Feeling Stuck
Greetings Tribe! It’s been a while since I posted my last article and although I’ve been wanting to write so many times, my brain had too much and I did not know what to start with … or let me reframe this, I had many topics in my head but I choose not to try putting them in order, I allowed to be held back from the joy I find in writing and I choose not to write. Sounds pretty straight forward, right? It is easier to find excuses than accept the simplicity that when something is not happening the way we want it to happen is because we choose to.
This year has been a difficult year for many of us, for some more than for others. For me it hasn’t been just learning how to live with the consequences of this pandemic, I also lost my dad on his recent short battle with cancer. I was not ready, neither expected to experience living during a pandemic, but I definetely wasn’t ready to loose my dad or even imagine there would be travel restrictions and I would not be able to be there with him during his last breath. This fucked me up. I haven’t manage to be fully myself again, and I still feel something is holding me back, I feel stuck.
Why we get stuck sometimes?
We get stuck through our internalized fears, when we are lowering our expectations and self worth or when we are worried or afraid to make important decisions in our life and taken away from our comfort zone. What help us get un-stuck?
Recognize you are stuck. Acknowledgment is a sign of courage, and a step forward to wanting to do something about it, otherwise we would not care. Once we recognize we are stuck, our brain is telling us we are going through a moment we don’t feel comfortable with, and we have the choice of analyzing how we can get out of it without self judgement so we can start thinking making positive changes with confidence. One of the biggest mistakes we make when feeling stuck and we don’t recognize it, is that we wait for change to happen to us without understanding that change doesn’t happen to us but it comes from within us, regardless how scary and painful might be. Acknowledgment opens opportunities.
If you are grieving, allow yourself to grief. Whether is that you lost someone you love, lost your job, going through a divorce, lost your financial stability. Sometimes more than one thing happens in a short period of time, and we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to process it. The important and healthy thing to do while you are grieving is to acknowledge, accept and understand your emotions. Allow yourself to feel and find your support system, don’t be alone and if you need to seek for professional assistance it is ok.
Stop living in your past, and stop blaming yourself or others when things did not happen the way you wanted. Learn from your past and your mistakes, and know you might make new mistakes, but try not to make the same mistakes twice. Let go of your past and live your present moment. What is gone is gone, so allow yourself to forgive and accept that is ok, and that now you are at a different time where you can make new choices.
Understand your reality and listen to your inner voice. Allow yourself time to reflect and understand where you are and where you want to go. You can control the way you think, the choices you want to make and the attitude you want to adopt. Practice meditation, talk to your best friend and expand your perspective over the bigger picture you want to see yourself in. Any practice that gets you paying attention to what’s going on around you and inside of you, is going to engage your parasympathetic system, which is what keeps our body and mind cool and relaxed. This allows you to have a better perspective of your reality and recognize new opportunities. Ask yourself, if you go around trying to live within a comfort zone in order to create safety for yourself, how is it that you can make major changes in your life? How do you break through your limitations? How do you expand your comfort zone to conquer and accomplish new things?
In order to change your behavior, learn to be flexible. Flexibility is gained by applying new knowledge and finding new applications of previous knowledge. It allow us to unlock doors, become more effective, powerful and influential. The ability to change behavior until getting the desired outcome is the source of personal power. It’s not magic, it just makes sense and takes a lot of emotional resourcefulness to remain flexible and open to options when things don’t go our way.
One brick at the time. Start creating small changes. Changes stimulates parts in your brain that improves creativity and clarity, so let it flow. Take your time and don’t rush, live your moment and the experience of how every small change affects your outcome, and celebrate it, because every small step counts.
Believe. Believe in yourself, believe in life and in what is happening around you. I understand that doing what you really want can be difficult, uncomfortable even sometimes embarrassing, but the second you state something, you claim it. The moment you want your dreams to be true starts with the courage to state them without diminishing them and in order to make this happen you need to believe you can. Life happens for us not to us. Trust that you can reach your expectations and get out of your comfort zone. Expect self sabotage will happen sometimes, and that is ok as long as you recognize it and understand sometimes in order to keep moving forward we need to take two steps back. Make sure you also recognize your successes and write them down on a gratitude journal, so you can go back to it when you are feeling low, to remind you, change is possible regardless the challenges or obstacles.
“Thank you daddy for being partially responsible of giving me life. Thank you for rocking my world, sometimes with pain and others with joy. Thank you for coming back to me after so many years of being almost estrangers, that time you dedicated to me and my family was priceless. Thank you for being the annoying and loving grandfather to the light of my life. Thank you at last to be honest and so careless of what others would think you never wasted your time, but above all thank you for letting us see and understand the simplicity of life through your choices of living your life. I’ll always miss you but you will always remain by my side, I know you are still here with us. Know you were not alone, and there was so much more love around you than you could have ever imagine.”