“I’m concerned about you,” my then boyfriend, now fiancé, told me two summers ago. “You keep jumping from one project to the next. Nothing seems to stick.”
I was concerned about me too. Since burning out and leaving my international consulting job years before I’d bounced between entrepreneurial endeavors, creative projects and freelance work. I kept announcing new plans, then getting diverted in yet another direction. I felt royally stuck in a pattern that I couldn’t understand.
Fourteen months later things have changed. I finished a rigorous training program that draws together the many strands of my professional experience into a new path of livelihood and purpose. I feel momentum pulsing through aspects of my life that were stagnant. Things that had eluded me — steadiness, fulfillment, joy, ease — have crept in and stuck around.
I’ve been taught that you can’t keep what you don’t give away — so I’m sharing my roadmap to finally getting unstuck. I hope it helps some of you struggling in the sticky stuckness to find your way out. (I’ll be writing more about each of these in posts to come!)
1 - I changed my physical environment. I’d been living in NYC for a decade and knew that I was energetically done with the city. So, slowly but surely, I extricated myself (I was extraordinarily fortunate to have the resources to make it happen). Moving to Upstate NY was a leap of faith on every level — livelihood, relationship, community — but it upturned my inertia and nourished the seeds of change that had been failing to take root. A more subtle energetic shift — like rearranging your space can have the same effect, especially when guided by ancient systems like Feng Shui or Vastu Shastra, or just purging old belongings Marie Kondo-style.
2 - I slowed down. Inevitably, leaving the manic pace of NYC slowed the rhythm of my life. But an even deeper re-pacing took hold too. Rather than sprinting into new pursuits, racing to achieve results and then burning out before I ever hit my stride, I’ve been allowing myself to linger. For example, I spent almost a year working on this website before I started circulating it widely — I wasn’t hiding in perfectionism (it’s far from perfect) but I was allowing it the time to to unfold and take a shape I felt aligned and content with.
3 - I doubled down on core practices. By “core” I mean both the central practices of yoga, meditation and contemplation that have anchored the last decade of my life, and the deep physical practices that strengthen the central channel that runs through our bodies, powers us through the demands of our days and fuels our aspirations for the future. I doubled down on my commitment to daily yoga and meditation practice, including a daily kundalini yoga practice to reset and strengthen my core that can be done in as little as 5 intense minutes; a mantra meditation designed to shift negative into positive energy; as well as open awareness and contemplation practices. This discipline has fueled new momentum while grounding me through the big waves of change of this past year.
4 - I surrendered to the seasons. It took time, but I’ve learned that a key to slowing down is surrendering to the innate wisdom of the seasons. Winter wants us to go inward into contemplation, gestation, rest (especially in a climate often covered with a foot of snow from November to March). Early Spring is for planting and cultivating the seeds of new endeavors; late spring and early summer call for even more action as seeds start to sprout and bear fruit. In late summer there’s an inevitable lull, a need for some rest and play in anticipation of fall, which brings a new round of productivity along with reflection and reconciliation on the year. I built my first little garden last fall and expanded it in the spring, ceded to the cycle of the land and the weather, and invited those cycles into my pace as I cultivated the seeds of transformation in my life's work.
5 - I invested in healing arts work. For years I lived with chronically severe tension ranging to full blown pain in my neck, shoulders and sometimes my low back. When my lower back destabilized several months ago I found my way to a chiropractor who diagnosed me with serious spinal degeneration in my cervical spine. She suggested a plan of three visits per week for a few months. Instead of letting financial concerns hold me back I followed my gut and signed on. Like magic, as fluidity re-entered my spine, flow re-entered my life. I’ve had similar experiences in the past with Rolfing, Cranio-sacral therapy, Reiki and other forms of healing arts. Sometimes we need the jackhammer of another healer’s skill to cut through the deep layers of bedrock that constitutes our physical resistance to transformation.
6 - I began honoring my own time. Even when I wasn’t working full time I always had a Google calendar full of colorful blocks of arbitrary self-imposed scheduling commitments…which I followed about 15% of the time. My calendar was basically a fantasy. When I decided to start honoring my own time I not only got honest and intentional about creating my schedule, but I started adjusting my calendar as I went through my days to reflect what I’d actually done. This accountability practice acknowledges and honors where my time is actually being spent and helps me plan realistically for the future, so I can create a schedule of ease. It’s not that things don’t still fall through the cracks — but now when they do I can investigate the energetic resistance to them and consider whether they align with my priorities, and make more aligned commitments going forward.
7 - I let go of perfectionism. Four years ago I experienced a flash of inspiration for a novel. I was blessed to have the time, so I started writing. Three years later I’d finished a draft, but by then I was so sick of the project I didn’t want to look at it much less pitch it to agents and publishers. I was sure it wasn’t good enough to be taken seriously. But I also knew that I needed to see the project through in order to break my old pattern of not finishing things. I owed it to the source of that inspiration. So I kept working and finally, when I knew I had nothing left to offer, even though I knew it was far from perfect, I began pitching it. And then I let go of the results and trusted in the process, knowing that I did my part for now — just as in yoga we’re taught to practice our fullest expression of a pose in the moment, offering it up without judgement. What happens to that manuscript remains to be seen, but it has already served its purpose.
8 - I committed to training in alignment with my calling. I had already been offering a modality that verged closely on coaching, and many friends and colleagues told me I didn’t need a certification, that I had plenty of skill and credentials and should just go ahead and do it — but despite the great feedback from those I worked with something was keeping me from putting this work out more broadly into the world. When I heard about Joanna Lindenbaum’s Sacred Depths Coach Certification and connected with her, I knew that it was exactly what I needed to bolster my skills and align my offering with the clients I’m meant to serve. When we’re receptive, I’ve been taught, the teachers we need come into our paths with ease.
9 - I became willing to see and actively work on my self-defeating patterns…for real. To break a self-defeating patterns we have to first acknowledge it — which means first looking straight at it, really seeing it. For me the big ones were judgment - of myself and others - and defensiveness. In the past I never would have sent out the book query or shared the website; I would stayed caught up in self-judgement until I just move on to the next thing. Meanwhile the faintest hint (often projection) of criticism would send me to the corner of a boxing ring ready to come swinging back with judgement, which meant I missed out on countless opportunities for expansion and growth. I never really got the link between all this judgement and defensiveness and not seeing projects through…until I was ready. Then I was able to start catching myself in the act of repeating those patterns and make different choices. It takes rigorous daily practice, which is a big part of my own inner work and my work as a coach.
10 - I delved deeper into inherited patterns of trauma and of privilege. Ancestral healing work investigates and heals ruptures in our lineages, whether we’re aware of them or not. Over the past several years a big focus of my inner work has been this excavation of painful aspects of personal and family history, as well as my own privilege and responsibility as an able-bodied, cis-gendered, economically secure perceptibly white American citizen with resources to offer in support of social, communal and personal transformation. This exploration and contingent action continues to be a foundation of the work of transformation on the personal, communal and societal levels.
11 - I cultivated community. Moving away from NYC forced me to re-conceive community. I connected with a clan of like-minded teachers and healers in my new town who nourish and inspire me in new directions, and am continually finding new ways of staying and becoming connected with those I can’t see in the flesh.
12 - I reframed the experience of stuckness and learned to honor the journey. For a few years I was so stuck in my stuckness that I sometimes forgot the ultimate truth — that everything is impermanent. With willingness and work on our part, stuckness will always eventually cede into flow and become just part of the journey. The path by which this happens depends on our willingness to show up for the journey.
