On March 17, 2026 we ran the first session of Get Moving — a 4-session intensive on dissolving the freeze patterns underneath stuckness.
This is what we covered. Not the personal stories. The principles.
Most approaches to stuckness try to fix the content — the story, the history, the reason why you’re stuck. They assume you need to dig into the past, understand what went wrong, build new beliefs on top of old ones.
Session 1 laid out a different frame. What follows are the principles underneath it — ideas I’ve been working with for over a decade, crystallised from developmental psychology, somatic methods, trauma resolution, energy work, and a few thousand hours of doing this with people.
Some of these will be familiar. Some will contradict things you’ve been told. All of them were demonstrated live in the session — not as theory, but as direct experience in people’s bodies.
THE CHALLENGE WITH SOME CONVENTIONAL CHANGE-WORK
Much of our suffering is not caused by the conditions of our lives
It’s caused by the added meanings and assumptions we make about our experience. This is the foundational premise of everything we do.
When something happens — a setback, a rejection, a feeling in the body — there’s the event, and then there’s the story we wrap around it. The story tells us what it means, what it says about us, what we should be afraid of next. That secondary layer of interpretation is where people actually get stuck. Not the original event.
I’ve spent 35 years looking at this. I grew up frightened, nervous, low self-esteem, hypervigilant, defensive — all of it. And what I found is that the suffering I was experiencing wasn’t being caused by the conditions of my life. It was being caused by what I was doing with those conditions internally.
In much of conventional change-work, the assumption is you need to understand what happened in order to heal it
This is so deeply embedded in our culture that most people don’t even question it. You go to therapy. You tell the story. You understand why. And then, supposedly, something shifts.
Sometimes it does. But often, understanding why doesn’t change anything at the level of the body. You can have perfect insight into your childhood and still freeze every time you try to take a step forward. The map is not the territory. Knowing the map doesn’t change the territory.
We demonstrated in Session 1 that you can work with a body state — a contraction, a resistance, a freeze — without ever identifying what it’s about. Without going into the story. Without naming it, analysing it, or understanding its origins.
“Feel it to heal it” is only partly true
This is one of the most popular ideas in personal development and therapy: you need to fully feel your emotions to process them. Go into it. Let it move through you. Feel it to heal it.
The problem is that this only works if the activation is low enough. If the activation is too high — if you’re at an 8 or a 9 — going into it doesn’t heal it. It just retraumatises. You end up reliving the experience, reinforcing the neural pathway, and coming out the other side no better off and often worse.
We know this from trauma resolution. Going back and reliving things is incredibly unhelpful very often. Someone came to me once about a fear of pigeons. She said, “Can you help me?” And then immediately: “But will I have to relive the thing?” No. You don’t have to relive anything.
Cognitive reframing is a different thing from what we’re doing
There’s a moment that happens in almost every group I run. Someone starts to make progress with a body-level shift, and then they jump to the head. They start reframing: “Instead of seeing these things as blocks, I’ll see them as stepping stones.”
That’s a nice thought. It might even be true. But it’s a cognitive move, and it’s a different thing from what we’re doing. The body likely didn’t shift — the intellect constructed a new story on top of the old one.
The distinction matters. When the body actually shifts, you don’t need a new story. The old one just stops being relevant. You don’t reframe “heartbreak” into “growth opportunity.” The charge drops out of the word and it just becomes letters.
The very effort we’re making to solve the problem is often what’s holding it in place
This one is hard to take on board because it goes against everything we’ve been taught about effort and persistence.
We attempt to do something, and it’s built on a polarity: “I’ve got to do this, because this is how I get the outcome I want.” But the more attention we put on it, the tighter it gets. We struggle with it, wrestle with it. It doesn’t matter — it just gets tighter and tighter.
And then there’s a secondary trap: if I let go of this effort, then I’m letting go of the very thing that was going to give me my solution. So there’s sadness or grief at the idea of stopping. Which keeps us gripping. Which keeps the pattern locked.
Sometimes we can just take our attention away. And we don’t notice that in those moments, the thing loosens in the background.
We come back to problems with the memory of how they used to be — and the expectation reconstructs them
Something loosens while you’re not looking. Then you go back to check on it — and you bring with you the memory of how bad it was. That expectation is enough to partially reconstruct the state.
I had a client who had a fear of water. We never worked on it directly. She moved to Spain, went out into her garden, looked at the swimming pool and went — oh. My fear’s gone. When she went to look for the fear, it had dissolved. Vanished. Disappeared.
How many people have had that experience? You go back into a situation expecting to feel a certain way, and you’re surprised that it’s different. Sometimes we’re more afraid of our expectation that we’re going to be afraid than the fear itself.
CONTENT-FREE: YOU DON’T NEED THE STORY
You don’t have to relive anything to resolve it
You can remain here, in a place of safety and calm and centredness and groundedness. And yet, in the background, aspects of you that have been generating fear or concern or worry can start to fall away.
The intention is: how can you stay here — present, grounded, low activation — while the resolution happens? Not by going back into the experience. Not by re-entering the state. By relating to it from where you are now.
The body speaks its own language — you don’t need to translate it into English
One of the biggest insights from trauma resolution in the last 20–30 years is that our body-mind systems can let go of things without ever knowing what they are.
The recognition that it’s possible for our systems to release without ever naming or understanding the content — this changes everything about how you approach stuckness. You might never know what it was. And quite frankly, do you care? You just want your freedom and your ease.
I said to the group: the body is speaking its language. Don’t need to translate it into English. It is a conversation. I was with a client earlier that day, and his toddler came in. She stuck her tongue out at me, I stuck my tongue out at her. She stuck her tongue out, I stuck mine out. We were just chatting away in the conversation of sticking your tongue out. It is a language, an exchange. The body’s release — tears, softening, loosening — is the same kind of conversation.
When the body releases, don’t add narratives
Tears come. Softening happens. Loosening. The body responds first.
The temptation is to ask: what does this mean? Why am I crying? What am I letting go of? Don’t. Just treat it as your body releasing tension. We don’t need any other stories, don’t need any other narratives. My body just figured out how to let go of something. That’s all.
Unfortunately, we may have learned a lot of other meanings to add to things. For now, it’s just relief. A release.
Structures of meaning are closed systems — the solution is not to climb in
The minute you climb inside a narrative, you take on the assumptions that the premises of that story require it to be dealt with from within that story.
If the story is “I was abandoned as a child,” then climbing inside that story means you need relational psychotherapy, an attachment figure, probably three years of it. If the story is “I have a reservoir of unexpressed hurt and anger,” then climbing inside means you need to process all of it, piece by piece.
But what if you don’t climb in? What if you start by relating to the pattern, not entering it? What if you find the exit pathway without ever going through the door?
That’s what we did in Session 1. Not once did anyone have to go into their material. And not once did the material fail to shift.
YOUR RESPONSE TO YOUR OWN RESPONSE
We’re not working on the fear. We’re working on your response to the fear.
This is the distinction. We’re not working on fear, or resistance, or stuckness directly. We’re working on your response to your own response.
When your response to resistance is more resistance, you jam. When your response to fear is fear of the fear, you lock up. When your response to stuckness is frustration about being stuck, the stuckness gets denser.
But when you can relate to it differently — witness it, oscillate with it, even choose it deliberately — the whole system loosens.
Not trying to fix it is already an exit pathway
Your capacity to be with feelings, reactions, emotions, responses — without any attempt to change them — can be the beginning of the process of starting to feel more confident in relationship to your experience.
One of the women in a previous session said: “I feel very, very unsafe. And here, I feel totally safe to feel that way.” The story about fear and lack of safety was not taking over. That is already the exit. That’s already one of the exit pathways.
“You can, and you don’t have to”
One of my mentors said this and it stayed with me. One of the easiest ways to stress out a manager is to tell them to do something and then tie their hands behind their back: you can’t, and you have to.
Here, the opposite: you can, and you don’t have to. You can speak. You can stay silent. You can engage. You can sit back. The freedom of choice — having permission without obligation — is itself a resource. It’s itself a form of safety.
Introducing variation breaks fixation
Where there isn’t much degrees of freedom or movement, we introduce variation. It doesn’t matter what the variation is.
We did this with someone working on creative resistance. I had them repeat: “I’m going to resist.” Then: “I’m not going to resist.” Then: “I’m going to resist when I resist.” Then: “I’m not going to resist when I resist.” Then: “I might do any of those. In fact, I’ll pick which one I want in any particular moment. I have options.”
The fixation broke. The buzz dropped. Attention unfixated. Because the system was locked in a binary — resist or don’t — and we just showed it that there were other positions available. The content didn’t change. The degrees of freedom did.
EXIT PATHWAYS AND HOW THE NERVOUS SYSTEM LEARNS
Freeze is intelligence. The problem is it didn’t get the memo that the threat is over.
The freeze response in animals is basically: stay put. Don’t move. While there’s a lion — or a cheetah or a leopard or a puma or a cougar — the gazelle freezes. It’s a survival response. It’s not dysfunction. It’s intelligence.
When the threat leaves, the animal gets up. It shakes. Shakes out the freeze response. The body loosens. Releases all that frozen energy. It drains away into the ground, or dissipates, or dissolves. Full reset.
Humans often don’t complete this cycle. The threat ended — those experiences finished, those things happened — but nobody told the nervous system. So it keeps running the freeze program long after the danger has passed. The stillness isn’t laziness. It’s intelligence solving a problem that no longer exists.
The oscillation: “a little less, a little more”
You locate the feeling in the body. You notice the intensity — say a 6 out of 10. You use your hands to represent it, to give it a spatial existence outside of you.
Then: a little less of that feeling. Let it reduce slightly. Now a little more — allow it back. A little less. A little more. You’re not trying to get rid of it. You’re showing the nervous system that the intensity can vary. That it’s not fixed. That there’s movement available.
What happens is that after a few oscillations, it dissolves. The hands come together and there’s nothing there. Empty, peaceful state. This is not positive thinking. Not reframing. It’s giving the neurology a new degree of freedom it didn’t have before.
We’re literally learning exit pathways from loops
The body state creates the thoughts. The thoughts create the body state. It’s a loop.
What we did was dissipate the energy so it’s empty. Then think about the thing you want to do from that empty state. And this is when the repatterning happens — because each iteration, there’s less to overcome internally as resistance.
It’s great if it happens in one trial. But even when the pattern recreates itself — and it sometimes does — each round, there’s less of it. 6 becomes 4. 4 becomes 2. 2 becomes nothing. And then when it tries to come back, it’s boring. It can’t hold up anymore.
A secondary meaning is being formed: “I can do something about it”
Even when the feeling returns, knowing you resolved it minutes ago changes your relationship to it. We don’t even mind if it comes up, because a secondary meaning is being formed, which is: I can do something about it.
In every state that we can’t deal with, some meaning has been made which is: I can’t do anything about it. That’s the real prison. Not the feeling — the meaning attached to it about our helplessness.
When someone goes from a 6 to nothing in 10 minutes, the secondary learning — about their own capacity — is as important as the primary shift. People who get this can see how quickly their life can change. Because they’re not going into frames of reference and meaning-making that tells them how hard it is to change.
We’re more afraid of our expectation of fear than the fear itself
Sometimes what happens when we get into frozen or stuck conditions is we don’t have a thing to do. We don’t have an action to take. So the anticipation — the expectation of what might happen, could happen, might go wrong, won’t work — becomes the prison.
What happens with anticipation? It’s the expectation of the future. Assumptions about what might happen. And that anticipation can be more intense than the actual experience. People go back into situations expecting to feel a certain way — and they’re surprised that it’s different. The expectation was the thing generating the response, not the situation.
WITNESSING, NOT PROCESSING
Peer over the wall. Don’t climb in.
One of the people in the session described seeing a reservoir of unexpressed feeling — hurt, anger, resentment — behind a wall. The instinct is to climb in and start processing. That’s what we’ve been taught to do.
Instead: leave it over there. Look at it. Don’t do anything with it. We’re only dealing with one response — your response to it. Whatever that is.
The resource that’s being built right now is witnessing. Not processing. That you can tolerate looking at it from a more neutral place. And actually, oddly, that starts the processing pretty quickly without having to feel it all.
It’s more important that you can move both ways than that you push through
This is like getting into cold water. You can do a Wim Hof dive. Or you can tiptoe. We want to acclimatise. Find out that you can move safely between head and emotion.
Deliberately go into your head. Do the thing you do — the going-up-into-the-intellect thing. Now let that go, and allow yourself into your emotions. When it gets too much, climb back out again. Go back in. Come out.
It’s more important that we can go both ways than trying to soldier through. That capacity — in and out, in and out — is the muscle we’re building. Once you can do that, the system trusts itself enough to start letting things go.
Stay in low activation while putting your attention on high activation
Stay calm. Feet on the ground. You’re here. Now put your attention — just your attention — on a state when you have high activation. Like an 8 or 9 or 10.
Don’t go into it. Almost like at a distance, imagine a time when you’re not in this state. Relate to it from here. This is the fundamental architecture: you don’t have to re-enter a state to work with it. You can hold it in awareness while remaining grounded.
PATTERNS, NOT CONTENT — AND WHY IT’S NOT LINEAR
The content is endless. The patterns are not.
There are common patterns for how human beings get stuck neurologically. And there isn’t a huge number of them. The content — the stories, the specific events, the details — is infinite. But the underlying structures repeat.
We’re not working at the level of individual incidents. We’re chunking up to the level of the relationship to fear. The relationship to resistance. The relationship to responses. Work at that level and you don’t need to visit every individual incident.
If you got stuck, you were innocent
When we’re growing up, the degrees of freedom that we have as our mind develops don’t have the fluidity and dynamic response to unpick complex dynamics. They inadvertently loop on themselves and get stuck.
Think about a child who sees a parent in pain and decides: I’ll take that on. I’ll carry it for them. That’s beautiful. A sincere and beautiful intention. It’s only later in life we start to realise that some of these things that were so sincere got us into knots and tangles that we weren’t able to get out of.
No blame. No fault. Just a young system doing the best it could with the degrees of freedom available to it at the time.
“Every fool knows there are many drops in the ocean”
Every fool knows that there are many drops in the ocean. Only a wise person knows that all of the ocean is contained in every drop.
This is from one of my mentors, Zivorad Slavinsky. The basic premise: in classical therapy, the assumption is I have to work through all my material. There’s an amount of it. This is a physical metaphor.
But if you learn one pattern shift in relationship to all of it, our brain has the capacity to generalise. Think about doors. You learn how to open an inward door, an outward door, a sliding door, a revolving door. Four or five types. You don’t walk up to a new door and go: “Oh no, I only know how to open 7-foot doors, but this is an 11-foot door.” Or: “I’ve only learned how to open blue doors. I don’t know how to open red doors.”
Dry one drop, dry the entire ocean.
Solve one pattern and a whole bunch of them disappear
It’s not linear. You don’t have to go through every single thing.
I see it like those MrBeast videos — 100 people standing on podiums, and they do one thing, and 50 of them drop away. These things that we think there are thousands of are usually multiple examples of the same pattern. Solve one pattern and a whole bunch of them just disappear and fall away.
When we start to recognise “oh, it’s another one of those,” we can start to generalise. And then it’s not the long journey it looks like it is.
CHANGING VALENCE WITHOUT CHANGING CONTENT
Alter the structure, not the meaning — and the charge drops
The charge on a pattern can shift — sometimes dramatically — without touching the content at all.
In Session 1, we took a word that carried enormous emotional weight. Wrote it out in space. Distributed the charge across the letters — found that almost all of it was concentrated in one letter. Removed that letter. Spoke the altered word. The emotional charge dropped from near-total to almost nothing.
Then put the letter back. The charge didn’t fully return. The whole word had changed — not its meaning, but how the neurology was holding it. We didn’t do any therapy. Didn’t touch the narrative. Just altered the structure.
It shouldn’t work. But the body doesn’t care about our theories.
Any neurological state can return to presence, stillness, being
This isn’t about getting rid of states. It’s about discovering that the return to neutral is always available. Whatever neurological configuration you’re in — fear, resistance, freeze, overwhelm — there is a pathway back to stillness.
And when you find that pathway, when you know it’s there, the states themselves stop being quite so threatening. Because you know you’re not trapped in them.
SAFETY AS FOUNDATION
When the base settles, everything above it reorganises
We closed Session 1 with a base chakra meditation. The base chakra — the perineum, bottom of the spine — is the energetic foundation.
I worked with a woman called Mikhail Levin for a while. She said: “Whoever comes to me, we work on their base chakra for the first 18 months.” Building foundations allows for coherence, stability, safety. Prior to psychology. Prior to the stories.
When that base settles, you have a foundation on which all the other chakras — all the other aspects of your experience — can start working healthily. Fear, hypervigilance, holding patterns that have been running for years begin to release. Not because we analysed them, but because the ground they were built on shifted.
“Are you safe enough to feel unsafe?”
The question isn’t whether you feel safe. It’s whether, in this moment, it’s okay that there’s a little bit of unsafety present.
Someone said to me once: “It’s not that I’m in danger. I just don’t feel safe.” And I said: none of us are safe. We’re on a rock hurtling through space at 25,000 miles an hour. They burst out laughing.
But in this moment, you are safe. Right now. You’re breathing. You’re metabolising. Heart’s pumping. The simple feeling of being. Can you settle into that? Not as an idea, but as a felt sense in the body?
Much of our fear is not ours
We are social creatures. When other people are in threat, if we’re empathic, we can be in threat as well.
In my early life, when I was hypervigilant and nervous and scared and frightened — most of it was not mine. Most of it was my mum’s energy. She pretty much sent out a message constantly: the world is dangerous, the world is dangerous. And as kids, we go: all right then, world’s dangerous. Not realising it’s somebody else’s energy and not our own.
I was working with somebody about fear of flying. She said: “Yeah, like 90% of it is not mine.” I said: “Well, what about the other 10%? What if it was your own energy?” She said: “I’d be excited. I like flying.”
Allow anything you took in from other people — anything that told you or taught you that you couldn’t rely on yourself — to fall away.
WHAT GETS US LOCKED IN
Loyalty, values, and early decisions can lock us into patterns we can’t update
This one is subtle. Someone in the session had a very strong commitment to loyalty — to keeping their word, being true to what they’d decided. Beautiful value. Sincere.
But what happens when you’ve made a decision and your own value system creates such a strong reaction — shame, disgust, “lack of integrity,” “almost not being human” — that you can’t change it? You’re trapped by the very thing that makes you who you are.
Somewhere along the line, decisions were made. And then the person got themselves into a place where they can’t change them, can’t update them. Changing your mind is not betraying who you were. But try telling that to a nervous system that has shame and disgust wired in as the consequence.
We need to reduce that polarity. Not abandon the value. Just make it possible to update a decision without the whole system treating it as a moral catastrophe.
When something unsticks, there can be grief
This is counterintuitive. You’d expect relief. And there is relief. But there can also be sadness — that we spent so long holding something. That we maintained the reservoir and didn’t let it go. Or that the thing we’ve been longing for has finally arrived, and there’s so much relief that some people even try to keep that away.
Sadness or grief is often an indication that something unstuck. Something got unblocked or released. The sadness isn’t a problem. It’s the body acknowledging that a chapter is closing.
The shift from cognitive knowing to felt knowing is what creates change
“I’ve cognitively known that needs to happen. But I felt it this time, as opposed to just knowing it.”
That’s the difference. The felt sense of knowing — rather than intellectual understanding — is what creates the actual possibility of change. You can understand something perfectly and have it make no difference whatsoever. When you feel it, when the body gets it, when the knowing lands at a level below the intellect — that’s when the scaffold starts to dissolve.
ATTENTION AND PERCEPTION
Whenever we feel stuck, we can always move our attention
Even when the body feels frozen, you have freedom of movement of your attention. You can put it wherever you like.
We did an exercise: eyes closed, gently move where you’re looking — left, right — loosen the eyes in their sockets. Whenever we feel stuck, we can always move our attention. So loosely move your attention around. Find out you can put it wherever you like. You have freedom of movement of your attention.
This is always available. Even in the worst of it. The body might feel locked, but attention is never locked. And moving attention is often enough to break the loop.
When attention unfixates, the whole perceptual field opens
After one of the processes, the first thing someone said was: “I’m more aware of the light in the room.” When our attention unfixates — when it finally comes off the self, off the fixated loop — the perceptual field opens up. You notice the room. The light. The space around you.
Sometimes our attention has got fixated on the thing we want to solve. And we go: I know, I’ll just put more and more attention on it. And struggle with it. And wrestle with it. And it just gets tighter and tighter. But sometimes, we can just take our attention away. And we don’t notice that in those moments, the thing loosens in the background. And we often don’t notice — because we come back to it with the memory of how it used to be.
This was just Session 1. There are three more sessions to come.
Everything above wasn’t taught as theory. It was demonstrated live, in real time, with real people making real shifts. The remaining sessions go deeper.
If you sign up now, you get the full recording of Session 1. The only requirement is to watch it before Thursday’s session so you’re caught up.
Thu Mar 19 · Impulses & Instincts Sat Mar 21 · The Emotions Underneath Mon Mar 23 · The Body Moves
Noon – 2pm PT · 3 – 5pm ET · 7 – 9pm UK · 8 – 10pm CET · $297
All sessions recorded.
Every fool knows that there are many drops in the ocean. Only a wise person knows that all of the ocean is contained in every drop.
Sometimes, even if you learn just one new pattern — a whole lot of the old ones can fall away.
— Anand
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.