Some people are motivated (put into motion) by negative emotions, like fear, hate, refusing something with so much energy that it finally puts them in motion: until then they cannot get unstuck.
Other people are motivated by accomplishment, joy, love, freedom, or some other positive event or emotion.
The problem is how to crank up the energy of the emotion, negative or positive, so there is enough energy in it to put you in motion, to get unstuck.
The enemy of any forward movement is complacency, cynicism, resignation. These are real strong energies. If we wanted to express their effect, they are like a ton of weight on the see-saw. If you want to make the see-saw move, you need to pile up the weight on the other side.
Most people leave this to chance, hope that something will move them from dead center to get unstuck.
Other people cause breakdowns to get unstuck.
Certain areas of life look monolithic, too robust, too unmanageable. They remind me of the 12 step program sentence: “our life has become unmanageable…”
Getting rid of clutter is like that.
I once visited a fellow “Emotions Anonymous” member. His house was knee deep in old newspapers. He, I guess, started to put aside newspapers that he wanted to read later, and they piled up. 4 rooms and kitchen full of them. Knee deep.
The guy was a talented computer programmer. Something snapped inside him, and he had been out of work for a few years.
I worked with him, worked on him. Although nothing happened in the session, next thing I heard he applied and got a job, six figures salary. Cleaned up his house, and stopped going to meeting.
Sometimes a tiny little blockage can back up a whole lot of emotions that need to be expressed. He cried in our session. I think with that crying he washed away the blockage. It got him unstuck. Miracle.
A blocked state often expresses itself in life becoming unmanageable. Mostly your home life. Your environment.
Unmanageable means you can’t see that you can do it. You can’t see that you can do more than sweeping around the edges. It feels sinister and too darn big for you, puny you, to do anything substantial about it. But more importantly: it doesn’t feel like it’s worth it. There is not enough energy in either direction. You don’t hate it enough, and you don’t love freedom, or clean and organized enough to tackle what there is to tackle.
Medically this is what they call low-grade depression. It is too low to go to the doctor with, but too high to have energy for life. But it keeps you stuck, and keeps you stuck for a long long time.
You may manage, somehow, to get your work done, to get dressed when you go out, but when you are at home, you rarely take showers, the dirty dishes pile up, and you wear the same dirty clothes days at a time.
The question is: how do you get out of this state, without waiting for a miracle. How do you get unstuck, using your own energy.
Miracles do happen. You may fall in love. You may get evicted… both are wakeup calls, for the energies, I mean.
I have been in that state more often than I care to share. The shoe-maker has a hole in their shoe, as a rule, I have much less power with myself than with a client or a friend. Healing, coaching oneself is a tricky thing: you feel both the important and the unimportant at the same time… too much information, hard to sort out.
They say that the reason business owners can’t retire because they work in their business not on their business. While you are working in your business you have your attention on what you are doing instead of the whole.
Same thing with your life. Living in your life is doing what you “have to” do every day. You need a second pair of eyes to look at the whole, at the “hidden” connections, so you can start working on your life and take it to a whole new place.
This is the ideal job for a coach. Of course most so-called coaches do something totally different, namely they help you work in your life better, but they never ask the uncomfortable questions to see the big picture: they don’t want to antagonize you, after all you are paying their bills.
I often take on “clients” gratis because what they are dealing with is so similar to what I need coaching in.
I look at their life and meditate over it, and get insights that can totally transform their lives, and the same insight works for me. The method is known as self-coaching: if this were the issue for a friend of yours, what would you advise them to do? Just moving your attention from yourself to a friend (imaginary in this case) you remove yourself from the center of the issue and can see the hidden connections you could not see standing in the middle.
I have a new potential gratis client: they haven’t quite accepted the agreement. Why? It is very unpleasant to be told that for 35 years you didn’t do the right thing: they are 70 years old, in business for 35 years, not enough money to retire.
I have been meditating on their life and business and am starting to see what it is that I am doing wrong, what it is that I am blind to, what it is that has been hidden from my view: we both work in our respective businesses, not on them.
The trouble with working on your business is that you need to set a goal, a target, and you need to make a plan.
Not necessarily a big plan, not necessarily a comprehensive plan, but without a plan you’ll lose sight of what you wanted to accomplish.
This is true for all unmanageable areas of life, not only business. You need to set a direction, a goal, a target.
The plan needs to work on one indicator, needs to set a goal in only one aspect, otherwise it will be so unmanageable that you’ll stop doing it. I have seen enough people get stuck in a too big to manage plan…
I will use cleaning up clutter as an example: it is easier for most to relate to.
I have heard students talk about clutter and cleaning up a few times. I have never heard a student succeeding in that. Why? The method they employ doesn’t work.
Years ago I read a book written by two women on how to do housework for right-brained people like myself.
It went something like this: start poking a hole in the big and unmanageable tasks so they become manageable.
Instead of what most people try to do: start in one corner of the house, get done with it, and then move to another area, they suggest a different method. Why? Because the starting in one corner method doesn’t work. Too many unrelated tasks overwhelm the person instead of energize them.
The poking a hole method is simpler and gives quick satisfaction and energy to continue the job.
Start with a specific task that you can start and finish without having to move stuff around. It must be a task that reduces the density of the mess.
Example: find all the little scraps of paper you have all those important notes on. Do not touch full sheets of paper, only scraps.
Do not look at them as you gather them, put them in a tray, or a pile, and when you have found enough, then go through them and throw the outdated ones away. Suddenly you will see more of what’s on your desk, shelves, drawers, etc.
Then find a second, easily definable type of item to search for, in my case anything that is harder than paper, cd’s, cell phones, wires, pens, and start to gather those. Do not organize them, do not find a place for them until you have removed all of them from the piles… you do not want to be sidetracked.
Once the pile doesn’t have any of these “hard” items, start organizing and putting the hard items where they belong.
Why am I sharing this with you?
Because it’s been a big issue for most people: they experience their lives too fast, too much to do, and yet they manage to have time to watch TV, to talk to people on the phone, so it is not a matter of time, it is a matter of manageability.
Same method slightly tweaked works for overhauling your business, if you have a business. And the same method applies to overhauling your life: getting a divorce, starting a new career, rebuilding life after a divorce, after a spouse’s death, after losing everything in a hurricane, etc.
The goal of uncluttering is that everything has a place and is in its place. The goal of overhauling a business is that the business works for you instead of you working for the business. The goal of overhauling your life is to be able to start on a healthy foundation, so you can be happy, fulfilled in your life.
I have both issues, and I will watch more for the parallels… I feel that there are many.
I’ll document what I find on this blog.
What does this have to do with raising your vibration? A whole lot. You see we could say that to raise your vibration you need to clean off, peel off stuff that is not you.
These stale, unmanageable areas leak all your energies and all you have energy for, often, is just survival. You may desire to raise your vibration, but to no avail: you have no energy.
By cleaning, peeling, overhauling these unproductive areas of your life you reclaim the energy locked up in them and you can start flying. You have the wings already.
Most of you are so frozen from fear, that you don’t do anything. Just wait. For Godot. Or for God. Or for Death.
After all, the big, unmanageable “job” of overhauling your life can do that to you.
The guy with the knee-high piles of old newspaper was lucky. I came along and nudged his grief out of him. But he could have, alternately, started to clean up the mess and get a lot of energy.
You choose your method to get unstuck. I can only help.
Read the original article: Stuck? Playing a small game? Waiting for a miracle? Get unstuck using my methods