You’ve done the inner work. Therapy. Energy work. Healing. Breathing. Yoga. And you’re still stuck. Nothing seems to change.
In my coaching framework, I distinguish between the shift someone feels after energy work and the hamster wheel that can remain.
Two clients this week brought that home again. Both had done real work. Both were still stuck. They reinforced something I keep coming back to: my hamster wheel framework sits alongside my energy work.
This piece is based on the video Done the Inner Work but Still Stuck? Why Nothing Changes.
A shift that doesn’t stick
Take a professional athlete I hadn’t spoken to for a long time. He asked me to do some energy work on the blockages he was dealing with. He sent five questions. Working through them, the number one thing holding him back showed up around value: how valuable he felt he was, and whether others valued him or treated him as worthless.
I cleared a lot around that theme. He felt the shift. Then he said the stuff had been around for a long time, and it was still holding him back.
The energy work had moved something. What was still there was the conditioning underneath it.
The mind as a black box
That value subject was part of his mind. In my framework I treat the mind like a black box inside us. We all have one. It’s a human operating system: very binary, very simple, created in childhood. At the root it runs like a hamster wheel. Five different hamster wheels drive that system.
I spent about twenty years working with energy medicine. A handful of clients either kept looping the same material or I couldn’t shift them. Watching my own behaviour, and looking hard at how the mind works, I realised why. You have these huge hamster wheels controlling behaviour. I was trying to change habitual patterns with small pieces of energy work. Energy work, as I use it, can clear and point. It doesn’t rewrite those programmes on its own.
With that athlete, the next step is his. I’ve done my energy work and pointed to what mattered most. He has to do the observing himself. It takes a lot of energy. In the way I teach this, it’s how you get free, but you have to want freedom, and you have to want responsibility for everything. He’s working on that now.
When people-pleasing keeps winning
Another client came in having done a lot of inner work: therapy, energy work, healing. She was stuck in a relationship pattern of people-pleasing. She kept going over the same ground. She didn’t know how to put boundaries in.
She’d done the energy work. What was still running was the mind. In my hamster wheel framework, her wheel looked like Support / Let Down. She supports her partner and he values her for it, so she gains a sense of value from supporting others over herself. While that programme is in charge, more clearing doesn’t switch it off.
Then the swing. When her partner can’t give her the amount of valuing she needs, she moves to the other side of the wheel and feels the opposite of support: let down. That triggers deep worthlessness, pain, disappointment. Then she puts in a hard boundary and walks away.
In my model that’s classic left-side behaviour. She’s a left-sider; in this relationship her partner is a right-sider. And somehow it’s “safe” for her to be let down. That sounds mad until you see how these programmes work.
Energy work is useful. The mind is the big one.
So this is what I’m saying. Energy work, whichever modality, and breathing, and yoga: they can be genuinely useful. Then there’s the mind. That’s the big layer.
I work with a lot of yoga instructors, energy practitioners and spiritual types. They do everything they can. Then they come up against the hamster wheels.
What you can do
What I love about this work is that you stay your own sovereign person. You do it yourself. If you want to change the parts of yourself you don’t like, or change your reality, this is the route I teach.
There’s a free Hamster Wheel Quiz that shows which side of the hamster wheel you’re on. There’s also a free video course that starts you working it yourself. And I’ve written a book called Glitch if you’re interested.
I spent my whole life thinking I couldn’t change. I have. Now I spend my life teaching people how. It’s a little counterintuitive, and that’s what traps everyone, especially the more intelligent ones.
If you’ve done the inner work and nothing’s changing, start with the quiz. See which side you’re on. Then begin.