When Surrender to the I AM Still Meets Resistance

There is a kind of spiritual searching that begins very early in life.

Not the casual curiosity of philosophy, but a hunger that sits in the bones. A longing to know whether God is real, whether love is real, whether the universe actually sees you.

For some of us that search began in church pews, in whispered prayers late at night, in the quiet promise that if we were devoted enough, pure enough, faithful enough, we would finally feel held by something greater than ourselves.

Prayer was once my refuge. I explored and found that different religious sects prayed differently, attached a range of rules such as different genders seating apart or no wearing of jewellery, but the dedication was always there in the search for divine connection.

I would at times speak to God the way a child speaks to a trusted presence, honestly and with hope. In those moments there was comfort. There was intimacy. There was the feeling that someone, somewhere, was listening.

And yet woven through that devotion was another message, subtle but persistent.

“You are not quite good enough”.

“You must try harder”.

“You must prove yourself worthy of grace”.

So the search intensified. Devotion became effort. Effort became discipline. Discipline sometimes became a quiet strain on the heart.

As time went on through leaving medical school, marriages, childbirths, divorces, three academic degrees, successful careers, I found that having discipline paid off, but my connection with the infusion of God’s love in day to day diminished.

There is a point in many spiritual lives when the old framework begins to crack. Not because the love for God disappears, but because the idea of separation begins to unravel, demanding attention. A time comes when separation no longer feels true.

The longing to know God remains. And the direction of the search changes.

Instead of reaching upward toward something outside ourselves, attention begins to turn inward, toward the silent awareness that is already here.

Over time something astonishing reveals itself. The connection we prayed to is not distant. It is not waiting for us somewhere beyond the sky. It is much closer in the very present moment.

Many traditions call this the “I AM.” Not as a concept, but as the simple fact of being.

And when this begins to stabilize in lived experience, life becomes quieter in a beautiful way. The mind softens its constant commentary. The body feels soothed and the heart relaxes. The world feels less like a battlefield and more like a field of unfolding intelligence, organising waves into matter with a determined flow of ease and power.

As this new knowledge of the I AM begins to unfold, there is another layer that often surprises people on this path.

As the mind recognizes the truth of Presence, the body sometimes remembers the old relationship with God, the God of times not too long ago. The God that was misunderstood by many and did not seem to infuse the lives of those who were supposedly connected with it. The old wounds experienced with this old God resurface - the dissatisfaction, the trauma, the pain, the disappointment.

And there can be a subtle hesitation around surrender. Not dramatic. May be just a quiet contraction. A whisper of caution in the nervous system that says, be careful with trust.

When this first appeared for me, I found it curious. After all the years of spiritual practice and the unmistakable evidence of Presence in my own life and work, why would there still be resistance?

The answer turned out to be simple and humbling.

The body still remembers it all. The disappointment dwells in a part.

For disappointment to exist, there must still be a belief, somewhere deep in the psyche, that God is still separate from me. That divine love might be conditional - something to be earned, something that was a struggle to trust. A connection that might lead again to loneliness.

These beliefs do not always live in the mind where they can be reasoned with. They live in the body, in the subtle tightening of the chest, spine, gut, in the hesitation before surrender.

The practice now is not to argue with these remnants, these parts. It is to meet them with Presence, with love and gentleness.

When that sense of unsafety appears, some self inquiry as Ramana Maharashi the sage once said, is a good practice, in a quiet question:

What must I believe is true in order to feel this?

The answers come gently.

Perhaps a belief that I am not enough.

Perhaps the fear of being alone again.

Perhaps it is about the ancient story that God is somewhere else and that I must reach toward that Presence rather than rest in it.

When these beliefs are seen clearly, something remarkable happens.

They begin to dissolve.

Not because they are forcefully removed, but because awareness itself is larger than the stories it illuminates.

What becomes obvious over time is that the “I AM” is not the God of fear or judgment that some of us inherited. It is not a distant authority keeping score of our worthiness.

It is the quiet intelligence of life itself. The Presence breathing us into being. The awareness through which every experience moves.

Surrender to this Presence does not make us smaller. It does not erase our humanity or our responsibilities. It allows us to live them with a deeper steadiness.

For many who walk a path of awakening after religious conditioning, the final reconciliation is not intellectual. The mind may already understand that separation was never real. The rhetoric was a fallacy and the experience was meant to reveal the truth in the long run.

The deeper healing happens in the body.

Trust returns slowly. Layer by layer. Belief by belief. Insight by insight. Until one day the resistance softens enough for something very simple to be felt.

Not effort. Not striving. Just the quiet recognition that the God we spent so many years searching for has been here all along.

Closer than prayer. Closer than breath.

Simply here. It was you all along.

Next Steps

Bola Abimbola is a Quantum Reiki Practitioner, an Akashic Record Practitioner, Speaker, Author, Teacher, and Energy Coach for High Performers, Host of the Daily Soul Bytes Show

If you are interested in experiencing clarity in your definitions, connecting from wholeness, and want to work with her as your coach, check out her work based on Psychology, Metaphysics, Trauma-Informed Quantum Reiki Energy Healing, and Light Language Channeling.

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