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.”

You are not broken.

Working in community mental health, I have thought and re-thought and will continue to re-think the value of mental health care for people who struggle with poverty and oppression. My clients have many barriers to good housing and employment, including mental illness, poverty, and criminal histories. Even some of the most generous assistance programs are unwilling to work with certain criminal backgrounds, and I am left wondering what to do. I am one piece in a network of systems that at times can work beautifully well and at times utterly fail.

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What can we learn from feeling stuck? If every experience offers the possibility to help us life more free, more meaningful lives, then stuckness might have its own seed of liberation. The feeling of being “stuck” is somewhat generic and can encompass a variety of human experiences, from fairly mundane to a kind of horror that begins to feel mundane:

·         Stuck in a relationship that’s not very good but not very bad, living a life that feels dissatisfying but I have no ideas about what would be better.

·         Stuck in an abusive cycle, where I feel terrified of someone or something in my life that has the potential to cause me harm if I try to make any changes, or even if I don’t make any changes. I genuinely feel there is nowhere I can go because every road seems dangerous, even the road of doing nothing.

·         Stuck in bad circumstances, such as being loaded with debt, wanting a job but not having a car or Internet access that would help me to look for one or actually commute if I could find one, living in an apartment that’s broken down and costs more in rent than it’s worth, and every time I try to make a move the ground seems to come out from under me.

Feeling stuck is painful. Our animal nature wants freedom as much as it wants comfort. The capacity to choose our lives can help us live gracefully with what might otherwise be unbearable situations. When we feel that choice is missing, we can fall into that learned helplessness that is akin to depression. This is a different experience than living with the spiritual belief that our lives are ordained for us by some wise benefactor. Submission to an outside will can itself be a choice that helps some to find freedom in life. A substantive difference in quality comes from the belief that such submission is voluntary and purposeful. Coerced submission is no blessing.

When we feel stuck, all that energy that wants to go and do gets coiled around the basic problems, becoming increasingly more painful. Some of us start finding ways to numb the pain or distract ourselves and displace all that pain and energy into something over which we have more control. A frequently-used example is yelling at a dog instead of speaking up to a boss. Irritation with life in general, or a sort of floating anxiety and fearfulness that seems to have no cause, may point to somewhere in life where we feel we cannot move and we want to avoid perceiving.

This perception is important. One way to begin to free that energy and reclaim it is to sense and sit with it, to sense the blocked energy and suffering, and to continue sinking into that sensation. Becoming free sometimes demands that we learn to move toward the intolerable. To simply sit with ourselves being stuck and feeling frustrated and let that part of ourselves speak. If we can sit with this and find a trusted ally who is willing to listen and offer honest feedback, we might begin to recognize something we’ve been avoiding that might help us to become free: a conversation, a resolution, an action. Sometimes we have to learn how to wait while staying awake enough to see an opportunity when it comes.

Action is not always possible or desirable. Sometimes giving ourselves space to feel or finding people who can sit with us in pain is enough to lighten the heart of its burden. We can change our experience of ourselves, but we might need to find physical safety and meet our survival needs before we have the energy to do so. Help exists if we are ready to look for it. We might not know what is possible, or who is willing to help, or what is available to us, before risking a change.

What else helps when you feel stuck?

Author Brian Bouldrey once told me that in adulthood, every victory is conditional. That has stuck with me throughout my twenties and now early thirties, and I notice that we experience nothing that is not some mixture. Sometimes we lift our torches to the world and ask for what we want, and sometimes what we receive is not what we expected.

I struggle with knowing what to do in these situations. My mind wants to clamp down and cycle through stories about why this is not right and fears about settling for what is offered. This is the cycle of a mind that is stuck within scripts and closed to information. The mind becomes constricted around beliefs about how things are supposed to be and not capable of achieving its natural, open, relaxed state wherein more becomes possible.

Lately I find myself slowing down more when my mind wants to cycle into anxiety. I take a deep breath and notice the urge to keep searching, looking, thinking, debating, to keep busy and postpone the actions that would move life forward. Instead of energy moving, it becomes blocked and fixated. At the same time, simply acting from this blocked energy does not feel complete or whole.

I can take a breath and imagine myself sinking inside, among the clusters of hurt and fear. I can notice what is happening within my physical body, within this environment, at this moment. All of this includes the cycling of mind and anxious movement of energy within. All of this includes the solidity of the chair, the gravity that keeps me anchored to earth. I can ask for help, for more information. I can make a decision, knowing that each decision is not an end but another step on a long and winding path. My being wants to be in relationship to this world, to be actively involved and in motion, to be still and seek rest.

Does life feel like a perpetual series of crises? Does drama feel endless? When feeling stressed, is there a rush and overflow of thoughts and a feeling like action is needed now, now? Is there even an awareness of a gap between the stimulus and the reaction? Do we act out with immediacy, without consideration, leaping into familiar modes of saving, intimidating, or escaping?

Within us are vulnerable places, old wounds or buried sensations stored in the body. Even the most well-adjusted and nurtured among us are likely to have something of the kind. Childhood can be wonderful and a terrifying, overwhelming experience. Traumas encountered as we grow and age can similarly become stored away, unprocessed, influencing us from behind the scenes.

We might be more driven by these buried memories more than we realize. However we managed that situation as a child potentially informs the structure of our responses to anything else that feels similarly stressful or overwhelming. If anger was shut down, we may automatically shut down anger even when it is necessary for self-protection. If we had to contort ourselves to please confusing demands from our caregivers, we may grow up constantly attempting to read and adapt to the expectations of those around us, or to the mental images we carry in our minds of what those confusing caregivers would have wanted from us. Adults becoming more independent, complex, and mature at some point must face the contradiction of the childhood image of certain adults as near-godlike in their wisdom, beneficence, terror, or demand for obedience; versus the adulthood realizations of those same adults as simply human, flawed, loving, wounded, or scared.

I do not advocate that we blame our adult problems on childhood lay them at the feet of our caregivers, but I believe strongly in the value of understanding how history has shaped and informed the present. Of particular importance is the way our story of history shapes our experience of the now. We do not have to start with the autobiography when stuck in crises or in compulsory emotional and mental responses that feel uncontrollable. We first start with noticing that this is our experience. Somehow I always seem to have this response in this kind of situation. I get angry when someone does this, and then feel embarrassed later when I realize what the person actually meant. If we are able to notice and have contact with the observing part of self, we can now learn to catch that response in the moment and sinking deeper. I’m getting angry, so I will take a breath and notice what else is happening. What’s going on in my body? What thoughts are coming up? What emotions do I find? What is similar to the past? With the metaphor of sinking, I imagine a storm troubling the surface of a pond, which is my usual awareness, and slowly dropping deeper beneath to still waters, able to gaze up and see the troubled surface.

I do not advocate discounting all of our immediate responses as somehow inferior relics from childhood, either. Anger or fear may well be a legitimate response to something in the situation we cannot quite name, and perhaps that emotion is also made bigger by previous experiences or something we’re not quite recognizing. Sinking into a larger awareness of what is occurring helps us to get more information and make more accurate responses. If I do not feel I can address the situation accurately when I feel angry, I can come up with strategies to manage the anger until I’m ready.

What I think brings balance is inviting the opposite into my experience. When I feel the urge to speed up, I can take a breath and try to slow down internally. When I feel the urge to lash out and protect, I can try to consider what is motivating the actions that feel like an attack. In major crisis situations, instinct is a valuable asset to help us through. If we can practice this slowing down and seeking balance in situations that are less urgent, we can become calmer and more effective in dealing with everyday matters and the big, scary crises if they come, as they come.

Let your breathing bring you gently into your body. Let your breath become a little slower, a little deeper. With every inhale, allow your belly to fill until the breath rises into your chest. With every exhale, allow your breath to slow and complete itself.

With every breath, notice your senses. Notice what you are seeing, or notice the texture of darkness and light behind your eyelids. Let your focus soften to simply receive what is present. If you are reading this text, take in the guidance and spend a few breaths with your senses before moving to the next.

With every breath, notice your senses. Notice the feeling of contact between your skin and the air, your skin and your clothes, your skin and the pressure of what supports your body or feet.

With every breath, notice your senses. Notice any scents in the air, or simply the feeling of air moving in and out of your nostrils.

With every breath, notice your senses. Notice the sounds of the environment. Some may be pleasing, some may be discordant. Notice any urge to focus on a pleasing sound, or silence, and notice any urge to push away or ignore sounds. If you can, let your breath open these urgings to simply allow sound to arise and fall away.

Shift you awareness to your heart, or imagine that you can sense your heart. With every inhalation, breathe in what you sense or what constricts you. With every exhalation, imagine the threads that connect. Breathe into what is within you, and exhale into what surrounds you. We are separate and interconnected. You are here and alive.