The Root of Our Stuckness: Why We Can’t Make Meaningful Change (and How We Remember)

A student asked me recently, “Why is it so hard for us to make meaningful change in the world?”

It was a question asked not with frustration, but with something deeper — a kind of sacred grief. The ache of someone who knows we are capable of so much more, and wonders why we keep circling the same broken ground.

And as I sat with her question, something ancient stirred in me. Not an answer in the usual sense — no ten-point plan, no data, no slogan. But a remembering. A quiet, steady truth that’s been spiraling through my writing, my rituals, my conversations with Spirit and with Mark.

We can’t make meaningful change in the world because we have forgotten who — and what — we truly are.

This forgetting is not just personal.

It is collective.

It is systemic.

It is spiritual.

And it lives at the root of why our greatest efforts toward transformation often fall short.

We are not suffering from a lack of resources or intelligence.

We are suffering from amnesia.

We’ve forgotten that we are creators — not consumers of life.

Most of us were raised to see life as something that happens to us — a stream of circumstances to react to, problems to solve, systems to navigate. But life is not something outside of us. We are not here to survive it. We are here to create it.

Change cannot come from a consciousness of powerlessness.

It begins the moment we remember that we are not passive observers, but co-authors of reality.

You are not a function of the world.

You are the flame inside it, shaping it with your every thought, choice, prayer, and pause.

We’ve forgotten how to listen — deeply, reverently, relationally.

The world has become unbearably loud. We are saturated with information and starving for wisdom.

But real change doesn’t roar. It whispers.

It lives in the hush between breaths. In the rhythm of waves against the shore. In the crackle of fire. In the aching silence after grief has emptied us.

If we cannot be still long enough to listen — to the earth, to our ancestors, to the truth in our own bones — then we will keep mistaking performance for transformation.

The soul doesn’t shout.

It waits.

We’ve forgotten the sacred role of ritual.

In this modern world, we light candles only when the power goes out. We dance only at weddings. We grieve behind closed doors.

But our ancestors knew better.

Ritual was how they remembered.

How they prayed.

How they told time by the moon and made sense of the invisible.

How they healed.

Ritual is not a luxury. It is a technology. One that connects us across generations, elements, and realms. Without it, we lose our map. We lose our rhythm. We lose each other.

To return to ritual is to remember how to be human — in right relationship with mystery.

We’ve forgotten that systems are not our salvation.

At some point in our collective story, we traded each other for systems.We handed over our trust, our care, our knowing — to institutions, algorithms, and policies.We began to believe that only what could be standardized and scaled was real.

But no system, no matter how well-designed, can replace the sacred mess of relationship.

We cannot spreadsheet our way to belonging.

We cannot legislate love.

We cannot automate care.

We forgot that healing is relational. That wisdom is lived. That community is built in kitchens and around fires — not in comment sections and customer service queues.

We need systems that serve relationship — not systems that replace it.

We’ve forgotten the village. And in its place, we’ve glorified the One.

We’ve been sold the myth of the hero: the lone leader, the influencer, the self-made woman.But there is no “self-made” anything. There never was.

The truth is: we belong to each other.

Your healing is my healing.

Your remembering is mine.

Your liberation, your joy, your ache — they ripple through the whole.

We were never meant to carry life alone.

We are not designed to thrive in isolation.

Individualism has not made us stronger. It has made us lonelier.

Let us lay down the illusion of the solitary self. Let us return to we.

We’ve forgotten that rest is not indulgence. It is initiation.

Change takes energy. And most of us are bone tired.

But we keep pushing, producing, performing — trying to outrun our own depletion.

We’ve been taught that rest must be earned. That it’s a reward for usefulness. But the truth is more radical than that:

Rest is holy. Rest is remembering. Rest is what lets us dream beyond survival.

If we cannot rest, we cannot imagine.

If we cannot imagine, we cannot create.

And if we cannot create, we cannot change.

We’ve forgotten that becoming is sacred — even when it unravels us.

Everyone wants change, but few want to be changed.

Real transformation doesn’t feel like a glow-up. It feels like a death.

It asks us to let go of everything we thought we knew.

It asks us to become unfamiliar to ourselves.

It is tender. It is terrifying. It is holy.

You cannot become new without shedding the old.

You cannot serve the future while clinging to what was.

Let yourself become undone.

Let yourself be remade by the very life you say you long for.

And finally — we’ve forgotten that we are not separate.

From each other.

From the land.

From the sky.

From the ones who came before.

From the ones yet to be born.

We are one vast body, stitched together by breath, story, memory, and blood.

The illusion of separation is the root of every injustice, every war, every silence.

We are not meant to dominate.

We are meant to belong — to each other, to the earth, to this wild, mysterious, breathing universe.

So why can’t we make meaningful change?

Because we are trying to build a new world with the logic of the old one.

Because we are trying to fix the world without healing the wound of forgetting.

Because we have not yet remembered who we are.

But here's the thing:

Remembering is already happening.

It happens every time you light a candle with intention.

Every time you ask for help.

Every time you rest without guilt.

Every time you put your bare feet on the earth.

Every time you speak the truth, even when your voice shakes.

Every time you choose presence over performance.

Every act of remembering becomes a thread — and those threads are weaving a new world.

You are not here to save the world.

You are here to remember it.

You are not a brand.

You are a blessing.

You are not the hero.

You are the circle.

The returning.

The pulse in the great remembering.

And from that place —

we rise.