You Were Never Meant To Live a Small Life

John Doe Tweet

The Weight Was Never Permanent: How to Finally Release What's Been Holding You Back

Welcome to Nayla’s Lab – a place where you can be completely free without the need to filter yourself for the sake of others!

There’s a word that doesn’t get talked about enough in the self-help world, and it’s the word that explains almost everything — why your goals feel out of reach, why you keep circling the same patterns, why you can want something with your whole chest and still not be able to move toward it.

That word is resistance.

Resistance is the invisible wall. It’s the state of being blocked — not by circumstance, not by lack of ability, but by something happening underneath. Something in the way you think, the way you’ve learned to protect yourself, the experiences that left marks you didn’t even realise were still running the show.

I love this quote from Esther Hicks that perfectly explains resistance process:

“When people ask us how long does it take for something to manifest, we say: it takes as long as it takes you to release the resistance. Could be 30 years, could be 40 years, could be a week. Could be tomorrow afternoon.”

This means this isn’t a life sentence. It means the thing standing between you and the life you actually want isn’t time or luck or whether you’re the kind of person things work out for. It’s resistance to the very thing you want. And resistance can be released.

Here’s how.

Remove the Negative Thoughts and Beliefs

Negative thoughts and beliefs are sneaky. They don’t always announce themselves as harmful — they just become the background noise of your life. The quiet voice that says I can’t do this, things never work out for me, who am I to get this. You stop noticing them because they’ve so familiar to you. They feel like truth instead of what they actually are — patterns. Learned responses. Stories that were handed to you so early that you didn’t realise they weren’t yours.

I have sat with beliefs about myself that I’d been carrying for decades without ever questioning them. And the moment I actually stopped and asked wait — is this actually true? — something shifted. Because most of the time, the answer is no. It’s not true. It’s just familiar.

The first step is to catch them. When a negative thought surfaces, write it down. Don’t fight it, don’t judge yourself for having it — just look at it. Hold it up to the light. Ask yourself: is this based on fact, or is this an assumption? Is this mine, or did someone hand this to me?

Then try this — and I mean actually try it because it’s more powerful than it sounds. Take the belief and finish this sentence: I believe this thought because…

You will be stunned. What comes up after that “because” is where the real work is. That’s where the root is. That’s where you find out this belief was never really about you at all.

Once you’ve identified it, you can start to replace it. Not with toxic positivity — not with affirmations that feel hollow because they’re too far from where you are right now. Start smaller. Instead of jumping from I can’t do this to I am unstoppable, try I am capable of learning and growing. Something your nervous system can actually believe. And repeat it. Genuinely, repeatedly, until it starts to feel more like home than the old one did.

If you’re struggling to even catch the thoughts as they’re happening, read my post on How to Slow Down Your Thinking first — it’ll help you create enough space to notice what’s actually going on in there.

Stop Making Fear of the Unknown the Enemy

Here’s the truth about uncertainty — it’s not going anywhere. Life is uncertain. It always has been and it always will be. And resistance loves to use that fact against you. It convinces you that staying still is safer than stepping forward into something you can’t fully see yet.

I know this feeling intimately. I’ve talked myself out of things that were meant for me because the outcome wasn’t guaranteed. Because I couldn’t control what happened next. And what I lost in those moments wasn’t just opportunity — it was trust in myself.

The antidote isn’t certainty. You’re not going to get that. The antidote is presence.

When fear of the unknown kicks in, bring yourself back to right now. Not six months from now, not the worst case scenario your brain is so good at constructing — right now, this moment, what is actually true. Break whatever feels overwhelming into the smallest possible next step. Not the whole staircase. One step.

Mindfulness genuinely helps here — and I don’t mean in a vague, sit-cross-legged way. I mean the practical act of noticing when your mind has left the building and bringing it back. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle changed something in me around this. If you haven’t read it, it belongs on your list.

And when you can manage it — reframe uncertainty not as a threat but as information. As the space where something new can enter. The life you want isn’t in the place you can already see clearly. It’s just around the corner you haven’t turned yet.

Also worth reading — my post Become Friends with Your Inner Critic, because fear and that critical inner voice are almost always working together.

“Your beliefs, either positive or negative, helpful or hurtful, largely determine everything you do and how you do it.” — Brian Tracy

Heal the Past Experiences That Are Still Quietly Running Things

This one is the deepest layer. And I want to be careful here because I know what it’s like to have things in your past that feel too heavy to look at directly. I’ve been there. I know what it is to have experiences that changed the shape of you — that quietly installed beliefs about your worth, your safety, what you deserve — without you ever consenting to it.

Those experiences don’t just live in your memory. They live in your body. They live in the way you react to certain things before your brain has even caught up. They live in the patterns you keep finding yourself in and wondering why.

The first thing I want you to offer yourself is self-compassion. Not because it’s a nice thing to say, but because the way you speak to yourself about your past either keeps the wound open or begins to close it. You are not defined by what happened to you. You are not the sum of your hardest seasons. And the parts of you that were shaped in pain — they were doing their best to protect you. They don’t need your judgment. They need your understanding.

Write things down. I cannot tell you how many times putting something on paper has taken its power away. When we leave painful experiences untouched inside us they grow. They take up more space than they deserve. Getting them out of your head and onto a page — without editing, without performing — is one of the most quietly radical things you can do for yourself.

[Add your journal link here]

If the weight feels too big to carry alone — please don’t carry it alone. Talking to someone you trust, finding a community of women who understand, or working with a therapist are not signs of weakness. They are acts of self-respect. I recommend Talkspace as a genuinely accessible and trusted place to start if you’re not sure where to go.

And finally — forgiveness. Not for them. For you. Forgiveness doesn’t mean what happened was acceptable. It doesn’t mean you’re minimising it or pretending it didn’t hurt. It means you are choosing to stop letting it take up residence in your present. It means reclaiming the energy you’ve been spending on carrying it. That energy belongs to your future, not your past.

Nayla

Founder of Nayla’s Lab – A Space for Women Rising