We get stuck. Its just one of the ways that energy moves (or doesn’t move) in life. Sometimes we don’t know we are stuck, because sometimes things got blocked up without us knowing. Maybe certain psychological barriers got put up when we were kids, and our worldview and sense of self were still incredibly receptive. Maybe we inherited some limiting beliefs from our ancestors, or when something traumatizing happened and we weren’t able to heal from it. There are lots of ways these little holding patterns in our consciousness can develop, and it can be useful to trace their origin to understand where they came from. But sometimes tracing that origin can become a distraction from healing, another way of staying stuck. So its important to also focus on making new patterns. Sometimes areas of stagnancy clear out on their own, but sometimes they don’t. This is a crucial part of healing, in fact some say it is mainly what healing is all about: clearing out the pathways in our bodies and minds to allow life energy to flow freely. It’s easy to understand how this could happen physically with say….something being stuck in your throat, literally blocking air from flowing, but this can also happen psychologically as thoughts and feelings can get stuck and keep us from growing, being and/or doing what we want.
Here’s an example of how a stuck thought could show up:
Sometimes we have unconscious thoughts that certain parts of us are broken and so we don’t even try to heal them or bring energy or light to them. For some reason (cue any of the things mentioned before i.e. parents, friends, media, trauma) we have the belief ” my hair is bad” or “my stomach is weak” or “I’m bad cooking” and its a because it has been around so long, it is a chronic thought. A chronic thought means we are no longer aware of it. The thought doesn’t stand out to us as separate from us, we have incorporated it into our being and it just floats around with us… ” my hair is bad” is just part of us, so when we go to brush our teeth and wash our face, we just skip over loving our hair. We skip over brushing it with healing. We skip over looking at it lovingly in the mirror. We don’t even consider that it could be slowly getting healthier as we go on. We don’t consider that our hair, just like ALL of life, wants to heal, and is always trying to heal, if we can just provide the right environment. It may be slow, and hard to see, but the healing adds up, slowly but surely. So we have to check in about where we are habitually (and often unconsciously) disallowing healing/growth/life/energy/new thoughts to exist.
This habitual and often unconscious limitation of our self can happen in so many places of our being. Often we do have these habitual limiting beliefs about parts of our body, but just as often we have these beliefs about our mind, our personality, our abilities, and sadly even our worth. In psychology this could be called ‘core beliefs‘. We often inherit them from childhood, but not always. It can be useful to think about where these beliefs come from, but you don’t have to know where they come from in order to change them. As I said early, sometimes trying to understand exactly where they came from can be time consuming, sometimes impossible to know for sure, and often can just keep us stuck as they can confirm why we are stuck in the first place. So just remember, you don’t have to know why something developed in order to heal it, although it can also bring a lot of insight into your life and a sense of affirmation to understand why you are feeling a certain way. Just make sure if you are going to spend time digging into the past to understand where something came from, that you don’t get stuck there. Just remember to also be doing something in the present to change your relationship to that limiting belief.
The first step in changing these limiting beliefs (or habits of stagnancy as I called them), is to know that they exist. To start to see these beliefs as just what they are; a belief, and not a finite part of reality. They are not an inherent part of you, like your heart or bones… even though they can feel that way when we are so used to them and aren’t even aware they are there. So again, the first step is to become aware of what habitual thoughts we are carrying around…especially the ones that are hurting or limiting us.