Getting Unstuck; Dr. Cathryn Jacob
RSS Feed Dr. Cathryn Jacob is a retired UK general practitioner and author of When Stuck Happens: How We Get Caught, Soften, and Come Back to Life. She co-created Raft to Freedom with Dharma teacher Vince Cullen to help people address harmful cravings, compulsions, difficult emotions, and destructive behavioral patterns. Her work draws on secular Buddhist teachings, mindfulness, compassion, and self-kindness. Through frameworks such as RAFT and ELSA, she helps people recognize reactive patterns, soften their inner critic, and respond to life with greater wisdom, care, and freedom.
Most Influential Person- Stephen Batchelor
Effect on Emotions- “Mindfulness has given me the ability to pull myself back from living in regret and shame and remorse and rumination.”
- It helps me return from “the anxiety of what’s going to happen next in the future.”
- “Right now I’m safe. Right now I’m satisfied. Right now I’m interconnected. Right now my basic needs as a human being are met.”
- “The breath is always with us” and can bring us back into the present moment.
- The breath can reveal whether we are anxious or relaxed because its rate and quality continually change.
- Breath-focused practice may be unsuitable or triggering for people with asthma, breathing difficulties, or trauma and should be approached carefully.
- Book: When Stuck Happens: How We Get Caught, Soften, and Come Back to Life by Dr. Cathryn Jacob
- Book: After Buddhism by Stephen Batchelor
- Apps: Cathryn does not use apps.
- “Get yourself safe. Get yourself to a place of safety.” Mindfulness and acceptance should never be interpreted as resignation or remaining in danger.
- “My inner critic was the biggest bully I know,” and she was “carrying my bully around with me everywhere I went.”
- She recommends rebuilding confidence and responding to internal bullying with self-care, self-love, and self-compassion rather than more aggression.