Meditations for Processing Stuckness

How Life kindly keeps saying "no" until you stop begging for a "yes" outside the wrong door.

This is a meditation of sorts, a guided reflection, for processing moments and seasons of profound Stuckness.

When we truly love something or someone in the world, we are helplessly rendered both vulnerable and, at the same time, desperate for the means to show up for them, to provide for and to protect that which we care about. If we are living deeply in the world, inevitably, we will be met with moments where we find ourselves lacking those very means, and we lose our sense of perspective, and along with it, our ability to find a way forward.

I wrote this for myself. The turns of phrase and the direction, the patience, the straight talk and sense knowing are aimed at the one in me who finds himself stuck so often these days, feeling besieged by the circumstances of my life, effectively friendless and deeply frustrated, unable to push through into the clear, uncertain which way to go, but compelled by circumstance to do or try something. In my clearer, stronger moments, I know precisely the love, the perspective, the reminding, the wisdom and the guidance that the struggling one in me needs most at such times.

This is my way of making my own medicine, for the times that will inevitably come calling again, when I will need it most and will be unable, then, to reach for the high shelf it is kept on, and I will not have access to the steady hand of love and leadership it takes to prepare and administer such medicine.

That said, I am not going to be the only one who needs this, and even if you don’t need it right now, somebody you know probably does, or if you’re living a full life, you will need it at some point.

As always, this post is an invitation to slow down and be really present for a moment. Isn’t it always true that if we fail to reset our state of presence, we allow the weight and intrusions of the previous moments in our day to overshadow this one, and rob it of its gifts.

Life kindly keeps saying “no” to us until we stop begging for a “yes” outside the wrong door.

We are all becoming something day by day, deliberately or otherwise. We are either becoming something that honours our truth and potential, or we are defaulting to habits and patterns, and expectations, that we inherit from life, or from our younger, troubled and less wise selves.

We are, in the end, who we repeatedly choose to be, and so, leaning in to this kind of work is how we cast a vote for the version of ourselves we would wish to be more like.

If you are here, sitting with this piece, it means you are invested in your own care. That is a good thing. For the next half an hour, we will be leaning into that sense of goodwill, so let us take a moment to acknowledge that intention.

Taking slow, deep breaths in, has a direct calming effect on the nervous system. Draw a breath in as low and as deep as you can without tensing or making yourself uncomfortable. Hold that for a moment, like a full system reset, and exhale with a sigh of deep letting go.

Whatever you care for in this life, any outcome you long for, is always going to be best served by you being well, by you feeling present and still. The word for this is Peace. Serving your heart’s true desire; feeling well, feeling present and being still.

Shanti they call it.

Putting this oxygen mask on yourself as a priority is how you position yourself to be of better service to everything you care for so deeply. If you did not care, you would not be troubled. This necessary step of regulation and maintenance is how you give your deepest heart callings the best chance of being realised.

Practising self-care and investing in your own wellness in this way is a direct and most effective investment in the relationships and projects you want to see flourishing in the world.

Self-love can be complicated to inhabit authentically precisely when it is needed the most. Fortunately, to simply wish to feel better, to sincerely yearn for better opportunities for yourself, to have an earnest desire to be free from pain and anguish, is enough. Such wishes are precisely equal to self-love.

To reach for invisible help, however doubtingly, to desire the wisdom and direction to guide you through the maze you feel caught in, to desire a way through, or around, or over obstacles and limits; to desperately want to have some clarity and confidence of the way forward, is a desire that is precisely equal to self-love.

The oldest mystery in the world is the paradox of Giving and Receiving. If you want to give more, you have to receive more. You have to be selfish about your own deep wants and needs to be able to serve Life. To be able to serve Life, you have to practice this necessary form of selfishness. You cannot pour from a broken cup. You cannot give your best to others in need if your bucket is leaking or depleted. And you cannot stand strong for anything when you are defeated inside.

The deep wants and needs you have are the voices of your inner child, the soft animal of your body, your inner protectors and your inner judicators. They want what you want. They serve you, and you have to enable them. Whatsoever you care most for outside yourself is always going to be best served when these voices are heard and their needs are honoured. The oldest mystery in the world is the paradox of Giving and Receiving. There is a form of loving selfishness, and you have to appreciate and practise this special kind of selfishness about your own deep wants and needs to be able to serve Life to your full potential, and to be able to ever reach your own full potential in this life at all. Anything less than the best for yourself, the best love, the best nurture, the best guidance, the best perspective and the best support has to mean that you will have less than your best to offer to Life.

What does Life want? Life wants to flourish, it wants to prosper, it wants to grow, and it wants to seed new possibilities.

We all serve Life by reaching for our full potential. We are all here to follow our own star in the sky. We are all here to live our own story. Life does not make copies; it only makes originals. We each have a profound myth that is trying to live through us.

We serve Life by reaching for our full potential. We can only find the necessary courage this takes, when we believe in what we are reaching for. We can only find the necessary courage when we trust that our efforts will really mean something. We can only find that courage, and we can only trust in Life to the degree that we are free from the torment of anxiety and depression, and overwhelm. It is crucial that you find an inner peace right here in the midst of these troubles. If you do not find that peace here, in this place, you will not find it anywhere.

When you understand this, making wiser choices becomes so much simpler. Understanding is how we unlock our love and thereby our willpower. When we have the sanctuary of such understanding, we can do hard things, because the hard things have meaning. We can connect with a reason. Understanding connects us with our “so that”, and thereby uncages our love and gives real wings to our willpower.

Being strict and severe with yourself ultimately comes from Fear: the fear of not being enough, fear of not doing enough, not having enough, not sacrificing enough, not giving enough, not being virtuous or worthy enough.

Does Fear ever say anything else? Has your fear ever had anything else to say?

Shame is a feeling that undermines its own stated intention. We feel shame because we feel we are somehow something wrong. The supposed kernel of that story is that we should improve or become better, but shame precisely shuts down the ability to believe in ourselves and prioritise the fostering of that inner kindness and generosity, the forgiveness and grace that are critical for us to become better in any sense.

Would we wish that scenario on anyone that we loved and still expect them to find their way forward?

Such fear makes us fearful of making mistakes. You are tortured, not only by regret of all the choices you did not make from love, but by all the preemptive regret of choices you are now faced with that were not conceived out of love. When you are not “coming from love”, when love is not your core reason, you make choices from ignorance or from fear. The retrospective regret that really haunts you is where you attach the outcome you are now living through to the earlier ways in which you had abandoned yourself in some meaningful way. Preemptive regret arises from wrestling with choices that are utterly constrained by fear, by necessity, by habit, or by compromise. Even before you act, you sense that none of these choices will redeem you, because the premise of those choices is loveless.

Sometimes there is no right choice.

Sometimes mistakes are the only way any of us could ever have learned. Deep regret is when you cannot forgive your mistakes or your ignorance, because deep down you know you acted from fear, not from courage. And this does not mean you should now blame yourself for not having the tools, or the means or the maturity or the wisdom to have made better choices then. It means you should understand that no human being can arrive at means, or maturity or wisdom without experiences and without having made mistakes.

Being strict and severe with yourself ultimately comes from fear. If David Goggins was ever going to find true peace through that unforgiving regimen of discipline and drive, surely it would have happened by now? If we only ever enjoy temporary bouts of reprieve and then only while we are exerting ourselves to the neglect of our own limits, can we still call that peace?

Fear grasps desperately for superstition and rigid morality, and throws itself at the non-existent mercy of external forgiveness and external validation. What is rigid morality if not superstition? What kind of god or divine order would every set me up to fail and then judge me responsible for the failure, especially given how sincere and desperate I am not to fail?

Fear says that the healing, the rest, the nurture, the respite, the help and the deliverance we need are contingent on our goodness, or our endurance, or our discipline, or our worthiness. Every single one of these capacities is something you already wish you had more of.

Would you withhold such things from anything or anyone in this world: healing, nurture, respite, help or deliverance? Would you deny these needs to anything or anyone and still call it love?

None of us really wants to wave a wand and have all our dreams met instantly, not if we are honest with ourselves. We all seem to know that this would just leave us feeling empty. It would leave us feeling like frauds, robbed of the sense of accomplishment and forever cheated out of the sense of self-belief we get from enduring and overcoming ordeals. That would leave us with regret. What we all really want is not the utter removal of all obstacles and journeys; what we really desire is the means to be equal to the challenge of pursuing and attaining them. Our losses and defeats along the road are what make the victory sweet and sacred. What we really desire is the means to be equal to what the journey demands of us. And how could such desire ever be met without the grace of healing, rest, nurture, respite, guidance, help and at times deliverance?

Which fool among us would ever wish to lose that grace? When have you ever not desperately wanted to fairly earn or belong, securely, to that grace?

Fear always grasps desperately for superstition, throwing itself at the non-existent mercy of external forgiveness and external validation, and thereby making ourselves utterly unreachable by that grace.

You have to understand, if that validation and permission are conditional and contingent on something outside of ourselves, it implies that if we lost that grace once, without meaning to, or wishing to, we will always suffer the risk of losing it again, through no failure we can avoid by being in some way further along the journey than we in fact are. In this way, through that story, fear keeps us small and keeps us in a state of fear.

Fear is the absence of love. Fear is Consciousness when caged in a state of Ignorance. Love is both Giving and Receiving. Love has two poles, like battery. The one pole is Desire and Need, it is ‘the will to receive’. The other pole of Love is Grace; the meeting of that need and the quenching of that desire. When the eye of need is rendered blind to that grace, the need remains in a state of scarcity and lack, and what can only occur from that is more fear. That is why Understanding is medicine.

Understanding who we are, what our true needs and desires are, is what true love looks like; such understanding is how we unlock our love and thereby our willpower. Understanding that the noblest purpose we could devote ourselves to in this life is our own authentic fulfilment, understanding this is what makes us feel at home in our own journeys, and deepens our sense of meaning, in whatever part of the cycle of karma we find happen to ourselves in. Understanding the reason and sense of this opens our eyes to the beauty of all things and the necessity of things like resistance and challenge. The frictions and resistance we encounter are how we build the muscle of our will and how we shape our becoming through the choices we make. All the comedy and drama, the costs and the gifts of the twists and turns of fate, the hardship and endurance we get to tally up as experience. This is what defines the greatness and quality of character. If we can appreciate it all, and if we can lead ourselves into a state of grace again, we get to distil real wisdom from that experience, and we get to appreciate how the hard moments, especially the long, difficult stretches of the road, are actually shaping us.

Life prunes the tree of who we are growing into. Life sculpts us out of the marble block of our younger selves. Life forges and tempers the blade in us. Life threshes us, quite rudely at times, to release what is essential and remove what has lived out its use to our soul’s journey.

All Tension exists to serve Transformation.

Resistance can serve our growth.

Feeling lost and feeling uncertain is actually how you know you are on your own path of becoming.

Understanding can really help us accept discomfort. This acceptance of discomfort helps you tell fear apart from danger and pain apart from injury. This sort of understanding is called discernment, and discernment is where the heart and the mind converge to guide the soul true.

Such understanding does not remove or unmake your problems, but it vastly expands your ability to navigate them.

So now, you can be more open to self-love.

So now you can be more open to help, to rest and to support. So now you can step back from the urgency and the drama of finding a way forward.

Stop picking the locks of your misfortunes.

Stop being the fly trying to leave the house through the closed window.

Sisyphus was never meant to reach the top of that impossible slope with that impossible burden. The slope is an exponential curve. When you encounter an exponential gradient like that, this is your cue to realise it is a recursive trap for the soul. Nothing changes if nothing changes. Pluck and determination, and doggedness and trying harder are not going to get that boulder through the gap.

There is a weaver bird that builds a nest with a hidden entrance and a second fake entrance so that when the snake comes along to devour the vulnerable chicks, it is turned back again and again, trying to reach its goal through the false portal and eventually has to give up. No amount of repetitions of the same action, no micro adjustment of approach, is going to change the fact of the fake door.

Sometimes we spend minutes searching around the house looking for a pair of glasses sitting on our head. No amount of opening drawers and moving cushions, no amount of anxiety and intensity was ever going to help us find something that was never lost in the way we became convinced of in the first place.

The chained prisoners in Plato’s cave were deeply immersed in a shared illusion, completely engrossed in pure and meaningless fiction. The shadows dancing on the wall in front of them and the compelling narrative framework they subscribed to simply did not align with the wider reality and the higher orders of reason and meaning. Whatever they felt, whatever psychological or emotional reality they were living through, whatever the story they believed they were witnessing, as real and complete as their subjective experience might be, invariably suffers from a profound ignorance of what was more true, more real.

If we don’t know what is more true or more real, we can never fully explore what is possible.

We are never fully out of the cave. To live in this world with all its modern complexity and story means it can only ever be caves all the way up. What cave are you stuck in now? What story are the shadows on the wall telling you?

If we don’t know what is more true or more real, we can never fully explore what is possible.

Don’t you know? Life will keep kindly saying “no” until you stop begging for a “yes” outside the door that would take you into a cave in which you cannot find true peace.

So now, what if the “no”, the closed door, the unanswered prayer, the unrequited dream, it turns out, says nothing about your merit, nothing about your worthiness, and nothing about your deserving?

What if the “no” was saving you from the tragedy of choosing less for yourself than what it would take to fulfil you deeply and honour your true potential? This does not make your needs go away. But perhaps it helps you accept that you cannot find a way forward this way. And to take a step back and stop for a moment, to regroup, to get respite from the anxiety and the stress of it all, can illuminate a way out of the cave and help you to see that what you have been fretting over so desperately is a soul trap, a false door.

What if the “no” was sparing you the tragedy of pursuing a dream too small for the wings of your soul to unfurl and soar, the tragedy of achieving success in that lesser ambition and being forever limited by that small success, until the soul-sickness comes to call again, to drag you through the necessary alchemy of depression until you realise you are cowering in a dream that is too small for you.

Understanding this unlocks our trust in Life. This trust unlocks our vitality and enthusiasm. It becomes possible again to appreciate that this difficult moment can be happening for you in some real sense. You can believe in Meaning again.

The hardest things you have endured in your life, shaped the parts of you that you most admire in yourself, and the hardest things you have endured have helped widen your vision and inform your dreams.

What if you choose that “no”? If that is a bridge too far, can we at least say “maybe I am looking at this from a limited perspective?” and let that be a real invitational question. “Maybe I am so hell-bent on a specific outcome that I am deaf to the invitation that is knocking?”

A real invitational question: “Maybe I am trying to solve this in a limiting paradigm?”

Ask yourself, “How could anyone outgrow a place we are stuck in by applying the same level of thinking that first closed the walls of this labyrinth around us, leaving us in that graceless hell, without a map.

Reason this with yourself, “How could anyone make a sound choice in this place when the compass of your sanity is spinning around madly, and you feel torn apart by impossible choices?”

Ask yourself, “Can I choose this “no”, and thereby let it inform me that I have been having the conversation at the wrong level, or in the wrong language or holding the wrong conversation altogether?

Perhaps I am ready to better understand, to better appreciate that this “No” is informing me that I am in wrong mind, that I am trapped in a story, with rules or conditions that are perhaps not entirely true. I am like Theoden under the spell of Grima Wormtongue, poisoned by the whispers of my own shadow-self. Maybe I am seeing the world and myself and my predicament only through the reductionist, literal left brain, holding this conversation with life in the language of the ego, a language too small for the size of the dream that is trying to awaken through me?”

Appreciating a bigger picture, inhabiting a transcendent paradigm, reveals how Rest is essential to work. How regression is essential to progress. How endings are critical to renewal and how essential renewal is to abundance.

Nietzsche said that when we are tired, we become attacked by ideas that we thought we had already conquered long ago.

Understanding this unlocks our trust in life. This trust unlocks our vitality and enthusiasm. You can believe in Meaning again. But right now, you need to remember what it feels like to be free. Everything you care for will wait.

Create a frame. And in this frame, allow yourself to put everything down for a while. Step into the frame.

Everything you care for will wait. I promise.

The natterer in you cannot come to peace, or to stillness. The small fearful voices cannot rest until you listen quietly to them and let them speak, unencumbered, one by one, one voice at a time. They will talk over each other. Your inner Critic sees vulnerability as risk and will shush it. It will treat need like selfishness, and all of the unmet need will trickle down into the heart of the Inner Child, and it will cover itself with guilt and shame.

Listen to the Critic, let it say its whole piece without the Victim in you crying foul. The Critic is the voice of our unheard Protector, who could not keep us safe and fell into its own shadow.

Listen to the Victim. Let it say its whole unattractive piece. The Victim is nothing more than the voice of our unheard Judicator, who could not ensure everything felt fair or free. The Victim is the one in you that argues like a lawyer, for which the truth is bendable, twistable, mouldable and selective. It argues what it needs to be true, not what is actually true.

Behind the caustic entitled cries and mutterings of the Victim is a sense of fairness and freedom left brokenhearted by the seeming indifference of life. Behind the “told you sos” and “should haves” of the Critic is a Protector that feels it failed to keep you safe.

The small fearful voices cannot rest until you listen quietly to them and let them speak, unencumbered, one by one, one voice at a time. What does it feel like to be truly heard? We feel heard when our whole truth is allowed. Nothing in this world can ever be free in any real sense until we can allow the whole truth of it. Can I invite that feeling by being the one for myself that allows my whole truth, without looking away, without tutting disapprovingly, without judgement, or critique, or blame?

If I cannot do this, to whom or to what shall I outsource this necessary love and leadership? To whom shall I outsource this role of parenting? Can I be the one who decides that I am worthy of love, of nurture, of rest, of support? Can I do this in part?

What does it feel like to have enough, just enough, just for now? Can I just be enough?

What does it feel like to be free, to not need to solve anything right now, to not know the way forward, and to not need to discover that answer right now? Can I just be free here?

What does it feel like to feel safe? What would need to be here, or not to be here, to make that feeling possible? Is it forgiveness? Is it permission? Is it compassion? Is it understanding? Who do I want forgiveness and permission from?

Whatever peace and grace, and perspective I arrive at now, becomes a superpower I can use to invest in my relationships. I can revisit choices I did not make from love.

Can I be the one who shows myself grace right now?

When I forget who I am, I come back to this medicine. There is real beauty in my bitter grief. When I forget who I am, I can still follow The Way. When I remember who I am, The Way and I are the same.