Three Things to Consider if You're Stuck on Your Healing Journey

First Things First: You Are Not Alone

The healing journey is a life's work and isn't linear. Feelings of stuckness and stagnation are part of the process, but there are some common roadblocks you can consider if you need momentum.

Approaching the process with care and self-compassion is critical. Before even considering your potential roadblocks, it is worth contemplating how you treat yourself. You aren't a project that needs fixing. The human experience is nuanced and complicated. There is no actual endpoint on the healing journey, either. Keeping these ideas in mind might help you more than anything. And even if it doesn't feel like it, you are not alone.

Here are a few areas to consider if you are feeling stuck:

1. Are you Centering the Body?

One of the biggest barriers to healing is learning how to use the body as a primary tool for reconnection. Mental health challenges and trauma responses often manifest as an overactive nervous system, making it difficult to sit with uncomfortable sensations—things like a racing heart, tightness in the chest, or a sense of restlessness are common.

The default responses to overwhelming sensations are either to hyper-focus on them (exaggerating their impact on the system) or to dissociate and disconnect from the body altogether. While both of these responses have survival at their foundation, for long-term healing, they are counterproductive.

Widening the ability to notice uncomfortable sensations is very useful, as is learning to notice neutral sensations (neither pleasant nor unpleasant) and moments of ease. Cultivating the ability to be with sensation helps rebuild self-trust. While most of the emphasis in many settings is on the mind, we can rebalance at the foundation by centering the body.

2. How is Your Breathing?

The breath can be both a barrier and a powerful healer. It is another overlooked yet essential component of improving resilience. Breathing patterns are deeply tied to the nervous system, and chronic stress and trauma often disrupt them.

Common dysfunctional breathing patterns are over-breathing, upper chest breathing, and even reverse or paradoxical breathing (the chest contracts during inhalation and expands during exhalation).

While breathwork can be a powerful tool for calming the system, many people find it uncomfortable or even triggering. A disrupted breathing pattern can reinforce the body's stress response, making intentional breathwork challenging at first.

If you have had trouble working with your breath, have tried commonly recommended practices like "box breathing" with limited success, or feel dismissed when you hear "just take a deep breath," this is normal and understandable.

Often, it is a good approach to look at underlying breathing patterns first. Instead of jumping into advanced techniques, the focus should be retraining functional, everyday breathing to restore natural rhythms. Over time, more specific breath practices can be introduced to help regulate the nervous system.

3. Are you Stuck in the Shame-Disconnection Loop?

Shame and disconnection are some of the most difficult barriers to healing. Trauma and chronic stress or illness can create feelings of being broken, isolated, and misunderstood. The physiological effects—such as anxiety, dissociation, hypervigilance, and chronic pain—can make us feel fundamentally flawed.

Unfortunately, these symptoms are often dismissed, reinforcing feelings of being "othered." Many trauma survivors internalize the belief that something is inherently wrong with them, creating a cycle of shame and further disconnection. If you have experienced this, you are definitely not alone. Ironically, many people feel a sense of isolation as a result of normal biological responses to trauma and chronic stress.

This is where a holistic approach to healing can be incredibly valuable. Unlike many Western medical models, which focus on treating symptoms, holistic approaches like yoga therapy consider the whole person—mind, body, and spirit.

In yoga philosophy, humans are seen as inherently whole, not broken. Many Indian spiritual traditions (as well as other global spiritual traditions) view the human spirit as connected to the divine and even inseparable from it. This perspective can be profoundly healing, offering a sense of belonging and completeness that trauma often strips away.

Moving Forward in Your Healing Journey

Healing from trauma is a deeply personal and nuanced process. What works for one person may not work for another. There are barriers and challenges, but there are many effective ways to overcome the impact of trauma and chronic stress. The good news is that the brain and nervous system are adaptable—they can heal, change, and return to a state of balance. Above all, orienting around your own wholeness and humanity is critical to regaining a lasting sense of peace, ease, and well-being.