Feeling Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place?
The smallest movement within impermanence: Exploring how the body's innate wisdom guides us when we're feeling stuck.
Shauna
11/15/20252 min read
Feeling Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place?
The smallest movement within impermanence and what the body already knows to do when we don't.
You know the feeling. Pressure from one side, pressure from the other. No good option, no clear way forward. The rock and the hard place aren't just a metaphor they describe something the body registers as physical reality. An emotional vice. A vicious circle that tightens the longer it turns. The situation may be external, but the body holds it internally, bracing, contracting, enduring.
This is what prolonged stress does. It doesn't stay in the mind it lands in the tissues, the breath, the gut, the jaw. Bessel van der Kolk spent decades documenting what many of us feel but struggle to articulate: the body holds what we carry, long after the moment has passed. His book The Body Keeps the Score remains one of the most important accounts of how unattended dis-ease the body not at ease quietly becomes something more. Left long enough, the body stops expecting relief and begins organising itself around the tension instead. Dis-ease, over time, has a way of becoming disease.
The nervous system learns through repetition, wiring responses to familiar situations until those responses become automatic, almost invisible. When the same bind returns again and again, the body stops looking for a way through and begins bracing instead. The stuck place starts to feel like the only place.
What if, when we don't know what to do, taking good care of ourselves is the thing to do?
Not as a detour. Not as avoidance. As an actual response to an actual moment. And not a selfish one — for those of us who care for others, which most women do in ways seen and unseen, tending to yourself is an act of maitri: loving kindness that begins within. The well has to be tended. The care you give outward is only as sustainable as the care you allow inward.
Because here is what the body knows that the mind in its panic sometimes forgets: nothing is permanent. Cells renew. Breath moves. The rock and the hard place are real and they are also not the whole story.
The questions that help are rarely the ones that demand an answer. Not how do I escape this but can I breathe here? Not what should I do but what does my body need right now? The smallest movement available is almost always a breath. And that breath taken on purpose, with some gentleness is the body beginning to care for itself. That is not nothing. Sometimes that is everything.
Both the rock and the hard place can be teachers, if we're willing to stay present long enough to notice what they're showing us. The way through is rarely what we expect. It tends to be quieter, slower, more interior than we were hoping. It tends to look a lot like coming home to yourself.
Dis-ease eases when connection returns. And connection almost always begins the same way with the body, with the breath, with the simple act of tending to yourself right where you are.
If you'd like to go deeper, Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score is essential reading. If any of this sounds familiar the contracted feeling, the not-knowing a free 30-minute conversation is always available. A place to begin.
Shauna
Start Where You Are Yoga · The Maitri Collective
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