Breakthrough – a blog for those who feel stuck


When you are practicing any kind of inner work you do this because of the benefits you expect or experience from it. And indeed, inner work, particularly shadow work is a powerful tool to expand our awareness, to release emotional blocks, to resolve old detrimental patterns and to shift our entire reality. However, we probably all know these moments of frustration when we feel stuck. When the same old stuff seems to show up repeatedly, no matter how often we may have dealt with it already.
Today, I want to share with you why we tend to feel stuck when we have truly changed and have already expanded a lot. And I want to show you an encouraging image that helped me understand the mechanism of a breakthrough.



The Law of Attraction

The Law of Attraction (Law of Resonance) states that everything in our life is a mirror image of our inner being, that our thinking and feeling attracts things on the outside. This law of does not only apply to the tangible things in our surrounding, to the people in our environment or to incidents in our everyday life. What many people are not aware of, is that it also applies to our thoughts. This means that when you are in a certain emotional state such as joy, you are more likely to think joyful thoughts and to remember joyful events in your life. You are a match to them based on the frequency you are in. Or in other words, your mental filter is set on “joy” and this is what you perceive and experience.

The flipside of this is, however, that when you are in a low emotional state you are a match to rather negative thoughts and memories. And this is what happens so often when we are in a phase of emotional integration.



Life comes in cycles

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Life comes in cycles. We experience phases of huge expansion, of forward momentum in the outer world. And there are phases where our focus goes mainly inwards and we reconnect with our true selves even deeper. Then, we integrate the new and can find insights and inspiration for our next phase of expansion. These are also often the times when we deal with our shadows, with unresolved issues from the past that would hinder our next steps, – and release them. Even though these phases are a crucial part of our growth and expansion, many people do not like them, because they can be uncomfortable and the external life seems to be on hold. However, without resolving the old blocks, without listening within for inspiration, there is no forward movement.



Blind for the positive

The mean thing is that sometimes when we are in a phase of emotional integration and resolving old patterns and blocks we are not aware that it is just a phase in the natural flow of life. We forget about the good times we have experienced, the big shifts we went through already. And this happens because we are only a match to thoughts and memories that hold the same frequency, the feeling signature of the old pain we are just releasing. But this does not mean we did not evolve, grow or heal. It only means there is still some resonance within us to that old pain. This can actually be really tiny and yet feel as intense as in the beginning of our transformation journey. It is merely the Law of Resonance blowing the experience up and making it seem more negative than it really is.

For me, it is always a huge relief to be reminded of this when I feel like nothing ever changes; like I am dealing with the same blocks over and over again, without any progress. (Yes, I do need to be reminded of that myself, because usually, we are not even a match to ideas like that when we feel stuck.)



The breakthrough and beyond

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To gain an even deeper understanding of that process, I want to share a graph with you that depicts the process of clearing blocks around any topic in your life. As you can see, there is a phase where the negative emotions and experiences around a topic outweigh the positive ones, even though we have already cleared out a huge part of that block. Eventually, there comes the point of breakthrough. This is when we can really see and experience the results of our inner work in the outer life. It seems like suddenly everything shifts when really, it was a rather continuous process.

But even after the breakthrough, we might still sometimes experience the negative emotions and thoughts around that topic as they are still not fully resolved. And when we clear them out we are, according to the Law of Resonance again, becoming a match to the negative thoughts and memories during that phase.

If you feel stuck in any area of your life, chances are that your situation is actually much better than it seems or feels like. No inner work is ever made in vain. What is resolved is resolved and what is healed is heal. The breakthrough might be just around the corner. And sometimes we only need a reminder of the breakthrough we experienced already.