Feeling trapped? Here's how to feel free again
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but feeling trapped, stuck and frustrated with your situation is a dead-end road to nothing changing.
The more we focus on our lack, our misfortune and our frustration, the more experiences are delivered right to our door that match the frequency of what we’re putting out. Rather than feeling free, we get more of what we don’t want.
We’re all electromagnetic beings living in a quantum field that ripples with every thought and feeling we have, forming the life we are living right now. Like throwing a stone into a smooth pond, each stone is a thought sending out ripples of energy, attracting similar energies back to us.
Look around you. Your environment is of your design; shaped and moulded from the thoughts and feelings you’ve had since the day you were born.
You know the saying from Lao Tzu? Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.
Lean into the alchemy of transformation
When you realise that you are constantly creating your life with every thought and feeling you have, it can feel both terrifying and overwhelming all at once, but there’s no reason for it to. You begin to realise your power. You begin to realise that you are a magnificent being of creation. Creativity is your natural birthright.
The good news is that feeling trapped, stuck and frustrated is the turning point. You are no longer living in denial about your situation, whatever it may be, and you are ripe for change. Like a pear, perfectly plump for picking.
Often, this change happens when we reach boiling point because alchemy happens when we cannot stay in a state of being any longer and are forced, under pressure, to alchemise.
Alchemy is the magical process of transformation and creation. It is the point of pressure where we transform out of an old way and into a new one. My experience is that the feelings of being trapped, stuck and frustrated are the ones that come right before this magical point.
My advice? Lean into the transformation, don’t mask your emotions. Lean into the suffering. Lean into the feelings of lack, frustration and stickiness and look into them deeply to understand the meaning.
Taking responsibility without judgement or shame
There is a vast difference between using our feelings to wallow in misery and fall into a victim mode, versus using them to change.
When we feel like a victim, we become powerless because we hand over all responsibility of our lives to the external. We blame others, we blame the world, we blame everyone and everything to avoid taking responsibility for how we might have created our situation in which we feel stuck, frustrated and trapped.
When I talk about taking responsibility I don’t mean it in a disciplinarian way that is so deeply ingrained when we think about taking accountability. I find that it is often linked to punishment, castigation and shame. Shame is one of the lowest vibrations that we can emit. It serves no purpose but to lower our self-worthiness, spiral us into negativity and feed the part of us that doesn't think we’re good enough.
Shame has no place in our society and no place within you.
Alongside shame we also carry judgement for ourselves when we think about taking responsibility. Judgement is another way we disconnect from ourselves and from others. When we judge others we become separate but when we judge ourselves, we punish and hurt ourselves to an even greater extent, that takes a lot longer to recover from.
Judgement, along with shame, is not what taking responsibility means.
Don’t try to escape the feelings
What taking responsibility really means is having deep compassion for yourself, all versions of yourself; past, present and future. We are all only doing our best and none of us go through this life without making decisions that don’t serve us well. It’s all part of the learning curve of life.
When we have compassion and love for ourselves, in particular the choices we’ve made that have led us to this state of feeling trapped and frustrated with where we are, we can gently begin to start unpicking the decisions that have led us here.
The key, when feeling trapped and stuck, is not to immediately try and escape the feeling. That’s the one thing that will keep us stuck and going around and around in circles. The mind cannot fix a problem that it has created in the first place and you will not be able to get yourself out of your situation just yet.
We also can’t create something bright and new from the energy that we are stuck in.
Think about it in colours: the colour of feeling trapped, frustrated with life and stuck is a murky brown. This is what is swirling around you when you’re thinking these thoughts. The colours of confidence and clarity are a vibrant crystal white, yet, to change from murky brown to crystal white there needs to be some alchemy.
Lean into the lesson and feel the change arising
The alchemy that’s needed comes from leaning into these unpleasant feelings without putting any pressure on creating a solution. When we release the pressure of coming up with an answer that we’re never going to find in this state anyway, we can begin to start understanding. We can begin to start healing.
Taking responsibility means healing ourselves, which we are all capable of doing. It means becoming aware that the decisions, thoughts and feelings we’ve had in the past have created the life we have now. It means that we realise that we’re ready to change.
If you’re feeling stuck, trapped and frustrated, congratulations. You are in the process of change because you are at last awake to the disquiet of your soul. There is something that is no longer in alignment with who you are and you have decided that it’s time to do something about it.
This is an extremely powerful place to be in but the key is not to desperately try and escape the feeling. Impatience has no place here. The key is to lean into it to learn what it’s trying to show you. You have to trust that everything is happening in Divine timing and now is the time for you to change, to heal, to evolve and grow.
Let go and allow the alchemy to do its work
I write this having come from a few desperate months of feeling the exact same feelings; frustrated, trapped and stuck. As you may now realise, everything I write comes from a deeply personal experience.
We can waste huge swathes of time trying to outthink the problem when, in reality, we don’t need to outthink it at all. Rather, we merely need to let the experience teach us what it’s meant to. For me, I needed to learn a big lesson around feeling enough as I am. For me the lessons are always around worthiness but for you it might be something different.
As soon as you let go allow the experience to take the lead your energy begins to shift, from grasping and controlling to acceptance and release. When you take the pressure off yourself to come up with a solution, a solution can arrive.
When you take responsibility for your situation with self-compassion and love, you begin to realise that you have the power within you to create a new one. And, this is the best one, when you acknowledge that you’re in a state of alchemy, you can begin to relax and let it do its work of transforming you.
The last thing to remember, nothing lasts forever. These feelings are temporary. When you know this you can relax because change is around the corner, it always is, and with it comes a new course for your life that will take you where you never expected to go.
Now, that’s freedom.
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