Growth is painful. Change is painful. But nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don’t belong. – M. Hale
One of the most frustrating experiences in life is feeling like you’re getting somewhere on your Soul’s path, only to feel stuck again for the millionth time.
This first year of parenthood has been one of those for me. I’ve been met with endless roadblocks, personally and in my work. Just when I think I’ve found some sliver of clarity or direction, I’ve fallen into a dark bog of confusion again.
If you’ve made it this far, I’m sure you can relate to the feeling of being stuck.
Spiritual Wanderer Course:
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐ "I started the Spiritual Wanderers Course a short while ago and for the first time in twelve years I have started to experience love, acceptance and compassion for myself and within myself. Thank you so much." – Vivienne S.
Wading through a cesspool of chaos, self-doubt, and disorientation is one of the most aggravating experiences known to humanity.
The sensation that you’re hopelessly stuck on your Soul’s path can make you:
- Feel lost and alone
- Feel angry and exhausted
- Doubt everything in your life
After some Soul-searching and introspection, I’m sharing with you some of my findings. I hope they can help you find clarity if you’re feeling stuck on your Soul’s path.
You Feel Stuck For Three Reasons …
If you don’t know where you are going, any road can take you there. – The Cheshire Cat (Alice in Wonderland)
There are many reasons why you may feel stranded or stuck on your Soul’s path. I can’t claim to know every nuance or detail of your unique situation.
But I have picked up on a pattern that seems to be common to many of us kindred Souls that I’ll share below.
The three reasons you may feel stuck on your Soul’s path are the following:
- Your mind is lying to you, aka, it’s playing tricks on you through the mental traps of filtering, blaming, and denying, and all-or-nothing thinking.
- You’re living predominantly from the head in an externally-focused way
- You don’t realize that the roadblock itself is the lesson and path
Let me unpack this for you below:
Dissolve the shadows that obscure your inner Light in this weekly email-based membership! Perfect for any soul seeker serious about practicing ongoing shadow work and self-love.
1. Your Mind is Lying to You
The first reason why you may feel hopelessly stuck is that you’ve got lost in your mind. You’ve entered a “head trip” on par with Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland.
Instead of being aware of your thoughts, you have become your thoughts. You have unknowingly become hypnotized by your own mind with all its fears, beliefs, and projections.
Some of the biggest forms of mental deception out there are known as ‘cognitive distortions.’ This is a concept I’ve borrowed from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but it applies to anyone in or outside the therapist’s lounge.
Feeling stuck on your Soul’s path is a good indication that you might be experiencing one of these ‘mental lies’:
- Mental Filtering Trap – This happens when your mind focuses on negative details to the exclusion of all other neutral or positive aspects of your situation. It says, “What matters is only the bad stuff. I can’t focus on anything else but what’s going wrong.” Mental filtering causes you to feel stuck by keeping you stranded in the quicksand of negativity.
- Blaming Trap – Let’s be honest, we all know what this is about! Blaming is denying that you have any role in the crappy situation you find yourself in and pointing the finger elsewhere. It says, “This/that/they’re responsible for my suffering, not me!” The blame trap makes you feel stuck because it robs you of personal responsibility and accountability. I’ve been there, and I’m sure you have too.
- All-or-Nothing Trap – Thinking in black or white happens when we swing from one extreme in our thinking to another. It says, “If I don’t experience total success in this, I am a total failure!” The all-or-nothing trap gets you stuck because it steals your personal power and reduces you to a shallow label such as “good or bad,” “weak or strong,” “right or wrong,” etc.
There are many other mental traps out there, but these three often dominate when it comes to feeling stuck. They are the alchemical ‘lead’ in our psyche, that, if identified, can lead to the gold of self-awareness.
If you’re struggling to find or get unstuck from these mental traps, I’ve created the Alchemical Soul Work Workbook to help you with just this. It’s a powerful problem-solving system that empowers you to find more clarity, freedom, and direction, especially if you’re feeling lost in life.
2. You’re living predominantly from the head in an externally-focused way
This point builds from the last: you’re too stuck in your head, and you’re disconnected from your heart’s inner knowing.
You can tell that you’re living too much in your head if you:
- Are disconnected from your feelings most of the time
- Tend to ruminate a lot and replay events in your mind
- Have little to no awareness of your body throughout the day
To walk our Soul’s path with grace, we need a balance of the mind and the heart, as well as logic and intuition. When one side is imbalanced, we can easily get stuck.
Typically, most people in our modern society are stuck in their minds. But it’s also possible to get stuck in the heart and lack the ability to use clear thinking, leading to poor decision-making and delusional ideas.
Would you like to save this?
We'll email this article to you, so you can come back to it later!
Your information will never be shared.
Whichever side you occupy, the result is often the same: living in an externally-focused way – depending too much on what others think, feel, or believe, and being out of touch with our own inner reality.
3. You don’t realize that the roadblock itself is the lesson and path
This took me years to learn: sometimes the feeling of stuckness itself is the higher lesson and road ahead.
Perhaps being stuck isn’t the problem. Perhaps it’s the path.
We can learn a lot from feeling hopelessly stuck. Some of the greatest Soul lessons that come to mind are:
- It teaches us the power of trusting in an Intelligence greater than our own
- It teaches us patience, forbearance, and respect for the cycles of nature
- It teaches us the need to go inwards and listen to our Soul’s voice
The Biblical saying, “Be still and know that I am God,” comes to mind, as well as the Hanged Man card in the tarot – these teach us about surrender.
The period of gestation is also a deeply significant process I want to mention here. Every new act of creation takes time to naturally grow and ripen. Look at the baby in the womb, the seed beneath the soil, and the fruit on a tree – each takes a matter of weeks, sometimes months, to emerge fully. The same process of gestation happens within our own lives.
You may feel stuck. But maybe what’s really happening is that you’re gestating and growing something new deep inside of you that hasn’t taken form yet. Maybe these feelings of stuckness are the ego’s impatience to rush the natural process of growth.
Feeling Stuck: A Soul’s Path Message From Spirit
Here’s the card I pulled as some extra guidance for anyone reading this article (from the Soul’s Journey Lesson Cards deck by James Van Praagh).
If you resonate with messages such as these, see Shadow & Light for weekly intuitive guidance and personal support for your Soul’s path:
Sometimes, feeling hopelessly stuck on your Soul’s path is a sign that you need to stop focusing so much on yourself and start focusing on how you can be of service to others.
Focusing on our growth, our needs, and our desires is important. We need periods of intense self-focused Soul work and introspection.
But if that’s all we do, it can easily lead us to feeling emotionally and spiritually malnourished, claustrophobic, and stuck.
Consider how you can give back to others. Reflect on what you can do to improve the life of even just one other person, young or old.
If you feel more drawn to helping animals or nature, take some time to think about how you can sustain, protect, or heal the habitats or wildlife that call to your Soul.
In the words of some great souls,
Spiritual Awakening Bundle:
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐ "This was probably one of the best purchases I made in a long time … These are some of the most valuable texts I’ve ever read, and I'll never forget the path they started me on. Thank you so much for writing it and putting it out there for us to find." – Heloísa
“I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.” – Maya Angelou
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“I slept and I dreamed that life is all joy.
I woke and I saw that life is all service.
I served and I saw that service is joy.”
– Khalil Gibran
I hope this post has sparked moments of meaningful insight in you.
Tell me, why do you think you may be stuck? What do you think is the greater reason for this feeling of stuckness?
A more provocative question you may like to explore is: What are you getting out of being stuck? The unconscious mind often has some hidden agenda when it comes to feeling stranded. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Whenever you feel the call, there are 3 ways I can help you:
1. The Spiritual Wanderer Course: Need "big picture" direction, clarity, and focus? Our Spiritual Wanderer course is a crystallization of 10+ years of inner work, and it can help you find your deeper path and purpose in life as a spiritual wanderer. You get 3+ hours of audio-visual content, workbooks, meditations, a premium test, and more!.
2. Shadow & Light Membership: Want weekly intuitive guidance to support you on your awakening path? This affordable membership can help you to befriend your dark side, rediscover more self-love, and reclaim inner wholeness.
3. The Alchemical Soul Work Workbook: This powerful psychospiritual tool helps you turn inner blockages into breakthroughs using the ancient wisdom of spiritual alchemy. Through guided prompts and deep self-reflection, you’ll gain clarity, dissolve emotional pain, and reconnect with your Soul’s wisdom. Transform confusion into clarity. Live a more authentic, ensouled life.
I very much appreciated this article today. It seems as though any time I feel that I am finding a way forward, I end up “circling back” to the same old challenges — and the mindset that takes me there, apparently. Thank you for helping me to find some clarity.
Happy to help, Marsha. :)
Thank you Lovely, I found this article comforting. I’m feeling stuck by hesitation and choosing from the many things I could do, fuelled by financial stress. I make elaborate plans but then change them. I believe there is probably an undercurrent of the fear of failure, as I’m not young and have only had limited success. I feel less alone after reading your article, thank you.
I’m so glad you feel less alone now, Jamila ♡
First, Happy Birthday to Sage!
And congratulations to mom and dad on first year of parenthood!!
I am stuck in transition.
I am aging out of the work force a bit, and afraid of the next stage. For some reason i just won’t engage in helping myself in ways that will help me.
John
Thanks John! Parenthood has certainly been one of those trials by fire!
I hope this post has given you some ideas on how to move through this transition.
I am as Mad as hell… And I just won’t take it anymore.. The fed-up character from a film I once watched, expressing his feelings out the window of his office high-rise. When everything in his life became negative, depressive, he became very angry indeed.
Contrary to your convoluted thoughts, my stuckness is too much going on in the outer World of thoughts in action, while I tend to introvert and go inwards, ruminating or overthinking to the point of anxiety at times.
Aging slows you down physically in the outer realms, but the mind always takes a point of view (Egoo) he, he, he, … Plus, my parents, God rest their souls, used my subconscious as their learning ground post-war, to fill my tender hard drive mind with much ingrained material, for which I am still recovering from today. As it takes decades of recovery, realignment, with diminishing or deleting the old fears, phobic responses, prescribed, and ingrained or stuck thoughts to bubble up, become cognitized from negative to positive flow. So we all grow in our own separate ways.
Along with this comes that I was born as a sensitive male, yes, but my inner ID archetype is more emotional dwarf, physically dented and stuck from the motorcycle accident in my Father’s days. So I am a very inner person, quiet and reflective, stubborn and sensitive, having to deal with the crazy changes happening all over this World.
As you point out, stuckness can also happen from being too internal (I guess this is where the “mental traps” part comes in, mentioned in point #1). Thank you for your reflections and vulnerable openness, John.
Thank you for another insightful piece.
Your reflection on life’s stuckness touched something deep, and your mention of Sage’s first birthday, and his love of churros, made me smile.
Yet his favourite treat, carries symbol, too. Churros whisper of chore and row…a reminder that at times, to keep flowing feels like work.
Still, we row.
As you beautifully expressed,
when we lean too hard on mind or emotion, we can find ourselves rowing in circles instead of moving through life’s natural cycles.
But when we accept that roadblocks are part of the journey itself, we begin to see that stuckness is often a matter of perception, a misperception, an illusion.
Then we can realign,
mind, heart, body, and spirit,
to what is within our gift:
the rhythm, the oar, the act of rowing itself. Your words remind us that the roadblocks, the illusions, and even the feeling of stuckness
are part of the flow that grows us.
Thank you for the wisdom you share. Happy 1st birthday, Sage.
May his journey always flow
with wonder and with grace.
You put this all so elegantly and beautifully, Amanda. I love your contemplative breakdown of the word “churros” as well 😄 I will never see them the same again haha
Thank you for your insightful reflections 💜
I can really relate to this article you have written, because I’ve felt stuck as you call it for quite some time not actually realising why!
I was trying to apply my healing gifts and knowledge but not actually knowing how to or where to start which left me anxious disheartened and felt lost
It was only until quite recent I was introduced to some charity work and like minded souls that offered me guidance and work in shelters animals which made me feel much better so I can put my healing into practice which I’m doing . I must admit though hi did ask for the guidance in prayer looks like it was answered!
I’m so glad you can relate, Jeanette, and that you’ve found an outlet for your healing work. Beautiful ♡
Thank you for being a blessing to animals.
For me, the feeling of being stuck coincides with the significant changes in my life. I have been in menopause for the past five years and the symptoms have been horrific. Adding to it HRT has not been helpful because I have a soy allergy and most estrogen and progesterone medications have a soy component. On another note, I was injured at work as an RN when my patient grabbed my wrist which required me to have surgery 13 months later. Having a wrist injury has been even more devastating because it interferes with everything especially my gym routines. Going to the gym is my stress relief and it’s been more than a challenge to be as active. Yes, I go for walks more frequently, but it’s not the same as the gym. Lastly, I am trying to complete my doctorate in Holistic Health and Metaphysics and I have been mentally block writing my dissertation. With all these things coinciding together, I absolutely feel stuck in every aspect. No matter what, I take two steps forward and three steps back, I am so over it.
My 31 year career as a nurse has been all service and I am exhausted. I do not feel I give back to myself enough. Whether it’s family or friends I always put others first, so if anything I believe all these situations are forcing me to rest. Yet, I do not have any clarity.
I appreciate you sharing this, A. It sounds like the opposite is true for you: you need to turn the attention back on *your* needs and healing. You need to be of service to yourself first. I hope you find some clarity soon, and that you can connect with your heart’s knowing to move through these blocks.
This is the best article I have red, Luna! I feel
the same
way, exactly. And I think
I am
stuck so I can finally
start being in service which was always my wish but the fear of showing up my healing soul is keeping me
stuck. Not anymore. Hope
life gets better for all
of us.
Sending Love,
Neda
Thank you for your affirming words, Neda! I’m excited for your path ahead now that you’ve found more clarity. Let the fire burn! ☺️
I can relate to this, Neda, I keep postponing my healing work as I believe I should do other work first. Maybe I need to change paths.
I’ve been stuck in an interminable dark night of the soul for about 13 years now and I’m losing hope that I’ll get out. Only to be met with multiple health, money and political issues in the past three years. Can’t work, can’t go out to do anything because of money, and physical disability. Spent 30 years digging out all the traumas of my life only to be met with more fierce garbage. My nervous system can’t take anymore. Can’t get out. Universe will not give me a happy spot. It just won’t let me out. And yes I’ve done all of the meditation etc that I could possibly do.
What are you feeling?
I’m sorry to hear of your struggle, frustration, and pain, Amy. I can’t pretend to understand your situation fully, although I can recommend one practice: creativity. I have found creativity to be an immensely powerful outlet and healing practice. Frida Kahlo, when she was bedbound and suffering from spinal problems (including eventual amputations to parts of her body) found solace and self-mastery through painting. Sometimes the answer isn’t more healing or trauma work. Sometimes it’s the act of creating something from where you are.