What to do when you feel stuck
Our human animal wants to be free to run, play, move, and to self-express.
But so many things in modern life are set up to make us feel stuck.
Stuck wearing stiff clothes, sitting in stiff chairs all day, stuck in debt, or in a job you don’t like to pay off said debt, stuck in a sexless marriage, stuck feeling shame if you let yourself dance and let loose in any way that doesn’t involve moving in right angles.
You might also notice you feel stuck repeating the same thought loops and emotional patterns.
Every. single. day.
Maybe you even feel that valuing the body, being agile and supple, strong and adaptable is a waste of time.
The default is to become stiffer - using force to get more results, more money, more status. Using bigger weights to build bigger muscles. And boxing ourselves for maximum efficiency.
But all of this focus on more, up, bigger, faster makes us stiff.
Stiffness and stagnation in our bodies, our minds, and our emotional processes actually make us sick.
To get unstuck, we need to allow new patterns of thinking, new ways of moving, and new vectors in our lives.
One thing I have learned from movement artists, contemplative thinkers, and the sacred feminine is the importance of non-linear processes, such as cycles and spirals.
When we allow these both in the way we think and the way we move, life gets unstuck.
For example, when learning something new, it’s a spiral process, not a black-and-white, upward vector. We know we may forget and have to come back and re-read - and that’s not a failing, that’s a natural process.
Over time, we refine our understanding by revisiting a concept again and again. Same concept, new perspective: a spiral process. We don’t just completely leave behind old patterns all at once.
Similarly, in the movement of our bodies - we thrive when we move non-linearly. For example, getting up from the ground happens much more easily if we do it by turning around ourselves rather than forcing ourselves up in right angles from the ground.
But in our culture, the associations with anything non-linear (aka, non-’efficient’) include weakness, feminine, and shame.
Case in point: how intensely difficult and shame-inducing is it for most of us to get ourselves to let go in dance? To allow ourselves to move in ways that curve and twist and aren’t simply straight lines?
Of course, moving our hips is associated with sex, which is highly shamed.
And yet the bodies of the men and women who allow themselves to move freely and think expansively are the strongest I have ever seen.
They are strong because they have muscles, yes. But they are even stronger because they are also flexible.
There’s BOTH strength and adaptability.
No longer a brute force, but intelligence in movement.
When you’re equally at home lifting weights as in dancing. When you allow unexpected, creative movements - both standing and up and down off the floor - into your body and into your mind -
It brings freedom, fights stagnation, and helps you feel alive, no matter what your external circumstances.
The liberation of the movement of our body helps us re-examine our mental and emotional patterns.
What would it look like in your life if you unstuck yourself from rigid and linear systems of movement and thought?
What if you saw the dance, the spiral, the cyclical not as weak or a distraction from “real” productivity, but as essential to your health and the health of our world?
What would your life look like?