance may feel external, it’s not. Like every voice and impulse — including the desire to create — it is a part of us, a piece of our being. The impulses of fear and avoidance that constitute Resistance are not coming from external forces like people and institutions — although external forces may have led to the development of these impulses — but rather from deep inside our own psyches.
One of my own deepest insights in the past few years, gained through meditation, therapy, research, writing, and a lot of soul-searching, is that no part of any human is truly “bad.” Yes, there are parts of us that can be destructive, confusing, even murderous, and these parts include the anxieties and shame that keep us from achieving our goals: Resistance.
Yet as I’ve developed the skills, courage, and support to go inward and befriend those parts, it’s become clear to me that they’re not demons, they’re not enemy warriors, and they’re certainly not the stain of original sin.
Instead, these parts that form our Resistance, when met with tenderness, actually look and feel more like frightened children than aggressive adults. They’ve been hurt, neglected, perhaps even abused, and so they’re in pain. They’re acting out of fear and terror and neglect and discomfort, not out of a deep-seated “aim to kill.”
Resistance springs from the parts of us that need to be healed
Imagine you’re walking through the woods and you see a fox snarling aggressively at you, like it wants to attack. Then you turn a corner, and suddenly you see that the fox is snarling not because it wants to kill you, but because its foot is caught in a trap.
That story is used often by Tara Brach, the spiritual teacher and psychologist, to explain the relationship between aggression and its causes. When we look beneath the surface at the parts of ourselves that seem like they’re trying to harm us, we invariably find that they are in pain.
To be clear, this is not to say that there aren’t enemies out there who need to be fought. Sharon Salzberg, a Buddhist who has written books on lovingkindness, tells of traveling in a rickshaw through Calcutta. While in an unfamiliar alley, a large, drunken man attacked and tried to pull her out of the rickshaw.
She was terrified that he would rape and kill her. Fortunately a friend traveling in the rickshaw pushed the man away, and they sped to safety. Later, when she later told her venerated monastic teacher about the event, he responded, “Oh, Sharon, with all the lovingkindness in your heart, you should have taken your umbrella and hit the man over the head with it!”
Being kind to parts of ourselves — and to others — does not mean ignoring real threats to our emotional and physical safety.
But that’s not what Resistance and the “war of art” is about. Internal threats to our artistic and spiritual growth are not the same as external threats to our safety – even if they often look and feel alike.
Instead, I have come to believe that Resistance is driven by the wounded parts inside of us: the hurt, neglected, and under-developed parts that, ironically, will be healed by the very creative act they’re struggling to resist.
Now this idea may at first seem counter-intuitive. After all, is fighting our creativity — resisting it — a logical way for a part of our psyche to behave, when that part would be healed by the very creativity it is resisting?
No. It is not logical. Yet we all know that in the deepest recesses of our psyches, we are not logical beings. Indeed, these “resistant” parts are acting much more like hurt and frightened children, or even animals, than rational adults. In the language of neuroscience, these parts have roots in the primitive, flight-or-flight responses of our autonomic nervous system and in deep cerebral structures like the amygdala.
To say resistance is the enemy, therefore, is like saying that an upset child or frightened pet is an enemy. Parts of us engage in resistance not because they are trying to destroy us, but because they are trying to protect us…at least they think they are. The irony is that in trying to keep us safe, they end up keeping us small. While these parts exist because they developed to protect us in the past—perhaps in childhood—today, instead of protecting us they keep us from growing.
So, how, then, do you work with Resistance? Especially if you are an artist who wants to create?
Approaching resistance with a binary mindset is limiting
Pressfield’s approach to handling resistance is binary. His book offers two options: either collapse in its face and fail to create, or defeat it by “turning pro.”
For Pressfield, “turning pro” means approaching your craft like a professional. Be disciplined. Do the work every day, whether you feel like it or not. Detach yourself from the outcome. Know that sometimes you will create great things but that often, all you will do is, to quote Stephen King, “shovel shit.”
On the whole, Pressfield’s approach could be described as “Don’t let your feelings about the work get in the way of actually doing the work.”
I would agree, strongly, that there is profound wisdom in taking a professional approach to your creative endeavors. Indeed, every productive artist I admire approaches their craft like a professional. Composer Igor Stravinsky, for example, prided himself on keeping “banker’s hours.” (According to a college professor of mine, Stravinsky also opened a bottle of port each day after composing and went to bed when it was empty — but that’s another story.)
Yet refusing to let emotions like fear, shame, and avoidance run the show does not necessarily mean avoiding them completely, or “defeating” them. Our emotions are there for a reason; as a therapist once said to me, “Emotions are information.”
Personally, I’ve found that in my own creative work, whenever I summon the courage and take the time to listen to my emotions — especially fear and shame — instead of ignoring them or collapsing beneath them, they end up offering profound insights that actually help make the project better, teach me something about myself, and lead to healing.
Approach resistance as if you were an authoritative parent, not a soldier
With that in mind, I would offer artists and other creatives a third way towards handling resistance, one rooted in decades of research on parenting.
Diana Baumrind, a psychologist, famously described three parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. Authoritarian parents tend to be highly controlling and demanding, while permissive parents fail to set boundaries and let their children run wild.
Pressfield takes the same approach to resistance as an authoritarian parent might: fight it, defeat it, control it, don’t let it get in your way. The other approach he describes — allowing Resistance to run the show — is essentially permissive.
Pressfield is not wrong that if you take a permissive approach to Resistance, you won’t get much creative work done. But there is another way.
According to Baumrind, there is a third type of parent — authoritative — who can be nurturing while also setting high expectations and clear boundaries. Authoritative parents tend to combine a caring attitude with structure, communication, and consistent limit-setting. Not surprisingly, research has shown that children raised by authoritative parents develop more competence and self-confidence. They also tend to be happy, capable, and successful.
After reading The War of Art, I spent years trying Pressfield’s disciplined, authoritarian approach to writing. Indeed, I had already been taking a similar approach (without much success) before reading the book. Pressfield’s work simply encouraged me to double down and push myself harder down a Spartan path.
What I found, however, was that it didn’t work for me. Trying to defeat my Resistance led to burnout, and it didn’t lead me to create art that I was proud of. The warrior approach ended up narrowing my focus in unproductive ways. Instead of befriending and listening to inner voices that might have helped me, I spent years focused on projects that seemed like they needed to be done, but weren’t where my heart really was.
In the past two years, however, I’ve tried taking a more fun, flexible approach, which has worked much better for me. Tara Brach often suggests that we “attend and befriend” all parts of ourselves; that’s the approach I’ve taken to Resistance.
On a practical level, this means that before I start writing something, I make an effort to tune into the fear, anxiety, and shame that arises. Sometimes that looks like meditating on it and sitting with the feelings of anxiety, perhaps practicing RAIN. Or I’ll do some journaling and let the anxieties bubble up, even asking them “What are you afraid of?” After I write, I’ll often do some postgaming, returning to the fear and shame to see how they’re doing and if they have any insights to offer.
Do I do these practices every time I sit down to write? No. Sometimes I forget, and sometimes I don’t have time. In fact, typing these words, I’m realizing I didn’t sit with the Resistance that came up as I started penning this article — and I probably should have!
As with parenting, however, working successfully with Resistance over the long term does not require perfection, which is, of course, impossible. Instead, it asks for a blend of approaches — perhaps even including Pressfield’s Spartan approach at times — and allows for mistakes.
How has this worked out for me? Well, in the last year I finished my first book, started my first newsletter, and have found my writing style become much more personal and less stiff. I like what I’m doing, I’m getting more done, and my work is all starting to look and feel more like “me” when I’m not anxious or holding back. This is all coming, by the way, after several very dry years in my writing life.
Understanding physical vs. spiritual warfare
I’ll close this article by coming back to one of the questions posed at the beginning: Is art truly a war?
To answer that, I’d like to draw a distinction between two types of warfare: physical and spiritual.
In physical warfare, which is what we usually think of as “war,” the goal is to vanquish your enemy. Bodies, lives, and property — physical manifestations of being— are all at stake. WWII was this kind of war, as is life on the streets, the football field, or in a high school cafeteria. Even in the realm of the arts, trying to make a Hollywood blockbuster or Broadway hit might be considered a this kind of war.
The other type of war is spiritual. We all fight spiritual battles day in and day out, whether we are aware of them or not. Although physical war is often used as a metaphor for understanding spiritual strife, in reality a battle fought in the heart is not as simple as one fought on a battlefield.
To give you just one hint of that complexity: one of the paradoxes of spiritual “war” is that, unlike in physical war, you ultimately win by surrendering. Maybe it’s surrender to a divine presence, to the work of art that’s struggling to be born within you, or – as Eckhart Tolle suggests – surrender to the present moment itself. Letting go can be so difficult, yet on the spiritual battlefield, it’s often our greatest ally and the source of our deepest strength.
Gandhi had a name for that kind of strength: “Satyagraha” or “soul force.” It’s the power that he used to unite the fractious Indian subcontinent and defeat the British Empire, despite British economic and military superiority. Soul force is why peaceful, non-violent protesters have time and again prevailed against violent, oppressive regimes.
Art is not a physical war. There are deep, profound conflicts involved in its making, but they are spiritual struggles, not physical ones. (The marketplace for art is a very different story. Here I’m focused on the creative process of making art, not the economic process of selling it.)
While I certainly agree that you can legitimately describe art as a war, the problem for an artist is that if war is your only metaphor for your craft, you’re setting yourself up for unhappiness. Your enemy is, and always will be, you. If art is nothing but a war, your life will be like the world of Orwell’s 1984: at perpetual war with itself.
I prefer to think of art as a journey, specifically a healing journey, a journey towards wholeness. As my friend Shakina Nayfack once put it, “It’s not how you make the piece, but how the piece makes me you.”
Art-as-journey doesn’t mean that art is never a war, and it certain doesn’t mean that struggle and conflict are not at the heart of its creation. Instead it means that, just as the ultimate goal of physical war is diplomacy, improving your position at the bargaining table, the aim of war in art is ultimately healing, growth, surrender, and peace.
That, for me, is a struggle I can live with.
