The Quickest Way to Get Unstuck

Description

As noted many times, our prison cells are locked from the inside. “Stuckness” then is often of our choosing. How can we get unstuck? It begins with a truth none of us gets to skip: “Life is suffering.” Faith does not hand us the stress-free future. It gives us a different perspective on those stresses, a way to move through the storm with God beside us instead of pretending the storm is not there. Swedenborg names the trap with uncomfortable clarity in Secrets of Heaven 570: “As long as we cling to our adopted principles and persuasions, we force everything into agreement and harmony with them,” and “the more we dote on ourselves, the more rigidly we stick by those ideas.” That is how suffering can shrink into self-pity. That is how we end up playing what Nora McInerny calls “the grief Olympics.” So I offer one small practice with real spiritual weight: “write one letter of gratitude.” Text it. Email it. Send it to a teacher, a friend, someone who blessed your life and may never know it. Gratitude bends us outward again, toward compassion, toward blessing, toward the discipline of “looking out” after we have been looking in for a long while. And before we rush anywhere, we breathe.