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When Pushing No Longer Works: The Power of Inner Work
- Nicole Dickmann
- Mar 5
- 3 min read
For the longest time, I believed that if something wasn’t working, I just needed to try harder. Push through. Figure it out. Do more.
It showed up in so many ways—overthinking every decision, second-guessing my instincts, forcing things to happen before their time. I was always swimming upstream, exhausting myself in the process. And for a while, I convinced myself that this was just how life was meant to be—hard, relentless, a constant battle to get things right.
But no matter how much I pushed, certain things wouldn’t budge. Old patterns kept repeating. The same struggles resurfaced. I found myself stuck in an endless cycle of frustration, and the more I tried to force change, the more life pushed back.
Then one day, in sheer exhaustion, I stopped.
Not because I had some grand epiphany, but because I had nothing left to give. I was tired. Tired of resisting. Tired of trying to fix myself. Tired of feeling like I had to fight my way forward. And in that stillness—where I finally let go—I began to see what had been there all along.
The Wisdom in What We Push Against
The edges we meet—the discomfort, the hesitation, the walls we hit when we try to move forward—aren’t barriers to overcome. They are thresholds.
What if, instead of forcing our way through them, we became curious about them?
Arnold Mindell, the founder of Process-Oriented Psychology, teaches that our experiences—our dreams, body sensations, emotions, and the repeating struggles in our lives—are all part of a deeper intelligence, guiding us toward greater wholeness.
The tension we feel isn’t just resistance; it’s energy trying to move. The discomfort isn’t just an obstacle; it’s an invitation. A doorway into something waiting to be seen.
Imagine if every time you hit a road bump or felt resistance or tension in your life, you were able to get curious and really look at it; to ease into it for a moment, to open to it, and then to move through it with ease!
An Example of Inner Work in Action
I once had a client who kept having the same frustrating pattern in their relationships. Every time things started to feel vulnerable or intimate, they would pull away—sometimes even sabotaging connections they deeply cared about. They saw this as a problem to fix, something to push through. They would grit their teeth and get frustrated at life.
In session one day, instead of forcing themselves to be different, we tried something new.
We got curious. We began to listen to the part of them that hesitated. Through inner work, we uncovered a deep, unconscious fear—an old belief from childhood that told them that being truly seen wasn’t safe.
Once they stopped resisting their resistance and instead explored it with openness, something shifted. The fear no longer had to control them. By simply giving space to what was already moving within them, they allowed a new way of being to emerge. The energy of that problem was able to dissipate as it's greater primordial wisdom, the energy at its core, had been released.
Letting Life Move Through You
This is what inner work has taught me. It’s not about fixing, striving, or forcing ourselves into transformation. It’s about learning to meet what is already there—the edges, the walls, the high-energy moments that beckon us further in. It’s about following the signals that life is already offering us, instead of overriding them.
This is why I created Unfolding and Soul Haven—two pathways into this work:
🔹 The Unfolding is for those just beginning to explore their inner world, gently stepping into the process of self-discovery. First session April 6th. Learn More.
🔹 Soul Haven is for those ready to journey even deeper, into the rich and transformative work of meeting all parts of themselves. First intake May. Apply.
I know what it’s like to push upstream. And I also know the relief that comes when we finally surrender to what has been waiting for us all along.
Are you ready to stop pushing? Are you ready to listen?
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