Why You Feel Stuck (Even When You’ve Done The Work)

I remember sitting on my bed back in 2020, just feeling like I had concrete… wait, no… 12’ thick invisible steel walls surrounding me… I couldn’t think straight, I didn’t know what to do, and it was all covering me like a thick, weighted blanket I couldn’t move from.

I was so frustrated, mad, depressed… all of those things. I thought I’d done the spiritual alignment work: years of advanced shamanic training. Master-level mindset courses. I knew how to shift energy for other people—yet I still couldn’t break through my own invisible prison.

Does that sound familiar? You’ve done the work—or at least you thought you had.

• Journaling.
• Meditating.
• Perception Shifting.
• Gratitude Practices.

And yet, you still feel stuck in the same cycles.

Girl, I get it. Maybe you:

✔ Keep attracting the same relationship patterns.
✔ Struggle with self-doubt, even after affirmations.
✔ Feel physically exhausted, despite prioritizing self-care.

Like me, perhaps you feel like you’re in a self-imposed prison you just can’t seem to get out of, whether its physical, mental, emotional or spiritual.

So, what’s going on?

If you’ve been doing all the “right” things but nothing seems to change, it’s possible that you’re carrying unreleased energy blocks—the kind that keep repeating themselves in your thoughts, emotions, body, and spirit, just like I was right before 4 years of the most deep spiritual and healing work I’ve ever had to do…. leading me to so much fulfillment and joy after so much… stuckness.

What You’ll Learn in This Post

By the end of this, you’ll understand:

• What happens when you don’t release energy blocks (and why they don’t just disappear).
• The hidden costs of holding onto stagnant energy—from mental fog to emotional exhaustion.
• Why spiritual bypassing might be keeping you in repeating cycles.
• How to finally break free and shift into alignment.

If you’ve ever wondered why some things feel impossible to change—this post will show you what’s really happening under the surface.

What Are Energy Blocks? (And Why They Don’t Just Disappear Already?)

If you read last week’s post on clearing energy blocks, you already know that negative energy can keep you stuck.

But here’s what most people don’t realize:
✔ Even when you think you’ve worked through a block, fragments can remain.
✔ Unreleased blocks don’t just fade—they accumulate in your subconscious, emotions, and physical body.
✔ Left unchecked, they shape your thoughts, patterns, and even your reality.

If you’re not sure which part of your life is being affected, you can start with my post on The Four Bodies of Energy—which explains how your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual energy layers interact. (Link to post here!)

Now, let’s go deeper into the effects of unprocessed energy—and how they silently shape your reality.

What Happens When You Don’t Release Energy Blocks?

If you don’t release negative energy, it doesn’t just disappear—it accumulates.

Think of energy blocks like a dam in a river: when water (your energy) can’t flow freely, pressure builds up. Over time, these blocks manifest as mental fog, emotional exhaustion, physical tension, and spiritual disconnection… quiet problems we tend not to notice at first, push through, or take an Advil to fix.

This is why you might keep hitting the same walls—even when you’re actively working on yourself.

Now, let’s break down exactly how unreleased energy blocks impact your life on every level.

The Consequences of Holding Onto Blocks

Each type of energy block creates a ripple effect, influencing your thoughts, emotions, body, and spiritual connection. Here’s what happens when these blocks aren’t released:

1. Physical Consequences: Stress, Fatigue & Chronic Symptoms

When energy isn’t flowing, your body compensates—and not in a good way.

• Chronic fatigue, muscle tension, digestive issues, or headaches can stem from stagnant energy.
• The nervous system stays in overdrive, leading to burnout, adrenal fatigue, or immune issues.
• Unprocessed energy weighs on the body, making physical exhaustion feel constant.

Ever feel physically drained, even when you haven’t done much? Or, have you ever felt like you’ve suddenly “caught” a headache or stomachache while out and about? That’s often your body carrying unprocessed energy, or absorbing other’s energy and problems, even if they’re not yours.  These are highly empathic and psychic traits that must be understood, protected against, and learned from; these aren’t curses, they’re gifts, even though they come in uncomfortable packages.

If you’ve ever noticed yourself taking on the stress and emotions of those around you, you’re not alone. Highly sensitive individuals or empaths may find themselves absorbing the emotions and stress of those around them. This can lead to feelings of overwhelm and physical discomfort. Understanding this trait is crucial for managing one’s own well-being. Read more about how this works here.

2. Mental Consequences: The Subconscious Loop That Keeps You Stuck

Your subconscious mind holds onto energy blocks as repeating thought patterns, or that “voice in your head.”

• Limiting beliefs—also known as Limiting Decisions—like “I’m not good enough,” “Things never work out for me” reinforce themselves over time.
• Overthinking and self-doubt become habitual, keeping you stuck in a loop of analysis paralysis.
• The brain and nervous system become wired for stress, making clarity and intuition harder to access.

Ever feel like you keep running into the same frustrating challenges—no matter how much mindset work you do? That’s often a subconscious block running the show.

Understanding how your brain wires these beliefs—and, more importantly, how to rewire them—is key to shifting from limitation to empowerment. I break this down in Dis-Owning Your Stories Transforms Your Fate Into Destiny, where we dive into neuroplasticity, subconscious programming, and how to rewrite limiting beliefs at the core.

3. Emotional Consequences: Increased Reactivity & Emotional Weight

Emotions don’t just disappear when ignored—they store themselves in the body until they’re processed.

• Suppressed emotions turn into heightened reactivity (irritability, mood swings, or emotional outbursts).
• The same emotional wounds repeat in relationships (e.g., attracting emotionally unavailable partners) and all other areas of your life.
• Over time, unresolved emotions disconnect you from your intuition and inner wisdom.

I had a limiting belief that I had to be a “good girl.” You know, the one who over-pleases, makes everyone else in the room comfortable first, doing things that made me feel kinda gross but it was what I “should” do. Each time I did something that wasn’t in true alignment with who I am, it took me farther away, and those emotions I kept pushing away in favor of the “shoulds” collected… leading to two miserable and failed marriages, a pile of autoimmune challenges and other mystery diseases that doctors couldn’t diagnose, a failing business and dead-end career, and this wonderful invisible jail cell. Amongst myriad other symptoms. I just hadn’t done the deep (and I mean deep) inner work that lay underneath the “shoulds” of being that “good girl.”

Healing this kind of deep-rooted programming isn’t just about recognizing the pattern—it’s about rewiring your emotions, shifting your mindset, and reclaiming true inner happiness. If you’re ready to step into empowerment, I break down The 4 Fastest Ways to True Inner Happiness—where we explore healing past wounds, emotional empowerment, gratitude, self-love, and the deep work that actually shifts everything.

4. Spiritual Consequences: Disconnection from Your Higher Self

Holding onto blocks lowers your vibration, making it harder to receive guidance from your higher self.

• You feel disconnected from your intuition, purpose, or spiritual gifts.
• Repeating life lessons keep showing up until the energy is cleared.
• You’re “waiting for clarity” but never getting real answers.

If your manifestations feel blocked or you’re feeling spiritually lost, there’s likely unresolved energetic resistance in your field.

For example, when I was young, I could manifest the impossible (this was before “manifestation” was even a word getting attention on a large scale). I didn’t even understand the word “energy” in terms of spirituality, nor did I have any interest. But I did know that if I really wanted something, and I put it out there in the form of a statement and a feeling of already having it—as if it were just traveling toward me—the most amazing, impossible things would happen.

I created a nationwide youth council for a very big youth organization. I was traveling to Washington, DC, to do work at 17 years old. I was completely on fire when it came to traveling nationwide for fun (and bits of work, though it never felt like work) by myself. It was a game for me to keep leveling up.

But that was before I went to college and started doing what young adults “should” do—get an education, get married, get the house with the picket fence, stay informed (big yuck to me—hello, insanely high blood pressure). Somewhere along the way, I stopped listening to my inner compass.

Tuning back into that intuitive knowing—and trusting where it was leading me—was the key to shifting everything. If you’ve ever felt disconnected from your inner guidance, your manifestations, or your sense of direction, you’ll want to explore Unlock Your Inner Compass: Intuitive Living Guide—where we dive into intuition development, spiritual guidance, and how to truly live in alignment with your soul’s path.

The Hidden Trap: When Healing Becomes Spiritual Bypassing

If you’ve been doing the inner work, but nothing is changing, you might be spiritually bypassing without realizing it.

Spiritual bypassing happens when we use spirituality, or spiritual concepts, to avoid difficult emotions instead of actually processing and healing them.

Instead of addressing limiting beliefs, unresolved trauma, or emotional wounds, people often:
✔ Repeat affirmations to “fix” emotions instead of feeling them.
✔ Avoid discomfort by focusing only on love & light while ignoring their shadow.
✔ Keep seeking intuitive guidance without actually integrating the messages they receive.

✔ Use “positivity” to avoid the “negative feelings” that are really red flags, limiting beliefs, and unhealed traumas and wounds that require attention to step forward in alignment for your true life purpose

Awareness Without Integration = Stagnation

Healing is really about awareness, then taking action and integrating what you notice and learn about yourself. This is what becomes wisdom and health.

True transformation happens when awareness turns into action. Recognizing a limiting belief is the first step, but it’s what you do next that rewires your subconscious. Integration is where real healing occurs—it’s the difference between knowing something intellectually and embodying it in your daily life.

Imagine again the blocked river. The water—your energy, emotions, and spiritual flow—has been building pressurebehind a blockage. Instead of addressing the dam itself, spiritual bypassing is like building a bridge over the problem. It gives the illusion of movement, an escape or a spiritually “accepted” way to go around the discomfort, but it doesn’t change the fact that the water beneath is still stagnant, trapped, and pressurized.

True healing happens when you break open the dam—when you clear what’s stuck, allow emotions to be processed, and take real action to shift your patterns. That’s when energy flows freely again, restoring clarity, alignment, and movement in your life.

If you’ve ever repeated the same affirmation every morning—“I am worthy,” “I trust myself,” “Abundance flows to me”—but deep down still feel unworthy, uncertain, or blocked, that’s a sign of bypassing rather than integrating. The words alone don’t shift the energy; the integration comes when you take aligned action that proves to your subconscious that the affirmation is true.

Real healing happens when you stop repeating the lesson and start living the change.

Signs You Might Be Spiritually Bypassing

Not sure if this applies to you? Here are some common signs of spiritual bypassing:

✔ You rely on spiritual tools(psychics, cards, meditation, astrology) but still feel stuck.
✔ You use positivity as a shield to avoid feeling deeper emotions.
✔ You keep seeking external answers but don’t act on the guidance you receive.
✔ You feel like you’ve “done the work” but life still looks the same.

If you’re in the cycle of consuming more spiritual and self-development knowledge but seeing little transformation, it might be time to shift into deeper integration.

How to Shift from Spiritual Bypassing to True Healing

If you’re catching yourself in spiritual bypassing, it’s not your fault—most people don’t realize they’re doing it. The key now is to congratulate yourself on your awareness (I think this is the most difficult and important part) and now to move from awareness to integration.

Step 1: Get Curious About Your Resistance

• What emotions do you avoid feeling?
• What patterns do you keep repeating?
• What truths feel uncomfortable to acknowledge?

For example, if you always distract yourself when feeling sadness, it may be an emotion you need to sit with and fully process. If you “look to the bright side” every time you feel sick about going to a job that you despise, you probably need to examine it and find any fears around why you’re not making other decisions and plans for your happiness and better career.

Step 2: Feel It to Heal It

• Instead of overanalyzing emotions, allow yourself to fully feel them.
• Journaling, breathwork, or energy healing can help move the stuck energy.
• Work with energy medicine practitioners or healers to clear stored emotions from the body.
• Learn energetic and mindset techniques that will help you diagnose and deal with the negative energy as you’re feeling it – in the moment. In other words, run toward the storm to get through it, instead running away from it as it chases you indefinitely.
• Find a great group of like-minded people learning how to do this, and putting it into practice – and become part of that healthy, personal-growth and spiritually-oriented community!

Step 3: Take Aligned Action

Healing happens when you shift behaviors—not just perspectives. Take small, tangible actions to break the cycle of bypassing. If your intuition keeps nudging you toward something… listen and act.

If you keep receiving messages about setting boundaries but never actually do it, that’s avoidance. Start by setting one small boundary today.

The Ripple Effect: How Blocks Shape Your Spiritual Alignment

Energy blocks don’t just affect how you feel—they shape your entire reality.

Think of it like this: Every unresolved block acts like a filter, distorting how you see yourself, your relationships, and the world around you. The longer a block remains, the stronger its influence, and it rolls through all the areas of your life

This is why you might keep experiencing the same setbacks, frustrations, or stuck emotions, no matter what you do.

Let’s explore how these blocks ripple into different areas of life.

How Energy Blocks Manifest in Different Areas of Life

Think of your life as a network of interconnected systems—when energy is flowing freely, each area thrives. But when it’s stagnant, blocks form in ways that may not seem directly connected at first. For example, a deep-rooted belief of unworthiness may start in your subconscious but gradually influences your financial situation, career choices, relationships, and even your well-being.

To fully understand how energy flow impacts your life alignment, let’s explore the key areas where blocks can manifest in life:

• Intellectual Life – Difficulty focusing, mental fog, or resistance to learning and personal growth.
• Emotional Life – Repeating emotional patterns, feeling emotionally drained, or struggling with self-regulation.
• Spiritual Life – Feeling disconnected from intuition, lacking purpose, or struggling to trust divine guidance.
• Financial Life – Money blocks, self-worth issues affecting abundance, or fear of financial success.
• Love Relationship – Attracting unavailable partners, repeating toxic patterns, or struggling with emotional intimacy.
• Social Relationships – Feeling isolated, drained by social interactions, or experiencing repeated conflicts.
• Family & Parenting Relationships – Carrying generational trauma, struggling with boundaries, or feeling unseen within family dynamics.
• Health & Fitness – Chronic fatigue, stress-related illnesses, or feeling disconnected from the body’s signals.
• Career – Feeling unfulfilled, stuck in repetitive cycles, or lacking confidence in professional growth.
• Overall Quality of Life – A persistent sense of dissatisfaction or feeling that something is missing despite external success.
• Life Vision – Struggling to see the bigger picture, lacking clarity on goals, or feeling disconnected from your highest path.
• Your Character – Your True Self is being suffocated by trying to be someone else.

This complete framework is inspired by Mindvalley’s Lifebook course, which helps create clarity and alignment in each area of life. I’m working through it and it’s absolutely mindblowing. (Not an affiliate, just truly happy customer!)

Now, let’s explore how these energy blocks might shape your reality in each of these areas.

How Energy Blocks Manifest in Different Areas of Life

Let’s go back to my example of being the “good girl” and having followed the script society handed me—go to college, get married, get a corporate career and a white picket fence. I honestly tried to lead a “perfect” life, to be seen as “perfect” to anyone around me. This hemmoraghed my energy, constantly flowing to everyone and every situation around me, trying to control, to even out, to make nice. What it gave back to me was a little scarier – those I loved took me for granted and went down the road of abuse, my mismanagement of energy led me to physical disorders the medical profession says can’t be healed, and at one point, in deep post-partum depression, everything else came crashing down around me. I had no real stability in my life, I didn’t know who I was anymore, and the house of cards crashed.

When we leave our energy unchedked, it can seep into multiple areas of life, shaping decisions, reinforcing limiting beliefs, and making it harder to access your authentic path.

Let’s take my example and give other context to how it could manifest in key life areas:

Examples for Someone With The “Good Girl” Syndrome

1. Financial Life: Playing Small & Avoiding Risks

If you were one of us taught that society deems stability more important than life or purpose fulfillment, you might unconsciously avoid opportunities—often called “risks” to those with a pessimistic view—even ones that could lead to greater abundance of happiness, financial wealth, and life purpose.

• Sticking to “safe” career choices rather than pursuing what truly excites you or something you feel you were “meant to do” because others may see you as nuts.
• Feeling guilty for wanting more than just security—believing that ambition or wealth means you’re “selfish.”
• Avoiding investments or financial expansion because it feels reckless, even when you’re deeply capable.
• Thinking that going down a happier road will “waste” the expensive education your parents gave you, even though there’s no growth, no interest, and honestly it makes you feel terrible.
• Thinking things like “I’m too old to change now,” “What will others think?” “If I fail, I’ll be out of money…”

2. Social Relationships: Staying in Surface-Level Connections

When you’re a “good girl,” conditioned to prioritize being likable and fitting in, social interactions may become performative rather than authentic.

• Overcommitting to obligations because saying “no” feels selfish, or might hurt the organizer’s feelings.
• Feeling like an outsider in groups where you “should belong,” or finding you’re energetically holding the whole room steady, constantly aware of other’s people’s words, how they’re hitting in the conversations, and clearing the energetic way for feelings not to be hurt, and basically triaging anything that could go wrong, dumping your energy into it instead of just seeing what would happen if you just observed.
• Holding back from deeper friendships because vulnerability wasn’t encouraged growing up, you have trauma around being truly nice and the consequences of it.

3. Family & Parenting Relationships: Passing Down the Same Expectations

When you’ve been raised with strict expectations about how life “should” look, those patterns often carry into your own family life.

• Struggling with guilt if your choices don’t align with your family’s vision.
• Feeling pressure to raise your children with the same rules—even if they didn’t serve you or them.
• Experiencing tension when setting boundaries with parents or relatives, and holding onto the generational pain of these actions and decisions.
• Knowing your children are watching you, absorbing your actions as just another way they “should” act; just like you, to your detriment. Although they don’t see it that way – yet.

You might have followed the expected path—marriage, kids, stability—because that’s what was modeled for you. But now, you feel a pull toward something more, yet a voice inside says, “You should just be grateful. Why disrupt what’s already working?” Well… is it working? Truly?

4. Life Vision: Struggling to See Beyond the “Expected” Path

When societal conditioning tells you who you’re supposed to be, it becomes difficult to imagine an alternative.

• Feeling lost when asked, “What do you really want?”—because you’ve never allowed yourself to ask. (hand up… this is old ME!)
• Struggling to envision a path that breaks away from the traditional milestones of success.
• Experiencing guilt or fear when considering big changes—because they go against the “safe” route.

You might have checked all the boxes—education, career, marriage, homeownership—yet something still feels missing. The idea of pivoting feels both secretly exhilarating and terrifying, because stepping into the unknown means unraveling decades of conditioning. And that’s just for you; thinking of telling your family and friends you want to step into the unknown will meet you with so much friction you simply decide not to.

How to Break Free: Moving from Stagnation to Flow

By now, you understand why energy blocks keep you stuck. So now let’s dig into what happens next: Once you start

releasing stagnant energy, everything shifts.

Your Next Steps to Spiritual Alignment:

1. Recognize when a block is holding you back. Become Aware.
2. Use energy-clearing practices to reset your mind, body, and spirit.
3. Shift from awareness to integration—small, tangible actions break the cycle.

What’s one block you’ve noticed in your life? Drop a comment below—I’d love to hear your thoughts!
And if you need a deeper refresher, go back to the last post and read more.

If you’re ready for structured energy clearing & integration, check out The I AM Method for deep healing, mindset shifts, and spiritual alignment.

Your Next Step: Step Into Your Healing Path

Your body, mind, and soul are always communicating with you. The longer you hold onto energy blocks, the more they shape your thoughts, emotions, and reality.

Once you begin clearing stagnant energy, you’ll feel more aligned, open, and empowered than ever before.

What’s one area of your life where you’ve felt stuck, even after doing the work?

Drop a comment below—I’d love to hear your thoughts!

If you’re ready to clear energy blocks and step into alignment, start with my FREE Healing Path Activation. This guided energy healing session will help you release stuck patterns, reset your energy, and begin integrating deep shifts—all inside a mini-course designed to activate your spiritual and healing path.

Get Your Free Healing & Activation Now!