This piece comes from Episode 01 of ‘the Inner Practice’ podcast.
I have a little trick for when you feel stuck in your life. Take every ‘should’, every ‘if-only’, every bit of pressure you’re putting on yourself, and put it in a box. Put the lid on, push it to the side. Nothing is being thrown away, you can take it all out again later if you want to, but for now it isn’t allowed anywhere near you.
By the time most people reach me, that box is already full. A student of mine has tried so many things to get unstuck, to move her life forward, and none of it made lasting change. Not because she hasn’t put in the effort, but because effort was never really the problem.
Feeling stuck isn’t a crisis. It’s a niggling sensation that turns up in the quiet moments, saying ‘is this it? Is this all there is?’, while everything on the outside still runs perfectly well. We normally drown it out, doom-scrolling, keeping busy, or plan it away instead, the meditation we’ll finally do every morning, the course, the book that’s going to explain everything. The planning works for a day or two, and then we fail at the thing we promised ourselves we’d do, and the niggling feeling is back, with the added weight of having let ourselves down.
None of this is a character flaw. It’s just the brain doing its job, which isn’t happiness, it’s protection, and distraction or a plan are the two moves it already knows will bring the discomfort down, for a while, so it keeps offering them, whether or not either one has ever actually solved anything.
The way through isn’t a better plan, it’s sitting with the discomfort itself. Find where it actually lives in the body, the chest, the belly, wherever it is, and just observe the sensation, without reaching for a reason. The body doesn’t lie, and it doesn’t need a story attached to be worth taking seriously. Something in us wants more from life, and the stuck feeling is what that wanting feels like before fear buries it under ‘shoulds’, before we go looking for the answer somewhere outside ourselves instead.
This is what the box is actually for. Once the shoulds and the self-imposed pressure are somewhere else, and we’re not trying to explain or solve the feeling, just staying with it, there’s room for something to happen. What comes up is rarely the next course. It’s quieter than that, ‘I need to be heard’, ‘I need to be seen’, the kind of answer the head would never have produced on its own.
Staying with discomfort instead of needing to fix it immediately is a muscle, and it strengthens with use. Life keeps throwing things at us, that part was never optional. The only real question is whether we have to catch every single one, or whether we can sit with it for a while.
