Stuck is a Wondrous Place
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“I hardly move though really I'm traveling
a terrific distance”
writes the poet Mary Oliver.
Being stuck gets a really bad rap. In this over-culture, where being seen, producing and being active is rewarded, the very different tone of stuckness is seen as a weakness, failure or a lack of capacity. But “stuck” is the soul's way of slowing you down enough to undergo a transformation that your conscious mind would never voluntarily choose. It's not a failure of your journey …it is the journey, at one of its most important thresholds. The task isn't to escape it but to ask what's gestating in the dark.
The times I have felt stuck, I have flooded myself with self-criticism. I should be doing this, I should be able to do that. It took time, but I understand it now as an essential stop on the way to another station of life. It works on a different time clock. It is asking me to pay attention to what the poet John O’Donohue calls the enlarged life - a much deeper and wider field of life. The stuck is actually full of movement.
And so here I share some of the inner workings of the wild place we might called Stuck.
Stuck is not really stuck! It's an edge.
In Process Work (or process-oriented psychology), an approach to inner and collective evolution founded by Arnold Mindell, what we call "stuckness" is usually a signal that you've arrived at an edge. This is the crunchy boundary between your known identity (your "primary process") and something unfamiliar trying to emerge (a "secondary process"). The stuck feeling is the friction of hovering at that boundary. It’s one of the most interesting, confusing, confounding places to be, full of the juicy stuff of our less known selves!
But here is the thing, the disturbance carries the solution. Arny Mindell's core insight is that whatever is disturbing you - the block, the symptom, the discomfort - isn't just an obstacle. It contains the seed of what wants to happen next. Rather than trying to push through or get rid of the stuckness, Process Work invites you to unfold it and to get very curious about its texture, sensation, and quality. There are infinite ways of unfolding a disturbance, and this is where I have loved Process Work - there is no one way of traveling the road of our evolution. How?
Instead of asking "how do I get unstuck?", a process worker would ask "what is the stuckness doing?" We would invite you to amplify the experience: if it feels like a wall, what kind of wall? What happens if you lean into it? What's on the other side? This follows Arny Mindell's principle of following the dreaming process rather than imposing an agenda. As a Taoist, a Jungian and a physicist, he was very connected to the ways in which the invisible worlds are quite busy with us, trying to get our attention so that we might become more aware, more fluid, more flexibly intelligent. In other words, follow the signal, not the goal.
Following the flirts and disturbances
Arny would say stuckness often shows up simultaneously in body sensations, dreams, relationship conflicts, and life circumstances. That heaviness in your chest, the recurring dream, and the project you can't finish may all be expressions of the same underlying process trying to become conscious. What is key here is the role of the "metacommunicator." Process Work cultivates an inner awareness, a witness in oneself who can notice "I'm stuck" without fully identifying with it. This slight shift from being stuck to noticing stuckness creates room for the process to move.
We can think about stuckness as a democratic issue. Arny Mindell might also frame it in terms of deep democracy, that some voice or inner state or part of you isn't being heard. The dominant part of your identity is marginalizing something, and the stuckness is the marginalized part knocking on the door. Until all "voices" in your inner system get airtime, the system can stay frozen. In short, Arny would say: don't try to escape being stuck. Turn toward it with curiosity. The way through is into the experience, not around it. The process already knows where it wants to go and your job is to follow it.
One of the main tasks and practices of this time is to follow the flirts. I love this idea - that the universe, that my body, that the world inside and outside of me is trying to flirt with me. Catch my attention. Send me some breadcrumbs to follow, and some elements of the new version of myself that I have not yet met.
Stuck is the ego's word for what the soul calls incubation
This is a key distinction. The ego wants productivity, motion, resolution. But archetypally, many of the most important processes look like nothing is happening from the outside: the seed underground, the chrysalis, the pregnancy. James Hillman (a wonderful Jungian psychologist with amazing writings) would say the ego's complaint of stuckness reveals its bias; it can't recognize that the soul works in its own time.
In Jungian terms, stuckness often marks the moment when the Self (the larger organizing principle of the psyche) is rearranging things in ways the ego can't yet comprehend. The ego's maps have run out. The old story has ended but the new one hasn't begun. This is what the anthropologist Victor Turner called liminality which is the threshold space that is neither here nor there = and it's where the most profound transformation happens.
Stuck a very interesting place! Respect it! James Hillman would push back on even wanting to "get through" it. He'd say: What if the stuck place is where the soul actually wants to be right now? That is what I meant by "respecting" where you are and that the Great Designer, so to speak, has also dreamt this moment for you.... James Hillman would ask what images live in the stuckness. What god or myth is present? He'd say stop treating it as a problem and start treating it as a place. In other words, a landscape the soul is inhabiting for its own reasons. "Stick with the image," he'd say. Don't translate it into a growth narrative too quickly.
The wound as the threshold to vocation
Being “stuck” often circles around a core wound and archetypally, the wound is never just personal. It connects you to something universal. The stuck place is frequently where your calling lives, disguised as your suffering. Chiron, the wounded healer, embodies this: the wound that cannot be cured becomes the source of your deepest gift. It doesn’t mean it is easy, in fact the discomfort itself is like a boundary line between what you know and who you were and who are becoming. It’s a deathing and birthing process at the same time.
Much of “modern life” runs on the well-known hero archetype - to overcome, push through, conquer. Stuckness is often the moment the hero myth fails you. And that failure is the point. It's an initiation into a different relationship with life... one that listens, yields, circles, and descends rather than always ascending. The hero has to die so the deeper Self can emerge.
Do not abandon yourself, says Jungian Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of one of my most visited books, Women Who Run With the Wolves… Instead,
Stay close to your own instinctual nature. Listen to dreams. Follow what has energy, even if it doesn't make sense. Grieve what needs to be grieved. Let the tears come.
She writes that tears are a river that carries your soul-life somewhere it needs to go. And above all, resist the voices - both internal and external - that tell you this darkness means you are lost. You are not lost. You are in the underground forest. You are exactly where the soul needs you to be. The bones are being gathered. The song is being chosen. And when the time is right - and not when the ego demands it, but when you have retrieved the lost parts - you will rise, pelted and running, into whatever comes next. There is a very special time clock to this work. It’s the least capitalist thing going…
As Clarissa Pinkola Estés reminds us: the doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. A deep scar is a door. An old, old story is a door. A yearning for a deeper life is a door. Even stuckness - and especially stuckness - is a door.
Being in good company
When I have found the meaning in and underneath this state of Stuck, I have not only found solace but good company. I have been less afraid of the stretch into the unknown territory of my own self and more able to listen to the shimmering flirtations as the edge of my own awareness. The good company has included my dreams and the dream figures that have accompanied me. The tarot images and archetypal helpers that give me a sense of being part of fool’s journey that many have embarked on. The poems that have come my way to offer navigation, provocation and an opening into non-linear ways of taking steps in the dark. And the conversations with friends, elders, guides who know a tiny bit (and sometimes a whole lot) more than me.
There is no perfect way to tie up this thought piece , in fact, I think it’s just a beginning of a deeper inquiry into what I have learned so far and the questions I am now holding, so here is a poem…