These are the steps to get unstuck.

Last month, I launched a new monthly series, The Open Doorway, where readers can anonymously submit questions about...well, anything.

My original plan was simple: each month I’d choose a handful of questions and answer them the same way I would if you were sitting across from me in a coaching session or spiritual reading. The first answer would be free, with the rest tucked behind the door of The Sanctuary, my paid subscriber space.

Then you all collectively ignored my agenda. (Just kidding I love where this landed.)

Across Instagram & my anonymous mentorship hotline where I gather submissions, I did not receive an eclectic assortment of deeply personal questions. Instead there was one question coming through over and over again. The collective voice was loud.

Many of you can describe, in vivid detail, exactly what you want your life to look like. You know the business you’re longing to start and the city that you feel destined to move to. You have the aspirational Pinterest board, an overflow of ideas on your Notes app, a color-coded Google Doc, and seventeen different versions of the plan.

It’s almost as if there’s a stick jammed in the spokes of the bicycle headed toward the life you actually want. You’re pedaling, but the wheel won’t turn.

So let’s fix the wheel, shall we?

Instead of answering four separate questions this month, I’m answering one, with five supportive steps/suggestions. These are the exact steps I use with clients (and myself) whenever life starts feeling strangely resistant, and my co-creation process is halted.

If there is one thing I universally prescribe when someone tells me they feel stuck, it is movement.

The size of the movement is far less important than the willingness to begin.

To be clear, I mean movement that feels accessible, respectful, and possible within your unique and beautiful body. A walk around the block. Stretching in bed before your feet touch the floor. Incorporate micro-movements throughout your day, and I promise you’ll feel a little less stuck.

Movement kick-starts our Spirit’s momentum. Momentum creates possibility, and possibility restores our faith in ourselves. Before long, our bodies begin to believe they can do the very thing our minds had already decided was impossible.

But we can.

As you continue reading, let this be your invitation to move in whatever way feels good to you right now.

When I feel creatively or emotionally stuck, I stop asking myself what I need to add and start asking what I can remove. What conversation can I finish? What obligation can I decline? What drawer can I empty? What hour can I reclaim as my own?

This has become one of the guiding principles of my Co-Creation Circuit™ (a trademark I granted myself, thank you very much), because I’ve found that a NEW life rarely forces its way into a unrelenting schedule, a home, or an anxious mind that is at full capacity. There’s something so freakin’ satisfying about completing a cycle, even if it’s as mundane. Maybe it’s for the dopamine. Maybe it’s the nervous system’s love of resolution. Whatever it is, I’ve lost count of the number of times clearing one small thing has given me enough momentum to finally begin THE THING I was actually avoiding.

There’s an energetic principle at work here as well. Co-creation depends on having somewhere for life/magic to land. We spend so much time trying to manifest new ideas, relationships, opportunities, and conversations while leaving no room for any of them to arrive. Whether you call it synchronicity, coincidence, divine timing, or kismet, new possibilities appear when we’ve made space to receive them. Sometimes we’re simply too full. We’re stuck because our lives are quite stuffed.

This one is a little more energetic. Whenever I’m teaching someone how to develop their intuitive or psychic abilities, one of the first assignments I give them is to collect their natural resources.

Before we practice specific readings or strengthen psychic perception, I ask them to identify the places in nature they can reliably return to, and often. I want them to know what elements make them feel most restored and understand what their bodies crave. Opening ourselves creatively and/or intuitively is not only a matter of becoming more receptive. It’s equally a practice of learning how to care for ourselves as we become more receptive.

Every meaningful process asks something of us, and if we are continually asking our bodies to hold more, sense more, and move more energy, we need a way of receiving something back in return.

Most of us assume the next step is another insight or another step, when what we may actually need is a different relationship with our environment. I have learned that after a long day of readings or teaching, my body craves water with insane consistency. I use frequent salt baths, ocean dips, and cold-street teas to honor that need.

Your body may ask for something entirely different. It may need the steadiness of the earth, the openness of the sky, the movement of wind, or the powerful release of burning fire. Pick an element, and work intentionally with it.

The living world is a resource for getting unstuck, just look at how it sets an example, and is always changing.

When a client feels stuck, I’ll often prescribe play.

I’ll tell them to go to the beach. Visit a bookstore. Bake a pie. Finger paint. Please do something, anything(!) with no measurable outcome and lead with curiosity instead.

I do not consider this a distraction from their goal. I consider it an intervention.

From an Internal Family Systems perspective, our protective parts are constantly scanning for danger. They want to solve every problem before we make a mistake, fail publicly, or get hurt. Their intentions are good, but they can keep us circling the same thoughts for weeks. They analyze, rehearse, perfect, and procrastinate, all in an effort to keep us safe.

Play interrupts that pattern. Obvious bonus points: it’s fun! Play allows those protective parts to experience life with you, instead of only scanning for something to solve.

PLAY MORE to build that trust between your true Self and these protective parts. Get curious MORE.

I will never shut up about ceremony.

Every culture throughout history has relied on ceremony. It is one of the oldest ways we make meaning of change. What has changed is the way many of us are choosing to live. More of us are writing our own timelines instead of following inherited ones (hell yeah to that), which means we can no longer rely on culture to tell us which transformations deserve to be celebrated, honored, or witnessed.

We have to be willing to mark our own thresholds of change, which in turn supports us from getting unstuck.

SIDENOTE: This reminds me of the Sex and the City episode where Carrie creates a registry for herself after realizing she’d spent years celebrating everyone else’s milestones.

• It marks a threshold. Human beings have always used ritual to distinguish an ordinary day from an extraordinary one. It creates a psychological before and after, helping us recognize that something has shifted.

• It creates relationship. Ceremony moves us from simply thinking about change to participating in it. It’s a way of entering into a conscious and collaborative relationship with yourself, with Spirit, with nature, with your ancestors, with the life you’re building.

• It engages your whole Self. We do not change through thoughts (rumination) alone. Ceremony invites the full body, all your senses, powerful emotion, ritualistic movements, sacred beauty, and presence into the process. That’s a recipe for change, BTW.

• It gives the invisible a visible form. So much of our inner life is intangible. You can't see a commitment, an intention, or a shift in identity. Ceremony changes this. It gives your inner world something physical to interact with, helping your mind and body recognize that what has changed internally is now real in the external world. It gives us a proof point to recall when we continue to integrate the changes.

This is also why so much of my own work is intentionally ceremonial. Whether someone joins me for an intuitive reading, a coaching session, or a retreat, I want it to feel distinct from the rest of their life. I want them to arrive with presence and leave knowing they have participated in something meaningful. Most importantly, I want them to leave feeling a little less stuck.

Sometimes I’ll guide someone through a ceremony in the moment using visualization and somatic practices. Other times, I’ll assign a private ceremony inspired by the themes of our conversation. And I have to say, after years of watching people walk through these experiences, it works.

I’ve recently redesigned my coaching and mentorship containers to be more responsive to the person sitting in front of me, rather than asking everyone to fit into the same established framework.

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