Duration: 14 min
I had a student recently who has tried so many things, and still feels like nothing is moving. She can’t quite say why. I don’t think she’s alone in that.
Feeling stuck isn’t a crisis. It’s a niggling feeling that something isn’t quite right, and most of us try to drown it out or make a plan to fix it. In this episode I take that mechanism apart, and look at what the feeling is actually asking for.
Read the transcript
I’m Catherine and I teach the Inner Practice, which is what I call the yoga for the mind. It’s about the workings of the mind and the emotions, and how this is a body and mind connection.
And today I want to look at the feeling of being stuck. I had a student of mine who tried so many things, but feels like it’s not going forward. Nothing is changing in her life. And I think a lot of us are stuck at a certain point in our lives, and I just want to take this mechanism a little bit apart.
Feeling stuck is actually not a crisis. It’s just kind of a niggling feeling we have inside of us. Something just doesn’t feel quite right, but we function perfectly during the day. We see people and everything works, we go and do our jobs. But when there’s a little bit of a quiet moment, up comes this feeling that you can’t really grasp what it is, just something. And then sometimes a question pops into the head, like: is this it? Is this all? Is that what I can expect for the rest of my life?
And when we have those niggling feelings, one thing we do is we drown them out. So we doom-scroll, we binge-watch, or we distract ourselves somehow, so we don’t need to feel it.
And another way is we go and create those big to-do lists. All those things like, oh, if I just do my meditation every morning then everything will be good. If I just do my yoga practice every day everything will be fine. If I do this course, that course will solve it. That book will tell me.
And every time we live in a fantasy like that, of an upcoming course, or that fantasy of every day being on the meditation cushion, that niggling feeling calms down, because we have a plan, right? But then the next day comes and the plan falls through, and that feeling is back, but it’s now accompanied by this feeling of: oh, I failed. I said I’m going to do it and I haven’t.
So it piles up, layer by layer, and there’s a lot of shoulds and a lot of pressure we start putting on ourselves, which honestly is completely unhelpful, and all it does is we feel even more stuck.
So what’s the way out of it? Why are we doing this all?
We just don’t want to feel uncomfortable feelings. It’s as easy as that. And our brain is not just trained, it’s actually its purpose to protect us. To protect us from uncertainty, from danger, from the negative feelings. And our brain wants also to control outcomes, so it predicts the future based on your past.
So let’s say you have that niggling feeling, and the brain knows that doom-scrolling or making plans will help getting rid of it. So the brain knows: okay, if I do one of those two things, that uncomfortable feeling goes away and the person is okay. So that’s what the brain then does. Okay, now do doom-scrolling, or think about the course. But solved has been nothing.
So this is just the nature of our brain, and we just need to accept it. And when we want to change, the brain just sees danger, because we go completely into an unknown field. The brain can’t control it, can’t predict the outcome. So it’s really going to talk us out of it, right? It’s like: oh no, you can’t do this, too much effort, you tried already. We know all this negative self-talk, and literally we talk ourselves out of it.
So the way through it is actually just to sit with the uncomfortable feeling, just acknowledging it. Because the being stuck comes out of all the pressure we’re putting on top of it. All the shoulds that we’re telling ourselves.
Something wants to change in us, right? Something doesn’t feel right. It’s our nature, we want to grow, we want to change. But then the brain is like: ooh, change, change is dangerous. So no, you’re going to scratch that right away.
So what about if you just sit here and you just feel that discomfort? It doesn’t mean we have to do drastic changes. We don’t have to act right away either. We can just sit and feel like, okay, something in me is longing for more.
You can feel this in your body. The body speaks the truth. Every sensation you feel is a real sensation, it’s a real feeling. So find that feeling. Where in your body do you have it? If you’re a yoga practitioner, then you have that connection to your body already, because you’ve trained it. So try to sense it, and if you have difficulty feeling it, start doing body scans on a regular basis.
Because when you have that niggling feeling, and instead of distracting yourself you just sit with what’s there, you actually start noticing it’s not going to change your whole life. It is just a feeling, that would like to be taken seriously, that would like to be looked at, and not pushed down. Every feeling you’re pushing down will come back up one way or the other.
So just feel it, sense it. There’s discomfort, I can feel it, maybe in the chest or maybe in the belly. Acknowledge it, without having the urge to solve it. Again, if you try to solve it, you come up with the next plan, with the next course.
And you probably noticed that yourself. When you think about solutions outside of yourself, you always doubt it. Or you make pros and cons lists. Whatever the brain tries to solve when it’s about lack or emotions, it just never sticks.
So our job is to have the courage to stay with that emotion and just sit with it, without narrating it, without creating a story or coming up with a solution.
And the next step is taking all the pressure off. All the “I have to”, “I should”, “if I only”, all this. I always say, take all the pressure, all the shoulds, put it in a box, put the lid on, and push it to the side. You can always take it out later. But for this, just put it aside, ignore it, and just stay, and try to endure that sensation of the niggling feeling, of feeling stuck. And then see what happens.
Because once you start listening to what’s happening, and you’re creating that space by taking pressure away, all of a sudden solutions will come up. You will have ideas, ideas that don’t come from the head. It’s not the next course. It’s more like: I need to be heard, I need to be seen. Things like that might come up.
Once you can acknowledge what’s there, once you are clear what this is about. And I’m not talking about story, I’m not talking about the why. If you have this feeling of I’m stuck, something is not quite right, it doesn’t matter the story behind it, the why. What matters is what’s here right now. What is it telling you right now?
Don’t analyse. Just work with what’s there. So listen, feel it, stay with it, allow it to exist, and then just see what comes up.
It works. So the less shoulds we put on ourselves, the less pressure, the less fantasies about finding any solution outside of ourselves, the more space you create in yourself. The more space we have, the more we can listen to what’s really going on.
It is having the courage to face and to feel what’s happening inside you. If you ignore it year after year after year, it will come up one way or the other.
So if you feel stuck in your life, try to sit with it instead of looking for outside solutions, for outside plans. Just sit with it. Put all the shoulds, all the pressure into that box, put the lid on, put it to the side. And then just see what comes up.
Being able to feel and stay with discomfort is a muscle we can train. And this is the muscle that gets our resilience up.
Life will always throw a curveball. The question is just, do you have to grab it, or can you just sit with it?
