Feeling stuck? Here's 5 ways to unstick yourself
There’s been many points in my life when I’ve felt stuck and unable to free myself.
Sometimes it’s been work situations where I haven’t been able to find my escape, and other times I’ve been stuck in personal circumstances and have gone round and round in circles trying to free myself.
I wanted to write about feeling stuck because it’s such a common theme for sensitive souls who struggle with boundaries and who tend to overthink everything instead of letting their intuition guide them forwards.
So, I’m basically talking about myself.
I work with a lot of clients who feel stuck in their circumstances and trapped in a life that no longer feels in alignment with them. It might be work, a job, marriage, a partnership or a way of living that cannot provide the joy and fulfilment it once did.
So, if you’re feeling stuck in a situation that doesn’t feel freeing for your soul (and I’ve written about soul suppression before), let me share some of the ways you can free yourself and fall back into alignment with where you’re truly meant to be.
No. 1 Find your perspective
The first thing that happens, from experience, when we feel stuck in circumstances that feel out of our control, is that we tend to get so bogged down in the details of what’s going on that we lose all perspective.
The ego really doesn’t like to be out of control, with anything, so it will do whatever it can to try and gain back control. And one of the ways it usually does this is through trying to out-think the problem.
As we do this, we tend to fall into the deep, dark cavern of the mind which traps us with trick mirrors and false exits, like a creepy fun house at a funfair, and we get lost in the labyrinth and lose all sense of perspective of the situation.
What we need to do is to pull ourselves out and take a deep breath of fresh air, take our time, and slowly lean back from the situation we find ourselves in. Everything feels worse in our mind, we tend to blow everything out of proportion and imagine the worst will happen, with no perspective of reality.
If you find yourself thinking “what if that happens?” then you might be stuck in a loop or future thinking and anxiety which can feel pretty uncomfortable until you slowly begin to bring yourself back into the present moment and see the situation for what it really is.
No. 2 Learn to lean back
One of the best ways to free ourselves from feeling stuck is to take a break from what it is we’re trying to free ourselves from. This may seem counterintuitive but there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to solve a problem and getting nowhere.
When we feel stuck it’s natural to have the urge to try and free ourselves as soon as we can because the circumstances are so limiting for ourselves and our soul. Yet the more we push, force and grapple with the problem, the less open it becomes in revealing its answers.
This is all about the ancient practice of aparigraha, the art of letting go. This is a beautiful way to live and I’ve written all about it here as I found it such a powerful way of understanding how to let go.
We’ve all heard the annoying phrase ‘what we resist, persists’ and sometimes this is what happens. The more we want to escape something, the more it holds us in its clutches.
When we’re so deep in a problem, trying to figure our way out of it, it can be exhausting and completely pulls us out of reality and into the quicksand of trying to figure out a solution before time runs out.
I know a lack of time can be really scary but sometimes we need to remember that leaning into trust can allow us to gently let go of trying to fix the problem. And you may just be surprised by what happens when you do just that.
No. 3 Ask for help and talk about it
Another way we can extract ourselves from the overthinking mind, that keeps us so stuck, is to consciously and proactively free our mind from the overthinking and overwhelm.
One of nicest ways to do this is to speak to someone about what’s going on, not so they can add their opinion, but so they can hold space and listen to you, because when we bottle everything up it often causes our own suffering that can make life much harder and more painful than it has to be.
We think we’re being strong by keeping it all to ourselves but more often than not this is because our ego is thinking it can handle it all on its own and that it doesn’t need any help. This is just a fear of vulnerability but there is huge power in talking, and when we soften and allow someone else to hold and care for us then it’s amazing how different we can feel afterwards.
Just remember, you are not a burden on others by sharing your problems. Every client I’ve ever seen feels like a burden when they share their problems, but if the people around you love you, which I’m sure they do, they will want to be there to support you.
When we’re in a state of crisis it can be the hardest thing to talk to someone about, but that’s what friends and family are for, and if they don’t feel supportive enough to listen, find someone who can. Rest assured there’s many capable and compassionate people out there waiting to help.
No. 4 Let go of limiting thinking
There’s a few numbers in the Soul Contract work that are all about feeling stuck, rigid and blocked, and one of the main culprits is the 6 (and if you haven’t downloaded your free chart, you can do that here).
6 is a beautiful number that’s all about creativity and taking a spark of an idea from our minds and letting it grow into manifestation in our reality. People with 6 are the artists and architects of the world, giving all the beautiful things we see around us form from their vivid and powerful imagination.
Yet, sometimes this energy can feel like things have to be done a certain way, and if they’re not then we can really lock up and find it very difficult to open our imagination to a different way of doing things.
So, sometimes, when we’re feeling stuck and trapped in a job or a relationship or something else that no longer feels good for us to be in, then we need to let go of the ideas were holding onto.
There’s been so many times in my life when I’ve felt like I only have a handful of options but this is never true, there are always limitless possibilities and opportunities waiting for us all the time, we just sometimes don’t have the imagination to bring them to our reality because of our rigid and narrow-minded thinking.
We live in an ever-expanding universe which is begging to show us its true magnificence, but when we get bogged down into a limited mindset of what we’re capable of, the universe responds to that frequency and we get what we are creating in our minds.
The trick here is to expand our imagination; through books, podcasts, documentaries, conversations with different people or anything else that can take us out of our limited thinking and open us wide open again.
No. 5 Allow yourself to relax
The final way to free ourselves when we’re feeling stuck and out of alignment, and possibly the most important one that ties all the other points together, is to come back into our parasympathetic nervous system and back into a state of rest and relaxation.
When we’re feeling stuck or trapped in circumstances, especially as sensitive souls, we can become locked into a state of fight or flight, which is basically our nervous system getting stressed out as we try and escape a situation or circumstance that isn’t feeling good anymore.
This is why it’s super important to calm ourselves down, because when we do this we allow everything I’ve mentioned above to be fully embodied. When we relax we can let go of stressful overthinking, let go of the things we can’t control, open our energy up to others around us and allow our creativity and intuition to rise up within us.
We all have different ways that feel super nourishing to relax, it could be spending time with people you love, taking hot baths, spending time in nature, doing something that makes you smile and time fly because you’re having such a good time.
At its most basic, the best way to de-stress is to have at least 8 hours of sleep, stay hydrated in the day, daily movement, scheduled time for relaxation and nourishing food to keep you powered up.
At a more elevated level, de-stressing could mean massages, time in nature, holidays and any physical or emotional stress relieving therapy that gets to a deeper root cause of the stress and allows you to release what no longer serves you.
And, wherever you’re feeling stuck in your life, just remember that life can change in an instant, and it often does, and sometimes just having a little faith in yourself and remembering that life is never as it seems, can be just the thing to get you through.
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