The Myth of Being “Blocked”: The Sacred Pause -What Stillness Is Really Teaching You

Part of the Pillars of My Practice series - exploring the sacred function of stillness, integration, and soul-led timing.

The Familiar Frustration We Call “Being Blocked”

Picture this: despite wanting to see progress in your relationship or creative pursuits, you haven’t had any development or felt any inspiration in a while. 

Or, you just got through a BIG breakthrough, maybe in healing, conflict resolution, or progress in your creative pursuits and you naturally think the next step is obviously rolling momentum and flow, either in life, passions, or that relationship. 

  Perhaps you've even done the self work to figure out what the block is. The rituals, the journaling, the energy clearing. Still nothing moves. 

It feels like everything is at a standstill. You’re tired, flat, off.

Like trying to bloom in January. 

What if that block isn’t a wound though, or something to push through, rather, something to sit with, or tend with care? 

 A winter you’re going through, rather than a drought. 

I’ve always referred to this as a “block” because of the verbiage such as writer's block, that is so common in our language. As well as my history as an energy practitioner, which taught me that when we don’t work through a certain issue in an energy center or aspect of ourselves, the flow of energy becomes stagnant, and can even lead to physical ailments. 

I experienced this myself when I had an issue with communication in my relationship & my throat center. I eventually even developed an unconscious habit of grinding my teeth in my sleep, which turned into ear & jaw pain. It would get so bad by the end of the day that I had to take pain medication just to sleep at night. 

 This has gotten better in recent months since my wife and I worked though the things we just weren’t talking about, without any medical intervention. But that’s not the intention of this writing. 

The point is, energy blockages are real, and sometimes we can’t force ourselves to heal or work through an issue simply by focusing on the problem, any more than a writer can force the next thread of inspiration. 

 Even before that though, I had this experience where we really had the mirror of the post-honeymoon-phase which I’ve spoken of in my sacred relationships piece hit us hard. If you’d like to read more on that you can find it here. 

Though in short, I had a certain vision of what I dreamed for my relationship with my wife, and what we’d dreamed together. Then after the ugly shadows of our mirror caused so much tension…I felt like we were frozen in a state of no heat, passion, and wondering what had happened. This doesn’t look the same for everyone, though most people will come together, have the explosive passion, then feel it fade, maybe even go through a huge resolution & healing arc like your own healing hill. 

The truth is that we need to give our nervous system, our bodies, and intuition time to integrate life’s big events. 

Nature Doesn’t Rush - So Why Do We?

Imagine how un-practical it would be to have an apple tree, and first of all it takes a few years to start bearing fruit at all. It buds in the spring, grows its trunk and branches while baring fruit through the summer into fall. Then, it must shed its leaves and draw its energy inward for the winter, before putting any more energy into growth in the spring. 

I believe that this mental neurosis around wanting to push the things which require slowing down and honouring our evolution, is a result of being disconnected from nature and our body’s natural rhythm. 

I’m not saying that this is inherently about us slowing down in winter, but understanding that we must know when to grow, when to bloom, when to slow down, when to let go, and when to surrender to the process, rather than insisting we bear fruit year round.

 Or we go through a major life event that’s stress inducing and takes time to integrate the changes from one chapter to another, so our body draws its energy inward, and what we mistake as a period of burn out we either try to push through at best, or at worst, you shame yourself and let your inner critic say you’re just being lazy and you should be farther along by now, by some invisible productivity standard. The truth is, it’s our very wise nervous system knowing exactly when it needs to slow down and draw its energy inward, as with a tree in winter bringing it’s awareness into its roots. 

If you’re spiritually minded, you might even be familiar with cards or runes in a reading which predict a “delay” in your life. 

I used to think it was about seeing it coming and avoiding it. Yet, it's not something to push through or avoid. It's meant to be experienced. Some winters can’t, and shouldn’t be avoided or ran from, they’re meant to be sat with. 

As far as creative stagnation goes, this shows that the body’s tension and our loss of inspiration for the art, writing piece, or conscious business that you’ve just “lost all motivation for” can be a protest, and a sign to stop and ask what we’re meant to sit with, not a failure.

Think of it like your intuition and nervous system freezing in a time when you aren’t supposed to be receiving answers, pushing growth & wondering why you’re not feeling it. 

As people, and a collective so disconnected from being in tune with our body’s natural cycles, we call it blocked, because we don’t yet have a name for Taking a sacred pause. 

We don’t have the awareness to ask: 

What am I not seeing?

What is this slow down trying to teach me? 

Is there something inside that needs my attention?

Wintering, Integration, and the Sacred Pause

This is about learning to breathe through un comfortability, ice, stillness, and embrace it as sacred containment of our spirit. 

 You’re not stuck. You’re being slowed down because it’s not time yet, and there’s something your unconscious mind, higher self, maybe even your ancestors know you need to learn, sit with, and integrate. Only when we give ourselves this level of grace, can we see that often inspiration clicks in after taking the time to integrate huge life events. 

And often, it’s the events and experiences that we literally haven’t experienced yet, that influence and inspire the budding leaves and stretching root systems of our next phase, and the epiphanies that come with it. 

 We don’t shame trees for not blooming in January, so why do we shame ourselves for wintering?

In the journey up Lyfjaberg, “Leave all time behind” - letting go of time, teaches movement through stillness, and letting go of how long our journey will or should take. Wintering and stillness is the medicine that holds the pattern steady until it’s ready to grow again. 

The last few years - My wintering was in everything. 

It wasn’t just my relationship that felt stuck. I was unraveling everywhere. 

The shadows, the conflict, the relapse into old sexual patterns. I knew the things we needed to fix, but I wasn’t done breaking old cycles yet. The monster of my sex addiction and old patterns had eroded our bond. 

By spring of last year, In my creative life, shamanic path and my business which I’d barely made the time for, had the drive, or the inspiration to pursue my writing, to be connected to my spiritual path, or do anything at all with my business as a spiritual practitioner in about 12 months. 

In 2024: I thought everything would move. After almost two years of feeling frozen, I got certified in Relationship + Law of Attraction coaching, changed my business name, built my website…

But unconsciously, I wasn’t ready.

There was still a year of unraveling ahead before I’d begin my apprenticeship in Nordic Animism & Trolldom, rebuild my site from scratch, rediscover my creative voice, and build the thriving practice I now have.

So I got this Relationship coaching certification, changed my business name, built %50 of a new website before getting stuck in the autopilot of grinding away at my stable day job, while losing close friends, and still being in the integration process of repeating old patterns in my relationship until my body put the “theory” of what I needed to change into practice.

I certainly didn’t expect this grind and continual relationship tension to lead to being so depressed that my marriage was on the brink, and I was on the verge of a mental breakdown in early 2025 before getting intentional with my self care and spiritual practice again. 

Looking back, I was at the point of asking “is it even worth it anymore?”, burnt out by the frustration that I hadn’t written a blog article or done anything that felt remotely creative in months. And it was a journal prompt from my chat GBT “Journal on grieving the life you had before marriage", that produced a reflection which turned into my first heartfelt writing piece in a long time - Ever-Evolving: Embracing the Tree That Grew How letting go of yesterday’s dreams revealed a life worth loving

Synchronicities and Rebirth

The simple act of going for walks again, talking to trees and land spirits, and the Utisita (sitting in nature) with my dog reconnected me with nature, my spiritual practice, brought me back into my body and into my own frame. 

I started to reconnect with my own natural rhythm and intuition, and I started to see the seasonal magic in my journey with more awareness. As opposed to negatively perceiving the two year pause I’d been in with my shamanic path, my business, and my relationship…as something aggravating and infuriating. Instead of obsessing over spending time with my partner in hopes of “fixing” the fractures in our relationship, I learned to let them breathe, and gave them space. 

Then the synchronicities slowly started coming in again.

Many of these things and embodiment concepts are now the foundational experiences of the book I’m now writing, Healing Hill: The Inner Union Rite & my Journey up Lyfjaberg. 

The blog piece I couldn’t not share with the world was the hidden inspiration I needed to finish my website at least up to my blog, so I could launch this website. 

It was just a blog, but as far as I was concerned I’d made the hugest milestone in my ever evolving purpose-led business in years. 

 One day in May when I was sitting by the river I used to stop by while patrolling in my security job, I was on my way back to the road when I looked down, and sitting in the rocks was an old skeleton of a deer, washed up on the bank. 

Now for some of you this might sound out of left field, but for those of you my readers who’re weird hippies like me who will pick up any rock, feather, stick, or bone on a walk you get it. 

Bones!  A mostly whole skeleton! 

                       Bones, people. Bones. 

I took this as not just a sign, but a gift from the river, my ancestors, and Freyja. I brought it home, and many of those bones have become part of my new rune set, and other tools I use in my practice for things like bone tapping, which you can see on my TikTok or Facebook. 

Then I got laid off from my security job. 

A month later I took a leap of faith and invested in starting my Trolldom apprenticeship with my teacher Karin Dahlstrom.

About 2 weeks before my apprenticeship started, I went in to pick up a criminal record check for my new coaching job I had lined up, and got arrested instead for $6000 in old traffic fines over 3 years old. 

I was sitting in a cell downtown that they had put me in, and I had a choice:

 - Pay nearly everything we had saved for moving…

Or stay 90 days in jail.

All to pay off something from an old version of me from over 3 years ago, who ran from things instead of dealing with them.

 And if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to commit to my Trolldom apprenticeship, get the job I’m waiting to start that led me to sitting there anyway. My family will be out of my income, and without me. This wasn't an anxiety spiral, I’ve learned sometimes we have to think of the worst case scenario so that we can ground ourselves into the right solution. 

What happened was an initiation. 

This was a real life shamanic journey to the underworld, similar to what many in myths have gone through, what we go through in life which seriously tests who we’re becoming. 

In a way it was the shamanic lesson and death before my deeper apprenticeship was set to start. 

I knew the outcomes and had told them I’d pay it, but the utter anxiety I faced sitting in a jail cell during the hours of them processing my payment was a crucible. 

 Where I got to decide if I’m still the kind of person who sits in shame and spirals into anxiety, or if I’d become a person who accepts my mistakes with integrity. 

I might be the first person and last in a while seen meditating and doing embodiment practices to transmute the emotions that surfaced while sitting all day in a cell in Red Deer remand. 

I did yoga, meditated, sat there humming the runes, telling myself we’ll be okay, because I’m clearing karma, cleansing my hamingja and moving forward, and we’ll figure out the money because we always do. 

In Nordic animism, we have an aspect of our soul called Hamingja, which is similar to karma or jinn, it is this familial energy force which is influenced by ancestral inheritance of wealth, wounds, shadows, respect, and honor. So with good hamingja in our spirit and our own personal life, it feels like life just works out for us, we have good life, and good things happen to us through manifestation and luck just as much as us “working for them”. 

And unhealed negative hamingja will do the opposite. Through ancestral & generational cycles or past life trauma, and personal experiences & patterns in life, it builds a negative force of bad luck which feels like nothing works out. Like walking through life going against the current instead of with it. 

We come across more strife, perceivably bad things happen often, and we attract it more when we have the belief “Bad things happen to me”. 

When I decided that clearing this fine off my traffic record, or spending money meant for moving wasn’t bad, I broke and integrated a lifetime of unhealthy habits, hamingja, and beliefs. 

And what happened wasn’t collapse after being stopped dead in my tracks. My ego died, I left him in the underworld of the cell, and decided from that moment on, that I wouldn’t be affected by the very interconnected things in life. 

And when I did that, I continued to see how everything was connected. 

That following weekend, I went into a deep Utesitta in a cave by the river. Feeling stuck yet again after a big breakthrough, on the idea of wanting to help people in sex & relationships as well as discovering their soul purpose, spirit seemed to provide me with the answer.

“You need to hear this, Hakin - for the sexual shamanic path you’re on. There is no separation between your desire to help others heal sexual shadows and transmute lust - From your years long mission to guide spiritually and help people find soul purpose.”

This turned into my mission statement:

There is no separation from the path to your purpose, building unity in relationships and sexual energy. The same energy that is either dammed up lust or sexual energy, which is intended to create life is the very life force which drives us to create the things we’re meant to bring to the world.

I invite you to pause here with me, breathe, and say this with me: 

“Circumstances don’t matter. Only my state of being matters. 

 After I started my apprenticeship and deeper runic study, over many insights and lessons I integrated into my path, all of the pauses, personal cycles of feeling frozen started to make sense.

I began to truly stop perceiving anything as “bad”, or horrible things happening to me.

No delay or period of sacred pause as terrible. 

Not the tension in my marriage, without which I wouldn’t have come to understand my wife better. 

Not the frustration of my business & personal passions slowing down for a couple years while I caught up to the feelings of shifting from single dad to father and husband. 

Not even having to spend all my savings on old fines.  

Just like destruction in nature, when hail hits and the plants affected become tougher, or a wild fire burns a forest only for new growth to come through the potash. 

These things we go through in the experience of being human are forces of nature.

And we get all caught up in the neurosis of it, like “Ahh it’s too frustrating that I’m not inspired to do anything productive or create anything!” While the chaos of life that you’re meant to sit with, pelts you like a hailstorm and prepares you for new material, new growth to flow through.

That's part of the disconnect from our bodies. We don’t want to sit with what’s uncomfortable when life isn’t moving at a steady pace, because modern life has taught us to avoid our feelings, always be productive, and if we’re not, well then something’s wrong. We shame ourselves. Or worse, we turn to vices to distract us from the uncomfortable. 

I live in Canada, and it's like I always tell my kids, if we didn’t have winter, we’d have some really huge bugs.