Cathryn Jacob’s new book, When Stuck Happens: how we get caught, soften, and come back to life, is indeed a companionable guide—a wise and befriending presence who listens carefully to the sufferings and blessings of our everyday worlds. Her grounding as a retired physician brings to her writing style a wonderful tone balanced on the thresholds of listening, writing, and speaking, with a conversational style directly addressing the reader.

As a spiritual practice her writing is uniquely accessible. She never slips into conceptual schemes or theoretical abstraction, but stays rooted in the granularity of the everyday—both its small sufferings and its quiet sublimity.

Having studied secular dharma at Bodhi College with Stephen Batchelor, Martine Batchelor and Bernat Font, Cathryn brings to her writing practice a pragmatic wisdom, creative insight, and humour all her own. Reading When Stuck Happens offers us a middle way passage between reactivity and sublimity as it occurs in our everyday lived experience.

I turn to the language of phenomenology—the philosophy of lived experience—because it captures for me Cathryn’s keen observation of the ways ordinary experience unfolds. She is a peerless observer of our mundane existence, especially its speed: “…experience happens quickly. Something touches us, the body recognizes it, the mind starts telling stories and before long, a whole difficult world can be built out of one small moment.” (p.17) She shares her recognition of the continuous ups and downs of everyday life which occur within what phenomenologists call the “lifeworld,” that is, the taken-for-granted environments as in the household and the workplace where most of our lives take place.

She has an ear for the nuance of relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and strangers, and a remarkable ability to bring into focus the precise meanings of reactivity and its relief. She is not interested in making grand proclamations about dharma practice but in exploring and embracing the incremental unfolding of lived experience—in the repercussions of how our comments “land,” how our imagined identities are often mixed up in our misunderstandings, how we learn to “notice” and recognize reactivity in our bodies and minds, and how to find our footing so that unsettling situations become more workable. (“Not easy. Workable.” p.69) She often qualifies by implying degrees. She guides the reader away from expectations of grand moments of transformation and towards the next decent step. Overall, I find that this scaling down of our frame of reference to realistic dimensions is itself transformative.

The arc of the book moves from the body to the mind. We begin with core understandings of reactivity—our intense resistance to what we don’t want and our often desperate clinging to what we want. We learn to notice the sensitivity of the body to reactivity, followed by recognizing tendencies of the mind to avoid or quickly fix situations that have gone askew. Cathryn’s goal, however, is to “know how to meet a hard moment without being swept away by it.” She highlights that before habitual patterns of the mind come into play, we feel “a tightening in the chest, a drop in the stomach, a quick heat behind the eyes” as we shrink our lives “down to the size of our latest worry.” (p .8)

There is a clear if subtle point-of-origin to this habitual and automatic process because while the mind can argue with itself for hours “the body is more direct. It tightens, clenches, speeds up, goes numb, braces, holds its breath. If we can feel that beginning—the jaw, the shoulders, the breath, the little rush of heat—we have already stepped slightly outside of the reactive storyline” that the mind generates. (p.15) That “outside” is the wider situation of our present reality where changing conditions may preside: “…poor sleep, low confidence, a wobblier nervous system, a body already tight…” (p.22)

In learning to pause, and identify the body’s warnings, she reasons that loosening can occur thereafter: “…and sometimes in the middle of that loosening, something ordinary reappears. A little humour. A bit of breath. Space around the thought. The blackbird is on the fence again. The day is no longer entirely about us” (p.25) or our current worry. With that new and wider awareness, we can care enough to ask a better question: “Not how do I make this stop, but what does this need?” (p.51)

“Softening” is a kind of trust that “the system is not stuck in one gear.” (p.88) When we soften, even “before the mind gets involved, something in us answers. The face softens. The chest warms. The whole system brightens for a second, as if a small lamp has been switched on somewhere behind the ribs.” (p.107) When we begin to soften, we are noticing first of all the subtle changes that can take place in the physical feelings of reactivity, such as “…the moment when the body is still hot but no longer escalating. The moment when the jaw loosens a notch. The moment when the breath deepens without being told to. The moment when the mind realizes it is no longer arguing with the situation quite so ferociously…” (pp. 88-89)

Before our minds throw together a storyline, the nervous system notices that the body’s reactivity is changing and changeable. Here is where the skill of mindfulness of the body is so beneficial. It is our first alert to reactivity as well as to its softening: “The body is where softening is easiest to spot because the body is not very interested in abstraction. It is interested in grip and release. Heat and cooling. Bracing and settling.” (pp.89–90)

Slowly reading When Stuck Happens, I was reminded of the writings of the philosopher Robert M. Ellis who has developed a highly original and compelling account of middle way philosophy. I find Cathryn’s thinking to be congruent with Ellis’s middle way, particularly in that she skillfully applies two of its key principles: incrementalism (seeing things in degrees, not absolutes) and provisionality (considering new options to counter the “one-gear”, absolutizing tendency to reactivity).

She demonstrates again and again the importance of thinking incrementally, judging things as a matter of degree instead of holding the narrow perspective of reactive states. And she demonstrates repeatedly that softening opens up the experience of finding options: It allows for openness to alternative possibilities so that we are no longer in the grip of intensely single-minded reactivity. Her way of writing enables her readers to experience these ideas in practice: we feel reactive, we feel the loosening that follows from thinking in degrees, we feel the opening up of options in the softening of reactivity.

Cathryn deeply explores the four tasks that Stephen Batchelor has developed in his approach to secular dharma, especially delving into the first task of embracing all of life, its many degrees of suffering and happiness. She does so without using an insider’s language. Instead she gives vividly experiential examples, so that the process of reading embodies dharma practice.

When Stuck Happens is a book to read slowly, allowing enough time to reflect and recognize the lived experience and lifeworld that Cathryn so astutely shares, letting her companionable guidance accompany us in “learning how to recognize reactivity, how to loosen its grip, and how to return to the awe and wonder of everyday life”. In Cathryn’s words, “…when stuck happens—because it will—we may begin to recognize the territory. The tightening. The narrowing. The heat. The story arriving with its evidence already arranged. The old certainty that something must be fixed, defended, avoided, won, explained, eaten, bought, sent, or solved immediately….” But, when we learn to pause, “when the grip loosens, more of the world can reach us…This is how care becomes a way of living rather than a good intention.” (pp. 145, 191)

Her uniqueness as a secular dharma teacher is her physician’s deep knowledge of the body and mind—the specific but also ordinary processes which we can all learn to access. She uses this embodied understanding rather than theoretical thought in order to approach with more equanimity the myriad problems we encounter every day.