There is a meditation I use when I want to explore places that are blocked or stuck on deeper levels. I think of feeling stuck or blocked as occurring inevitably, sometimes signifying places where who we are and what we’re doing with life are not in alignment. When feeling blocked, it’s easy to focus on the frustrating and defeating sense of being blocked and not the awareness of the parts of us in flow. If energy wasn’t moving, then it couldn’t be blocked. It would simply be still and contained.

I’m not, at this point in my career, a person who promises tools to help you get unstuck. There are great teachers out there who do that work. What I’ve found is that when I feel stuck the best way to get unstuck is to start doing the thing I feel stuck with. Yesterday I felt blocked about blogging and started to write a blog post about quitting blogging because I no longer knew what to write about, and as I wrote that entry, something in me shifted and I decided to write this instead.

Not everyone seems to respond to this approach, and I’ve experienced blocks that are very deep and ingrained. My approach to these–when I’m not myself feeling frustrated or beating myself up for being stuck–is to wonder whether this block is here for a reason. Is there some deeper purpose to being blocked? Is there something about the way I’m approaching this situation that defeats my intention? Is there something about this situation that is blocking me? Is this block a way of protecting myself from making a choice that could harm me, whether due to bad timing or a bad reading of the situation? Is this stuckness simply sloth, or coming from a fear of change?

Here is a contemplative practice that I use to get more information about blockages or places of stuckness. It is a variation on a meditation called the “Thousand Petal Lotus.”

Get into a comfortable posture with your legs crossed or your feet resting on the floor. With every inhalation, breathe in more slowly, more deeply. With every exhalation, breathe out more slowly and completely.

Consider a word or image associated with a place in you that feels stuck or blocked. Hold that word or image in the center of your mind. Notice what thoughts or memories arise. When you notice a thought or memory, acknowledge its presence, acknowledge its connection to the core word or image, then return to the core word or image. Continue this process of noticing and returning for several breaths.

Imagine that this word or image can sink from your mind, down your throat, coming to rest in your heart. Notice what feelings or emotions are present. When you notice a feeling, acknowledge its presence and connection to the core word or image, then return to the core word or image. Notice even if no feelings seem to come up, or places of numbness. Continue this process of noticing and returning for several breaths.

Imagine that this word or image can sink from your heart, down your solar plexus, coming to rest in your belly. Notice what physical sensations are present. When you notice a sensation, acknowledge its presence and connection to the core word or image, then return to the core word or image. Continue this process of noticing and returning for several breaths. Notice places of tension or ease, places of discomfort or places of numbness.

Let the core word or image stay in your center, but allow your field of awareness to soften and expand. Let yourself notice sensations, feelings, and thoughts, imagining that each of these connects back to the core word or image. Let these connections be like a spider’s web, connected to each other and back to the dense central core image or word. If you find yourself trying to analyze or make sense of your experience, breathe in and allow your awareness to soften, simply noticing what is present. Allow understanding to arise from this awareness, and not imposing meaning upon it.

Whether understanding comes or not, thank yourself for being present and engaging in this work. Acknowledge the work you have done and let the central word or image go. Bring your awareness back to your surroundings. Touch the edges of your body. Journal whatever information came up.

I’m proud to announce that The Star of Opening, an anthology of spiritual writings from Morningstar Mystery School, is now available on Amazon.com. I co-edited this anthology, and one of my essays, “The Stillness About Which the World Spins,” is included as well. (Fancy that!)

The material ranges from esoteric to deeply personal, showing the breadth and depth of how each contributors’ spiritual work moves through their lives. Topics include establishing a daily practice, ethics and values, death, stillness, astral visions, and presence. I am excited that we have created this document of thought and work from our early years of development as a school.

Please get yourself a copy!

In several recent conversations, I’ve heard and contemplated the divide between spiritual orientations of “working on one’s self” and “being in service” to something greater than the self—deity, community, or human liberation as examples. This separation, to me, is unfortunate and unnecessary, although I recognize the value of certain critiques.

There is no doubt that many spiritualities today have become a commodified and defanged way to make one’s self “feel better” and enjoy “prosperity,” cut off from one’s larger relationships to systems of inequality, human suffering, or the costs of our prosperity to the environment. Much of the pop “New Thought” technologies, like The Secret, capitalize on what often look like ego-level wants and not soul-level desires: manifesting thinness and not a health in a body-affirming culture, manifesting material luxuries and not a life of gratitude and connection. Christian “prosperity” work often looks no different.

In response to this trend, I notice spiritual practitioners who seem to eschew work on the self as hubristic, indulgent, and a distraction from being in service to that which is greater than one’s ego wants. They make comments that make other people nervous, prioritizing service and the needs of divinity or the Earth above human needs. (Which is not a problem, really, as human needs may well fit neatly within the circle of these larger needs.) They are sincere and devoted practitioners, and yet sometimes one can glimpse the immense personal costs of their work. I think the danger of this approach is neglecting or minimizing one’s own needs and human worth. Humanity is one thread of existence rather than the apex of Creation, as Western theological thought once attested, but we matter in the web of existence, we are here for a purpose and we have our own worth and value. Being in integrity with ourselves helps us to be in service.

“Know thyself” is an injunction passed down from the Delphic maxims, and for me this is the basis of spiritual work, though it is not the end. If our purpose is service to something larger than ourselves, then we are like the chalice into which rich dark wine is poured. The wine is not of ourselves and not for ourselves, yet that does not mean the self is irrelevant. We must make our selves into a cup suitable for this work. We can recognize the filters and toxins through which the wine must pass into ourselves, and we can make ourselves conscious and cleansed so that the wine can move through with greater purity. We can learn to discern between good wine and bad wine. We can keep our vessels strong so the work continues. If our foundations are weak, or our boundaries cracked, then the influx of power and energy that comes from this divine wine may well further crack and break down the cup.

Stepping away from the analogy, to some extent I think we need to know and honor our basic needs, even our ego-level needs, to be of good service. If I am not aware of and addressing my needs for friendship, for love and acceptance, for intimacy, then I am in danger of meeting those needs covertly in ways that would be harmful. We can easily see this when we look to all the abuses of spiritual leaders and priests who cross boundaries and exploit their positions of power to get their needs met by students or laity.

When I think of working on the self, I think of going deeper and deeper, layer by layer, always finding new ways in which my biases and complexes inform and deform my perception. There is no end to this process, so I cannot wait until I’m “done” before I act, but I can begin building habits of thought and action that support me in doing the work of self and service. The more I work on self, the more I see how deep and wide the Self extends. If I see in myself only an atomized individual, disconnected from the world and my communities, then I am very limited. Self ripples out to larger and larger circles of being, including my family, my communities, my planet. Self and Other are interdependent, and caring for one supports caring for the other.

Yet even with this larger perspective, I remind myself that I am not the ocean but a drop. I am separate, that I might be in relationship. If I were the ocean, I would not be suited to the task of being in service. I am a cup that I might bear the holy wine.

For the past three days I’ve had two different songs stuck in my head, alternating. When I grasp a piece of music that excites me, I tend to overdo it, and I heard these two songs together for the first time and then listened to them both repeatedly. Apparently whatever within me responded to these songs and has opted to keep them going, ad nauseam. My head feels very noisy, which is nothing new. I’ve always tended toward the head and have had to work to feel and understand my heart and body, work that continues. Though I prized my intellect, I also hated what my active brain cost me. Sometimes I feel like going to a concert is a waste of money because my mind takes me on a journey and out of listening. I envied friends who seemed wholly immersed by the moment, riding the waves of emotion evoked by the music.

What I most longed for, for much of my life, was some way to escape this mental prison that kept me out of my experience. I turned to meditation and discovered that the key to freedom is accepting that there is no escape. Trying to escape the experience of the present moment causes suffering. The quickest shortcuts to numbing the heart and shutting down the brain are the substances that cause problems when abused—drugs, alcohol, media, food, sex—in truth, any substance abused will create problems. None of them make problems go away. They might take your mind off your issues for a moment, at great cost: the cost of your innate ability to be with pain and still live in integrity, and the myriad costs that such patterns of self-abuse inevitably create.

Instead of getting out, we find freedom when we learn to be with the difficulty, which starts by going in. We cannot become free with anger, for example, without letting ourselves experience and work with anger. It would be like trying to learn how to ride a horse by reading books about horses, watching movies about horses, watching other people ride horses, but doing everything in your power to avoid actually touching a horse.

The language of becoming “free of” or “free from” something implies that eventually we can get rid of it, which further chains us to suffering. I would rather be “free with” something. The more I try to get rid of these songs in my head, the louder they seem to get. The more I fight with these songs, the more irritated I feel about the situation. I try listening to the recorded song and get a moment’s relief, but then they’re back. It’s like having mental hiccups.

This is a minor example but not irrelevant to other “sticky” feelings. If I wait until I am “free of” these songs before I can go out and live, I’ll be waiting for a long time. I’ll have given the prison keys over to these random neurons in my brain that are wholly out of my control. I would rather be free with the songs. I hear the songs, I feel irritated, and I am typing this blog post. I hear the songs, and I am breathing. I hear the songs, and I am listening. I notice that I get caught by distraction, and bring my attention back. I forgive myself, and I return my attention. The song continues. The practice does not end.

Recently I have begun thinking that I’ve lumped together several different needs and cravings into this larger mental category of “needing to rest”—or, more typically, “feeling overwhelmed.” Feeling overwhelmed and depleted is perhaps the worst time to develop a plan of self-care, given that the experiences labeled thus often leave me wanting to go for immediate cravings or numbing activities. Expressions such as “work/life balance” or other “balancing” type phrases address this from the end of reducing tendencies of overworking, but I have lacked a rich vocabulary for what I need in the times when I’m not working. At times, I have dutifully made “to-do” lists of self-care activities intended to make me “better” and make life fulfilling, which in some ways is effective, in other ways leaves me further in automaton mode, simply doing the next task and feeling this concern that I’m not so much living my life as performing life tasks.

All of which is my personal expression of a pattern of avoiding my experience in the moment. I experience things that I label “tired,” “cranky,” “overwhelmed,” or clusters of emotions that I group together as “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Over time I’ve developed go-to habits to soothe or avoid these experiences, sometimes in ways that feel healthy and supportive, other times in ways that feel even more draining, disheartening, or numbing. Coming home from a long day and sitting in front of the TV for hours—not really watching anything I care to watch, just whatever’s on—feels like one example of numbing activity. Other times I might come home and snack on a bunch of high-calorie, low-nutritional foods.

When I hear people say things like, “I need a drink,” or “I need to get laid,” I suspect they’re coming from a similar place of avoidance or numbing. It’s the “I need” that gets my attention, the way we describe activities that are pleasurable as though they are basic needs like food, water, or sleep. When I was drinking a lot of coffee, I would get to the midday energy crash and find my thoughts fixated on “I need more coffee,” when drinking more coffee ended up leaving me feel even more tired and depleted. One day, someone told me to try drinking water when I thought I needed coffee. I started to experiment with this and was somewhat shocked. Not only did drinking water leave me feeling more energized than the coffee, but I could almost feel my body relaxing and saying “thank you.” Now I wonder what other habits I’ve developed as poor substitutes for what, at a deeper level, I truly need. When I come home and want to snack on junk food, I might really just need to take a nap. A need to “get laid” could mask a deeper need to connect emotionally to someone. It’s not that people are “bad” for wanting or needing these things, it’s that doing anything to avoid feeling something means we neither enjoy what we’re doing nor get our deeper needs met.

All of this has come to bear when I think about my relationship to rest. When I feel depleted and overwhelmed, I become fixated on this need to “rest” and become fairly passive. Sometimes I feel like I’m either in “work” or “rest” mode. But I’m coming to see, “rest” isn’t really rest. “Rest” might be letting myself be passively entertained by TV, zoning out with a video game, or checking social media repeatedly, none of which actually allow my mind and body to relax and be—and if I do either too late in the day, the light and stimulus interferes with my ability to sleep. I’m starting to think that “rest” might be too big of a bucket into which I’ve placed a number of needs—a need for genuine rest; a need for play or fun; or a need for inspiration. The new project is learning to discern between these three and other needs.

What are your needs?

In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the protagonist must descend all the way through the nadir of Hell before he can begin to climb toward Heaven. In terms of Dante’s Christianity, the journey suggests that coming into knowledge of one’s sinful nature creates the possibility to transform and shed those sinful habits, via Purgatory, before finally ascending into Heaven. This geographical and poetic mystery evokes, for me, one process of psychological healing. Fully healing and transforming our suffering requires a descent, a conscious immersion into the pain and every layer deeper until finally emerging into its resolution. To me, this is depth psychology.

My tendency, historically, has been to withdraw and watch. If I felt I could be invisible and simply watch, I could notice all kinds of things about a group, a person, a situation, and offer great insight. What was terrifying to me was taking action and being emotionally present. I was an intellectual-based person with no sense of my emotions or my body. I used to “joke” that I had no feelings, and with this lack of feelings was a heavy depression. My mind could understand and argue many things, but when it came time to take action or put it into practice, I would balk. What I needed to become whole was my heart and my body. To manage my anxiety, I took up smoking cigarettes. I was in college and dealing with all new kinds of stresses and anxieties, both socially and academically. Because I felt so uncomfortable at parties having spontaneous interactions with people, I preferred to go outside and have a cigarette with a smaller group of folks.

Here is where unhealthy coping strategies compound suffering. We have the core pain—my anxiety at being in social situations with others. If I had a therapist at the time and some better strategies, I could have begun to learn being with my anxiety and my ambivalence about intimacy, sink more deeply into the experience, and find ways to connect. Instead I avoided my anxiety through smoking and added more problems—reduced lung capacity, smelly fingers and clothes, a money-draining habit, and the potential for long-term health problems. Smoking became my go-to habit when I felt upset or anxious, and I got anxious a lot. I also kept myself from adventures and new friends, as my smoking buddies tended were usually the same from event to event. They were absolutely wonderful people and dear friends, but after a while it seemed there was no point in going to a party of strangers if I was not meeting new people.

This is how our automatic and unconscious habits become what I think of as “Devil’s bargains.” In many stories, a deal with a devil figure usually means one gets a short-term gain at a huge long-term cost. Smoking cigarettes helps avoid the feeling of anxiety now, but the anxiety remains, and the economic and health costs add up. In college, a dear friend introduced me to a track called “I Might Fall” by the band Fetish. In the lyrics, the singer says, “To be free from the pain / you have to be free from the painkiller.”

To step away from the painkiller is to begin the healing descent through Hell. For people who continue to avoid their inner work, this descent manifests as “hitting rock bottom,” reaching that point where they no longer can avoid or deny the costs of their habits. For those willing to engage, this descent into Hell is a conscious work of healing. We work to let go of the numbing agents and feel our true feelings. Dante’s protagonist had a guide, Virgil, who knew the ways of Hell and loved the protagonist well enough to steer him through. Guides might appear as a sponsor, a therapist, a spiritual mentor, or a trusted friend who knows the ways, but such guidance is invaluable.

When we let go of these patterns and begin to feel the pain we’ve been avoiding, we might feel insane. “Why the hell am I doing this?” What helps me is to connect with my core desire—to be joyful, to be present in my life, to be loving and connected to others. Going into my pain, examining myself, and beginning to name what harms me gathers power within. Discomfort, slowly, lessens as we learn to be more at home within ourselves. We convert our unprocessed pain and stuck feelings into something more fluid, energy we can use to live, not just survive. Pain stops being something terrible to be avoided at all costs. It simply becomes one more texture of emotion, one we can experience with the rest. We can tolerate more life, we can learn to embrace it gladly. We find our way through the forest into the great open plain of possibility.

At this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, when the playful activity of summer begins to cool and withdraw into fall, I feel my energy draw inward. This can feel depressive, especially to someone prone to it, but the quality is different. The period from spring and summer feels like a time of broadening and expanding outward, engaging in new activities, finding new friends, planning and executing, working, playing. When fall occurs, I feel it is time to deepen and sink, to go more inward, to shift attention from relationships that feel casual to those that feel more nourishing, at times more intense. In my early twenties, I remember that there was a belief that now was the time to find an intimate partner, if you did not already have one, so you could share the winter months with someone intimate. Rarely, of course, did that work out as planned, but to me it speaks of that seasonal movement of energy. We are as much animals as we are anything else, but sometimes we forget our relationship to the seasonal cycles.

The roots of the psyche lie in murky, deep, mysterious territory, and sometimes we need to sink more deeply into it. The ego develops its habits and stories to support a sense of self, and that is as limiting as it is necessary. Making room to grow, change, or discover something new about the self means that the ego needs to relax and let awareness sink, finding the truth or insight that lies beneath the surface. Our dreams always offer us a new insight, an expanded perspective, a truth that can heal and balance us, but dreams come from our larger Self and tend to push against the waking ego’s habits and beliefs. In a dream, we might feel a sense of truth and power that follows into those early waking moments, only to later look back and wonder, “What the hell did this even mean? This dream makes no sense.” The ego is the part of us that says it makes no sense, the dream is meaningless, because the dream truth is beyond the ego’s blind spots and limitations, and the dream symbol has a deep truth that cannot be completely characterized by logical description.

Dream work, trance work, automatic writing, and art are some ways of connecting with the deeper Self and becoming open to its larger insights and deeper mysteries. We do not have to kill the ego to benefit from these, but we have to practice alternate ways of thinking and processing information. Dream work in groups can be useful for bringing up elements of the dream that the dreamer’s ego cannot recognize. Looking at mythological symbols and archetypal patterns, making art, even writing down the dream and reviewing it later allows us space and time to process and integrate the dream truths. The ego’s refusal of meaning is not the entire truth, it is the moment in which the ego feels threatened and wants to clamp down. If we want to grow, we need to breathe and keep contemplating.

In truth I do not think it is necessary or useful to throw out the logical, rational side of the mind, only to be able to integrate irrational, intuitive insight when possible. When life feels confusing or dried up, when I feel despair or lacking in creativity, I turn toward the unconscious dimensions of the Self to find the mystery that refreshes and invigorates. In turn, I think our communities, our cultures, even our species has its own larger unconsciousness, facets of which make up what Jung called the collective unconscious.

If you are in Seattle and looking for support sinking into your larger Self for inspiration or renewal, consider the Diving into Enthusiasm workshop I am organizing for November.

The rush of a new idea sizzles and crackles. Inspiration has hit, and the vision unfolds—of a new project, a new business, a novel, a way of being that seems suddenly possible, logical, and clear. When we are lucky enough to receive these flashes, we can become fixated on the pursuit of them. That energy wants to go somewhere, wants to act and make happen. We see what is possible and become impatient for that world to unfold, short-tempered with the people and obstacles that do not share our vision and seemed driven to impede the process, or simply ignore it altogether. That brilliant lightning flash threatens to burn away these connections as we pursue it with determination.

The world is not set up to support logic and clarity, however. Where the rational mind wants a direct path from inspiration to execution, the process of making an idea manifest is circuitous and beset by chance and change. The sevenfold alchemical process provides a map of the process—from the purest stage of ideation, the thought passes through opposition and refinement until it can finally become manifest, and then the manifest reality itself experiences conflict and opposition until finally taking its mature expression. Every artist and creator can speak to the gap between the idea and the reality—the novel that seems so perfect when unwritten and becomes something wholly other by the time it is published. The gestating child, surrounded by its parents’ hopes and fears, that eventually becomes its own adult.

This lesson seems hardest for people who are intellectually oriented to appreciate. Because the image is so clear and resonates so loudly, the disappointment and effort to manifest seems somehow wrong, any compromise from the vision a betrayal. These limitations and conditions are where the creative process becomes deeply engaged. If we do not see these as problems and signs of failure but rather opportunities for innovation and refinement, the creator discovers opportunities and lessons to include in their work. That ferocious energy of innovation ripens into the quiet determination of completion, producing results again and again. Our will gets energized by that energy of inspiration and creation, which gives us the power to keep moving through the stages of involution and evolution in spite of the challenges that inevitably beset the process.

I have written about the tyranny of positivity and I emphasize suffering consciously as a path to healing. Yet with all this, I believe my work is about cultivating joy.

We each bring our own personal and cultural associations to particular words, and so my use of “joy” and “happiness” might differ from yours. J.D. Salinger wrote, in his short story De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period, that “the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.” In that context, I believe the image was communicating that joy is more transient, leaking out quickly, where happiness has a hardy, enduring quality.

I experience joy as a natural response to acceptance of one’s life as it is. My critique of the culture of “be positive!” is its fixated nature, where admission that one is not happy all the time is tantamount to admitting that one is somehow a failed, flawed person without a strong enough will. Joy does not replace other feelings, but accompanies us as we feel exactly what we feel in the moment. In the depths of grief, I have felt profound spikes of joy, because both emotions rise from the same well. Joy is that affirmation that we are alive, that life is a worthy task. When we get stuck in avoiding pain and clinging to happiness, or avoiding happiness and clinging to pain, we lose the capacity for joy.

For some, joy waits at the bottom of a mess of painful memories and experiences. We might have to allow in a great deal of discomfort to make room for joy. Not suffering for the sake of suffering, we can aim to simply allow ourselves to feel what we feel in the moment—pain in the back, a sweet smell in the air, warm clothes.

We can also court joy in our lives. We can choose to approach life with a joyful attitude, ready to celebrate whatever comes our way, and not experiencing life as a series of hard lessons or some conspiracy to keep us complaining and unhappy. This might feel facile or uncomfortable for folks who see the pain and weight of the world and believe pleasure and joy are unworthy responses. Again, grief and joy can coexist in the same heart. I would go so far as to say that they must, because grief is the necessary cost of love.

Here’s a recipe for cultivating joy: Slow down your breathing, filling your belly with breath and exhaling completely. Notice your senses. If you can see, what can you see? If you can hear, what can you hear? If you can feel, smell, and taste, what do you notice? Breathe with this for five long breaths, allowing yourself to revel in sensation, even if some of it feels unpleasant.

What are you grateful for? Do you have clean water? Warm clothing? Do you have a place to sleep? Do you have any or all of your senses to drink in these sensations?

If you feel stuck, imagine that your heart is an open cup and pour out that which feels stagnant. Continue breathing in sensation and gratitude, imagining that these can fill your cup with joy. Practice radical acceptance—whatever arises within, whether it feels good or bad, respond to it with “Yes. And this. And this.”