The Recipe for “Stuck”
Do you ever feel stuck when you’re Focusing? Do you ever feel stuck in your life? The answer to both is the same, something I often say to my students: The recipe for “stuck” is an unacknowledged part.
Whenever you find yourself saying “I feel stuck,” let that be a signal to look for something in you that’s not being acknowledged. Probably it’s the very part of you that is calling your experience “stuck”!
Talia was Focusing, spending time with a feeling of heaviness in her stomach. She had acknowledged it, described it (“heaviness like a rock”) and now she was sitting with it, just keeping it company.
Suddenly she said to me, “I’m not getting anywhere! It just feels stuck!”
“Ah,” I said to her. “Something in you is really wanting to get somewhere. You might notice where and how you’re feeling that right now.”
Like Discovering You Own the Mansion
What happens is that you realize that you’re not stuck. Something in you is not moving as fast as another part of you would like, and that situation is being called “stuck.” But you are not stuck, you are spacious and able to hold this whole dynamic in your awareness… from Presence.
That’s the key of course… in Presence.
In a recent workshop, one of the participants said to me, “The trouble is that if I disidentify from my sadness, I realize the sadness is so big and I’m so small.”
I replied: “If you’re feeling small in relation to your feelings, that’s a signal that there is something else there to say hello to. Something in you is feeling small… but that couldn’t be Presence.
Experiencing Presence is like discovering that you really own the largest house in town, the mansion. You thought you had to live in a tiny cramped space, inside your identified part. But actually YOU are much bigger than all your parts… and experiencing that can be as simple as saying hello to what you are feeling.
Remember: we can never feel our very best by trying NOT to feel bad. Instead, we become that gracious, fearless Self in Presence that is our birthright. From there, we can be with anything… and anything can change.