The problem with what “resonates” with you

10 januari 2020

(Teal Swan) If you have spent any time at all in modern spiritual circles, you know that the indicator that people use for whether something is true or whether something is right for them is whether it ‘resonates’ with them. When something resonates, it produces or is filled with a deep, full, reverberating sound. We could say that when this happens, the sound vibration is expanded or amplified.

The problem with what “resonates” with you

When a person says that something ‘resonates’ with them, they are essentially saying that something is a match to their current experience, awareness, perspective or conscious desires. Because of this, it causes an amplification of their own personal vibration, which includes their current experience, awareness, perspective and desires etc. And because of this, when something resonates, it holds meaning to the person. We could say that when something resonates with you, it is a deeply validating experience. This is why we experience it as a confirmation or a ‘yes’. It is also why to the opposite, when something does not match our current experience, awareness, perspective or desires, we experience it as an invalidation, a contradiction to our sense of self and/or reality and therefore a ‘no’.

I find it is amusing that people only say ‘that resonates with me’ when they have either already accepted a painful truth or when they are referring to a positive resonance pattern within themselves. When something that a person encounters is a match to something within that person that they are desperately trying to avoid, it will also cause them to resonate, but this time it is amplification of the pain they are trying to avoid. It will strike a negative cord instead of a positive one, like a trigger for example.If you sit with this understanding of what it means to resonate with something, it is easy to see that the tool of ‘what resonates with me’ is a double-edged sword. For example, on the one hand, if something does resonate with you, it can indicate that something is in alignment with you or your true purpose, is true, is a validation, is a match to your desires or that something is compatible to you or that you are understood etc. But it can also mean that someone is reinforcing one of your shadows, enabling you, agreeing with what doesn’t serve you, offering a solution that allows you to avoid what you want to avoid, solidifying your limited perspective etc.

On the one hand, when something does not resonate with you, it can indicate that you have encountered a mis-truth, someone is being inauthentic, are not understood, something is out of alignment, something is incompatible to you, it is not a match to your desires etc. But it can also mean that you are being introduced to an experience that will alter your current perspective, an awareness that will break you free but that invalidates the limited awareness you currently hold, your conscious mind is being confronted with something in your subconscious that you don’t want to see, you are being offered something that will serve you immensely, but that is the opposite of avoidance, someone is expressing something about themselves that you refuse to accept, your pre-existing programming is being undone, you are being introduced to a truth that is inconsistent with your highly limited grasp of truth etc.

The problem with “what resonates with you” is that when something resonates with you, you are saying that it holds the same frequency as you currently do. This implies agreement instead of discordance. And you know that discordance does not always imply that something is false or wrong. For example, as it applies to thoughts, when someone’s thoughts are in consonance with our own thoughts on a subject, we agree with one another, we feel we are in synch and so their thoughts ‘resonate’ with us.

Limits of relying upon “what resonates with me”

So you can understand the limits of relying upon “what resonates with me”, I’m going to give a short list of examples:

A person is hyper controlling. This person is rigid in her thoughts, words and actions. The vibration of willow is the opposite of this; it is a master of allowing. This person says they dislike willow trees and despite having a big problem with headaches, has an allergy to willow bark extract. She will say that willow doesn’t ‘resonate’ with her. When in fact, willow is the exact energy she needs. What she feels coming up within her any time she is near willow, is her resistance to being allowing.
A man is in a relationship with a woman who is using him for money. She uses sex and affection to keep him committed to her and loves to spend time with him so he will take her on fancy getaways. Everyone around him can see this. When they bring it to his attention he says, “No, that doesn’t resonate with me, because she is so affectionate and complains when I’m not around”.
A woman is raised in a society that says the only way for her to be of value to the society and to be seen as good is to be a full time mother. She has to deny the part of her that wanted to be a lawyer. She ‘sacrificed this part’ to be a mother and says she did so out of love for her children. The children can feel her resentment and can feel that she made the choice so she could be seen as a good mother, after all she demands their gratitude and loyalty for the ways she sacrifices herself all the time. When they tell her, “Mom, you never wanted to be a mother” she will say, “that doesn’t resonate with me, I have given my whole life up to be a mother.”
A black person goes into a job interview and does not get selected for the job. The reality is that the company decided to hire someone less qualified because they were a friend of a friend of the boss’s. Someone this person knows well says, you know why they didn’t hire you; it’s cause that company is full of crackers. Because of this person’s experience with racism, this explanation will immediately resonate with him or her. They will take that ‘resonance’ to mean that this explanation is right.
A person has grown up in a Christian community. They have a particularly hard time in life and so they start praying. They hear a voice speaking back to them, offering them comfort. This voice is in fact their own voice; it is a coping part of themselves that is contradicting their negative thought with positive thought. When someone says this is what is happening, they will say, “No, that doesn’t resonate with me, it was Jesus speaking to me.”
A person goes to a self-help seminar. They have been hating the idea of facing and resolving any of what happened to them in their past. Seeing as how the past can’t be un-done anyway, they see no reason to look at what their parents may have done wrong. After all, their parents didn’t know any better back then. At this seminar, someone on stage says, “Do not live in the past. If you think about the past, it re-activates it. Just stop. Let your past life be a past life. Instead, become intensely focused on what you want as if it is happening right now.” This person will immediately say “Oh my god, that resonates with me sooo much.”

You get the point. We could be here all day going over scenarios where we can clearly see that ‘something resonating with someone’ has nothing to do with whether is it true or right.

What you need to become the most aware of is that anything that is buried deep enough within your subconscious mind, anything you are in deep enough denial of, will not positively resonate with you. Either it will elicit no reaction, or it will trigger you, meaning it will resonate with something you are trying desperately to avoid.

Let me say this in another way, if you are interested in awareness, you cannot rely upon something resonating with you as the indicator of whether it is true or right. By definition, your subconscious is what you don’t know that you don’t know. So it is more likely that anything in your subconscious, including anything you have suppressed, denied, disowned or rejected will not resonate with you. To expand your awareness around this, you would benefit by watching two of my videos, the first titled: The Biggest Barrier to Awareness and the second titled: Self Concept, The Enemy of Awakening (click here to watch).

You should pay attention any time something does or doesn’t resonate with you and the question you should be asking (and open to any number of potential answers for relative to either scenario) is: WHY. Why does it or why doesn’t it resonate with me? When something resonates or doesn’t, that resonance or dissonance is always telling you something. Just remember that your interpretation of what it is telling you is potentially not on point. To commit to awareness, is to deeply consider all perspectives. It is to treat the reactions within your body, including resonance or dissonance as an alarm bell calling us to curiosity, to open questioning, to further self and universal awareness. And never forget that as you change and expand, what will resonate with you will change.

Source: Teal Swan