Freeing Ourselves

Getting Stuck

“We do have options. We do have choices, even if the only choice available at the moment is to see that we are stuck and to accept that ‘stuckness.’ Amazingly, when we truly accept our stuckness, our situations begin to change. Often it is not the situation that is keeping us stuck but our attitude about our situation.”
Anne Wilson Schaef

I had a dream the other night in which I was stuck inside an old, storage shed full of rusty bicycles and assorted junk. I was trying to move through all of it, but somehow got snagged behind the bicycles where there was no door. I pushed and shoved, but nothing moved. Finally, I picked up an awl that was about a foot long and started whipping it in front of me like Harry Potter’s wand.

I’m always surprised at the scenarios that the ‘dream-maker’ invents to show us what’s going on inside. An awl—really! The last time I saw an awl was in 1977, in New York City. My lab partner, Fran, carried one in her purse to defend herself on the subway home to Brooklyn. Awls have a rounded handle on one end, with a long, pointed metal spike on the other. They’re made for piercing through wood or leather. If you stuck someone with an awl, it would not be a good thing. But the point of the dream was, ‘you’re stuck, Jane; what are you going to do about it?’

Getting stuck is a human condition that everyone struggles with from time to time. Whether it’s getting stuck in a job we don’t like, stuck in relationships that ‘don’t grow corn’ for us, or stuck in a rut of doing the same things everyday like a hamster in a wheel, we all get stuck. And when we’re stuck, attitude is everything. We can resign ourselves to a bad situation and suffer endlessly, which I call the ‘Eeyore Complex’ (from Winnie the Pooh). We can become determined, develop a plan, and execute the steps. Or we can pick up a ‘tool’ and blast our way out. All choices have consequences with which we will have to live. But options are always on the table.

One option, which Schaef describes, is embracing our ‘stuckness.’ We can feel how it feels to be unable to move forward or backward, and sit with that feeling. We can simply accept where we are without feeling sorry for ourselves or aggressive with others, and hold the question, ‘how do I resolve this?’ In most cases, the same inner intelligence that pointed to our ‘stuckness’ will show us the way out.
In the spirit,
Jane