When you shift from thinking about your experience to actually being in it, several things tend to happen.

Most psychological and self-help frameworks, however well-intentioned, are structured around a shaming logic. Something is identified as a problem — a behaviour, a pattern, a symptom, an emotion that's inconveniently large or persistent. And then the work begins to fix, manage, change, or eliminate it.

What follows is a set of practices I draw on in my own work, drawing on Somatic Experiencing (Peter Levine), Polyvagal Theory as Deb Dana has applied it clinically, and the community somatics approach of Collective Being.

The inner critic is relentless, creative, and — crucially — seems to know exactly where you're most exposed.

You worked hard, ticked the boxes, hit the milestones. The career, the relationship, the apartment, the lifestyle — maybe not all of it, but enough of it. Enough that from the outside, your life looks like it's going well. Enough that you feel guilty for not feeling better.

You can think your way to a lot of things. But you can't think your way out of a freeze.

Are you the same person?

Most approaches to feeling stuck treat it as a problem to be solved. Something has gone wrong, something needs to be fixed, something needs to change. Get a new strategy. Work harder on yourself. Push through.

But what if stuckness isn't a malfunction? What if it's a communication?

You want something different from your life, and you're terrified of what different might mean.

Where classical yoga traditions might frame the experience of emptiness and dissatisfaction as something to be transcended, the Tantric tradition takes a different approach.

Underneath almost every experience of feeling lost, there is a more precise longing.

We are here to become, not to arrive.