It’s been a little while since I’ve blogged. I’ve felt blocked. Last week I started to write and nothing seemed to come out right. Usually when I write I don’t think much about what I’m putting down. I just start typing and everything sort of comes out. Lately that hasn’t happened. It’s felt like work. It’s felt hard, so I haven’t gravitated toward expression.
I know that when I feel stuck there is usually something that I’m grieving that I need to let go of. That I need to forgive. That I need to express. I often feel stuck because I am relying on a past experience to dictate my future. I am already telling myself that it’s going to be bad again. So I don’t want to move forward.
I’ve been reading a book called “Shift Happens” – by Robert Holden, Ph.D. It’s really good. Short chapters with points that just hit me between the eyes. I feel like I need to go back and read it again. Just to take in all the information and insights that the book is making. Here is an excerpt on being stuck: “One of the most important things that I have learned about the “psychology of stuck” is that being stuck is really a form of self-sabatoge. People who are stuck are usually being held back by a riot of self-attack and self-doubt. The ego is on the rampage, looting the mind of vision, courage, and trust… Whenever you feel stuck, it is a sign you are not in your true power. This is why when you feel stuck, you also feel helpless, frustrated, depressed, and angry.”
I can certainly relate to that. What the book calls the battle between the ego and your true power the Bible refers to as the battle between the flesh and the Spirit. It hit me recently that is exactly where I am. I think whenever I feel tension I immediately look for either an answer or an escape. I either want to figure it out or get away from it even if it means escaping my own head. I want to believe that transformation should happen quickly or in even stages. So it’s hard for me to feel secure when I cannot easily identify what is happening. And truthfully, I haven’t been able to figure out the up and down space that I’ve been in over the last several months.
All I know is that on some level I feel my spirit changing. I notice that when situations arise that would have really thrown me before, I don’t respond the same way. I feel more peace. Yet, at the same time I am afraid to go with peace. It feels too unfamiliar. So then I become sad or angry. Mornings are usually the tell tale sign of where I am because whatever I haven’t dealt with seems to surface when I sleep and I wake up with it. Yet, over these past several months I haven’t been in a grove. Mornings are not always telling of what is unresolved. In some cases they have merely reflected old patterns of thinking and feeling. It’s as though I’ve gotten more healing and my inner me doesn’t know what to do with that. It almost feels like I’m two different people.
This has given me an entirely different view of “being stuck”. I always have thought of being stuck as a place where growth isn’t happening. A place of stagnation. The title of the chapter in “Shift Happens” that I referred to earlier is – “You are never stuck – just afraid.” It occurred to me how much sense that makes. As a friend told me, I’m fishing in a pond and I’m being called to go fish in the ocean. I just feel very safe with the pond, it’s familiar. That is my stuck. It’s fear.
So what is your ocean? What pond are you fishing in? Where are you being called to a greater place in life that you are afraid to enter in to? What transformation is happening that you are resisting? What emotional wound have you not been willing to heal? What is keeping you? I will look to answer those questions in my own life.
