What the Stirring Actually Feels Like —and Why We Dismiss It
By Dr. Susan Sterkenberg, PhD | Catalyst for Renewal
It doesn’t usually arrive as a voice. It arrives as a feeling you can’t quite name.
Something is slightly off. The days are full, and yet there’s this — a low-grade restlessness that settles in on a Sunday afternoon, or surfaces in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday. You tell yourself it’s just a phase. But it stays.
That’s the stirring.
It’s Not Restlessness — Even When It Feels That Way
The stirring is an internal knowing — a recognition felt in the body before it’s named in language. Something ready to be seen, lifted, examined.
For some people it arrives as unnamed excitement pressing at the edges of ordinary days. For others it’s the quiet ache of something unlived — a thought that keeps returning like the tide, patient and impossible to dismiss.
“You did not manufacture this knowing. It arose. And once it has arisen, it does not easily go back to sleep.”
Why We Dismiss It
We are skilled at dismissing the stirring. We reach for the nearest explanation: I’m just tired. This isn’t the right time. The stirring gets folded back into the noise of a full life — until it returns. And busyness helps us avoid it: as long as the calendar is full, we have a ready excuse not to stop and listen.
What It Actually Feels Like — In the Body
The stirring lives in the body first. Genuine desire feels like energy moving from the feet upward — the excitement that moves before the decision is fully formed. Obligation feels like contraction: effortfulness that has nothing to do with the difficulty of the work and everything to do with mismatch.
Your body already knows the difference. The excavation is about trusting what you’ve been feeling all along.
Three Questions to Sit With
When did you last stop long enough to tell yourself the full truth about where you are — not where you’re performing, but where you actually are right now?
What is the recurring thought — the one that keeps returning like the tide — that you’ve been telling yourself isn’t urgent?
If your body could speak plainly right now, what would it say about the life you’re living?
The stirring doesn’t require immediate action. It requires only this: stop pretending it isn’t there.
If something here landed for you, I’d love to explore it together.
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About Dr. Susan Sterkenberg
Dr. Susan Sterkenberg, PhD, is the founder of Catalyst for Renewal, based on Hilton Head Island, SC. She is the author of The Stirring: Excavating Your Authentic Self for the Life That Is Waiting and Becoming Sanctuary: One Mother’s Journey Through Seven Sacred Spaces of Grief.