1. Read If the Buddha Got Stuck: A Handbook for Change on a Spiritual Path by Charlotte Kasl. {Actually, read everything Charlotte Kasl has ever written that is relevant in any way to your life.}
It’s in my personal Ignition Kit (keep reading) and it’s a reference book you can get a jolt out of whether you’ve got a hour-long spell of writer’s block or you’ve been stuck in a hateful career for 20 years. It’s a lovely, guilt-free and super-effective Zen approach to self-activation. I’ve been working this book for so long that I’m certain the rest of the list draws at least some inspiration from there.
2. Explore your payoffs. As a human being, you don’t do things (or refrain from doing them) for no reason. Get to the bottom of what you’re getting out of staying stuck. Does it let you avoid growing all the way up? Do you get to be ‘right’ as against your partner’s or parent’s ‘wrongness’? Do you get to be the sad story, get attention, not have to be fully aware of things that hurt? There’s something in it for you – figure out what it is, and you can do the really grown up work of deciding what’s really more important to you: this payoff or the ‘after’ picture of your life that you envision.
3. Know the difference between floundering and stuck. If you think you’re stuck, but you’re working hard and the various things you’re trying just don’t seem to be working, consider that you might actually be floundering, as opposed to stuck. If you’re in motion, doing the work, staying awake, and trying to manifest the vision, you might not actually be stuck. Give yourself a break, and try to work with this image: vision without attachment to that vision, as it will undoubtedly change over time.
Living an awakened, prosperous life on this planet requires the ability to flex around events beyond your control and stay able to course-correct when circumstances change without railing at the unfairness of every broken plan. And ask any so-called “overnight success,” world-domination (if that’s your gig) doesn’t happen overnight – even when you really want it to.
4. Make a homemade ‘Ignition Kit’ – consciously search out reading materials, practices and other tools, experiment with them, and cherry-pick the ones that work for you. Put together a condensed ‘kit’ of your personal favorites, and have it ‘live’ wherever you most often feel the most deeply stuck. Your desk, your bedside table, your car, your meditation spot – all three – your gym bag, whatever works.
You can make an Ignition Kit in a variety of flavors – or even do a combination of the following (I have several, in different spots):
1. a pile of books
2. a document of affirmations, quotes and excerpts
3. a list of websites you can count on for inspiration
4. how-they-did-it articles about businesswomen or investors you admire
5. a friend to call
6. strategies
7. meditations – still or moving (sun salutations, etc.)
5. Practice gratitude in your most stuck moments – it’s the best distractor from mental spinning and chatter. A lot of the times, when I’m stuck, it’s because my focus has been thrown off by my spinning on my current problems or situations.
One cure for the mental chatter is yoga – if you’re a yogini, you’ll know that the whole entire purpose of yoga is not, contrary to popular belief, to get a yoga butt, but rather to still the mental chatter and physical discomfort so wise women (okay, and men) can sit for lengthy periods of time in meditation.
Meditation itself is another form of training in thought control – if you want a fairly non woo-woo gal’s analysis of how meditation can keep you from obsessing over drama so you can do the real work, check out Eat, Pray, Love –actually, check it out anyway.
The only other sure-fire way I know to manage the mental spinning is to practice gratitude. It links you tightly with the source of the things you already have (which, it just so happens, is also the source of the things you will have in the future), and makes it nearly impossible to veer off into fear or nervousness or anxiety or whatever.
When you feel a money freak-out coming on, stop yourself and list – in your head, on paper, wherever – all the people/places/things/experiences for which you’re grateful.
6. Eliminate. Earlier this year, I had an epiphany while potty training the girls. [Love me, love my dogs – check out Aiko + Sumiko pics on my Facebook page].
I’m a big no potty in the house-type gal. I was watching the girls (4 weeks old at the time) closely to prevent accidents, and noticed that when it was time for them to do their business (my puppies are business-women, too), they would circle the border of the rug with laser-beam precision.
Then came the a-ha moment:
When we’re going in circles in life, that might be a sign that it’s time to
eliminate.
Unlike the girls, though we’re not just eliminating the leavings of grain-free gourmet puppy food with Omega-3, 6+9 fatty acids.
When we’re stuck, it’s time to meditate on what needs eliminating. Some candidates for elimination:
· Habits that no longer (or never did) serve us
· Limiting thinking patterns
· Deactivating words and speech patterns, like spinning
· Power- and energy-draining relationships
Elimination is a powerful image for me. Others might respond better to the less aggressive image of letting go, or releasing. I find releasing to be an especially effective practice for working with letting go of attachments to outcome (attachments being the Zen version of the root of all evil human suffering).
Louise Hay, in You Can Heal Your Life, has some powerful affirmations and practices for releasing mental patterns that create “dis-ease,” both in our bodies and in our lives.
7. Go to beginner’s mind. You really should read Charlotte Kasl on this point. Long story short – start over. Rethink it. By it, I mean everything about the thing on which you are stuck. Especially when it comes to things you’ve been stuck on for years and years, ask yourself this question: if you were just now starting this project, and you knew nothing about it, how would you proceed.
Half the time, we overthink our goals and dreams and projects, creating mental obstacles that don’t exist in the real world, overcomplicating things that are actually simple and generally getting in our own way. In fact, if you’ve been stuck on it for years, revisit why you wanted to do the project in the first place – you might not actually want it enough to be a worthwhile pursuit anymore, or you might simply need a new infusion of passion and a refreshed vision of your ‘after’ picture to get you back in motion.
8. Get ready to unwind. And I don’t mean unwind, as in relax. Ayurvedic practitioners (Ayurveda is an ancient Indian wellness system) often refer to unwinding as the uncomfortable symptoms of detoxifying and properly nourishing a your physical body when you’ve been feeding it nonsense like Cheetos and other foods that are fake or even just inappropriate foods for your unique constitution.
As you work your prosperity practice (or unwork your scarcity practice, as the case may be) – especially at turns in the path that involve habit transformation and big-time rethinks – you will undoubtedly experience discomfort (both mental and, sometimes, physical) and angst. Sometimes you’ll feel empty, or you might feel a gnawing in your stomach (this can cause overeating).
Maybe you want to fall asleep every time you try to do your Fiscal Health Day or start an argument when you try to take a more mature approach to making joint money decisions with your partner. You might feel intensely alone when you eliminate friendships that no longer serve the you you are becoming.
Expect the discomfort, experience it and know that it’s a sign you are evolving – if you know about yourself that you’ll be tempted to resort to the old patterns (e.g., spending, eating or bitching to soothe the discomfort), set up some new, soothing behaviors in advance that you can resort to when the yuck emerges, like:
· taking a bath,
· doing some sun salutations {om},
· watching something distractingly, absurdly funny {episodes of Arrested Development tend to work for me}
· obsessively rubbing Burt’s Bees lemon cuticle balm into your nail beds.
9. If your stuckness is around starting a business or building a brand or doing anything online, do a Fire-Starter with Danielle LaPorte over at White Hot Truth. She’ll take an objective look at your stuff, evaluate it with her wide ranging expertise on everything from social media to authenticity to book publishing, and inject more energy into your world than Obama injected into the banking system – no joke.
Do you have any homemade ‘stuckness’ cures that work well for you? Please comment and share – help your sisters out!
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