Feeling stuck, anxious, or overwhelmed? It's okay. This article offers compassionate guidance on embracing your current experience, finding peace in the messiness of life, and allowing healing to unfold naturally. You're not alone in this journey

“Grief is the price of love” is a quote attributed to English psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes and one that I often see shared on social media, usually by those who have lost someone they love and are in a long and deep grief process; it gives some solace, explanation and justification for the pain they are experiencing and it’s longevity.

However, this perspective offers a limited understanding of the complex nature of both grief and love. And it can cause you to diminish, invalidate or ignore grief that arises that isn’t associated with love. This disenfranchisement of grief can lead to loneliness and isolation and exacerbate the pain you are experiencing as well as the longevity of your grief.

Continue to blog to watch my Youtube video below or keep reading the written article….

Some members of my community have been telling me that they’re in various states of freeze that they've been in for quite some time, or that they’re really challenged by going into a freeze response in certain situations such as being criticised by a loved one or having anger directed towards them.

So in this helpful article, I explain:

• what a freeze state is

• why you can get stuck in a freeze response

• the typical approaches people react to a freeze and why they don’t work

• how radical self-compassion can help yourself get out of a freeze state; and

• I take you through Tara Brach’s RAIN process combined with somatic touch to help you through a freeze/shutdown response or any challenge you may be experiencing

• BONUS audio recording of me taking you through the RAIN and somatic touch process for radical self-compassion

For several months now I have felt like I am in a liminal space, caught between old versions of who I was and who I am becoming but aren’t quite yet as old identities and ways of being release and new ones form.

In the last few days, I have experienced an incredible turnaround in an unexpected way.

It has been a welcome surprise and gift to return home and discover that I have been released from the rut I was in. I have more energy, drive and inspiration, as well as a renewed sense of meaning and vision. The pathlessness I had experienced for so long is finally starting to dissipate and open up. New opportunities and possibilities are starting to appear.

In this article I will give you the process that took place and explain how and why it helped.

I was going to write an article about how our inner critics work against us, but now that I’ve sat down to write, the words have frozen inside me and it feels like a drawer-bridge crashed down in front of me so I can’t move forward and write. My stomach is constricted. Feelings of dread, horror and shame arise. My arms feel jittery and weak. I want to go and do something else that doesn’t feel as hard or scary.

Have you ever experienced something like that?

Maybe it wasn’t as result of writing. Perhaps you wanted to reach out to someone to take the next step in a friendship or relationship, make contact with someone you haven’t spoken to for a long time, apply for your dream job, go somewhere new on holiday or take a creative class alone, speak in public or bring up a conflict or issue in a relationship. You may have concluded that you’re on the wrong track, that what you’re feeling is an indication that you shouldn’t proceed. If it feels bad, maybe you’re just not meant to do it? Or maybe what you long for just isn’t for you? Why would doing something you love or really want to do feel so bad? But this often isn’t what it signifies at all.

Instead of writing about inner critics in this article or even a more soulful piece as I love to do, I am sharing about navigating the freeze response on your growing edge – where you want to step towards something you long to experience but freeze and get stuck and can’t go towards it. It can be very painful, lonely and upsetting. Without a map – a clear understanding– of what is happening you can stay stuck for too long or give up and never get to where you long to be.

So when your goal, dream or plan fails or no matter how hard you try or what you do you just can’t achieve your goal, what do you do? Do you come up with plan B? Maybe. Or maybe the medicine your soul needs is to become like driftwood.

This is what happens after life cuts you down to the ground, when change has been forced upon you, a relationship or job ends, health leaves you, a loved one dies, your dream is crushed or a combination of many stressors and pressures makes your life seem untenable and you can’t go on.

Read more for a road map to finding your way through change, loss and the most challenging times of your life.

Dear lost, searching, trying, sensitive soul,

If change has been forced upon you. If the rug has been pulled out from under your feet.

If what you had is lost or taken from you and you’ve been thrown into a sudden abyss of darkness and uncertainty. If your way is lost, you’ve lost your vision, become directionless, disoriented, confused and you don’t know what to do, who or where to turn to.

Your body may be panicking. You might be fearful and anxious, desperate and scrambling to find a way out of your situation. Your nervous system will be automatically making you react into fight, flight, freeze or fawn.

But don’t rush to take the first step that comes to mind to get you out of your experience and away from where you don’t want to be unless the house is on fire or you are in some other kind of immediate danger. Don’t scramble to retrace your steps to find out where you went wrong to end up in this place for nothing is wrong despite what you may think. This may be confusing but stay with me and you’ll understand.

There will be times in your life, when change is forced upon you, the rug is pulled out from under your feet, where what you had is lost or taken from you and you are thrown into a sudden abyss of darkness and uncertainty. The way is lost.

You may feel immense fear, panic, dread, and confusion, worry or even numbness or shame.

When things stop working in your life or where you are trying to reach a goal but can’t find your way to get there, you can easily jump to the conclusion that something is wrong, that you’ve made a mistake and that you need to fix things to make it work again.

There is a biological reason for this. …

During the course of your life you will arrive in liminal spaces many times where you finish one chapter in your life but the next one hasn’t started yet or when you know you need to make changes but don’t know what to do or are avoiding change. Being in a liminal time in your life can make you feel fear, worry, anxiety, uncertainty and even panic. You feel the fear because this is an incredible and powerful window of opportunity.