When someone asks me on a podcast how they can tell whether their block is psychological, somatic, or spiritual, I almost always slow the conversation down — because the question itself tells me they’ve already done a lot of work most people never get to. They’ve read the mindset books. They’ve felt the body stuff. They’ve sat in the meditations. And they’ve started to notice that the same block keeps showing up, no matter which door they walk in through. That’s not a failure of discernment. That’s the beginning of it.

Here’s the honest answer: most blocks aren’t sitting cleanly in one layer. They’re showing up in all three at once, but with a centre of gravity in one of them. Your job isn’t to diagnose perfectly. Your job is to find the layer where the work actually moves the needle for this block, in this season.

The quick test I run in my own head

When I’m working with someone — or with myself — I listen for three different signatures. None of them are clinical. They’re more like fingerprints.

A psychological block usually has a story. There’s a belief underneath it, and you can almost hear the sentence. “If I charge that, no one will buy.” “If I show up that visible, my family will think I’ve changed.” “If I succeed at this, I’ll lose the people I love.” The block sounds like a thought you keep arguing with. You can write it down. You can debate it. And — this is the giveaway — you can sometimes talk yourself out of it for a few hours, and then it comes right back.

A somatic block doesn’t have a story. It has a sensation. You sit down to send the email and your chest gets tight. You open the sales page and your stomach drops. You’re about to hit publish and your hand just… won’t. There’s no clear thought attached. It’s pre-verbal. If you try to reason with it, the reasoning slides off because the block isn’t living in the part of you that does language. It’s living in the part of you that remembers.

A spiritual block has neither story nor sensation in the same way. It has a flatness. The thing you used to feel called toward feels strangely far away. The work you’re doing technically makes sense, but something inside you keeps asking, quietly, is this still mine? You’re not anxious. You’re not contracted. You’re a little untethered. The thread feels thin.

Story. Sensation. Flatness. That’s the rough triage.

One example, so this isn’t abstract

A few years back, a woman I was working with — a coach with a beautiful practice, maybe fifteen years in — was stuck around raising her rates. She’d done all the mindset work. She could articulate her worth in a sentence. She knew the numbers her competitors charged. And every time she sat down to send the new pricing email, she’d find herself reorganising her desk for ninety minutes and then closing the laptop.

On the surface this looked psychological. She had a story — “people will think I’ve sold out.” We worked the story. It softened. She believed the new belief intellectually. And the email still didn’t go out.

So we dropped down. We slowed everything to body speed. The moment she opened the draft, her diaphragm locked. Not metaphorically — you could see it. Her breathing went shallow and stayed there. The block wasn’t really in the story. The story was a decoration on top of a much older somatic pattern: in her childhood home, being seen wanting more than you had was dangerous. Her body learned that lesson long before she had language for it. No amount of mindset work was going to reach that floor.

And underneath even that, when we got somatically settled enough to feel into the next layer, there was a quieter question waiting: is this even the work I want to be visible for anymore? That was the spiritual layer. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just a thread asking to be picked up.

One block. Three layers. All real. The mistake would have been to pick one and insist that was “the” answer.

How to figure out where to start

If you’re sitting with a block right now and you want a practical place to begin, here’s how I’d think about it:

  • If you can clearly hear the sentence underneath the block, and arguing with it changes how you feel for a while — start at the mind and heart layer. There’s real movement available there. Our mind and heart work is built for this.
  • If the block shows up in your body before it shows up in your thoughts — if your hand won’t click send, if your throat closes before a sales call — the entry point isn’t argument, it’s regulation. Nervous system regulation is where the work has to begin, even if you eventually loop back through story.
  • If the block feels flat rather than tight — if you’re doing the thing but the meaning has drained out of it — you’re probably in a spirit and flow question, not a strategy one. No amount of nervous system work fixes a misaligned calling.

And if you genuinely can’t tell — which is most of us, most of the time — the six-layer model exists for exactly that reason. It gives you a map for walking through each layer in sequence so you stop guessing.

Why the layer matters

The reason this distinction is worth making isn’t intellectual. It’s economic, in the deepest sense of that word. Years get spent doing mindset work on what was always a somatic block. Or doing somatic work on what was always a spiritual misalignment. Or chasing a calling change when the real issue was a nervous system that had never learned safety around being seen.

This is what we mean when we talk about trying to solve a 3D problem with 1D solutions. The block has depth. The work needs to match the depth.

You’re not behind for not knowing this yet. Almost no one teaches it as an integrated practice. The books teach mindset. The somatic people teach somatic. The spiritual teachers teach spiritual. And you’ve been left to assemble the map yourself — which is exhausting, and not your job.

If you’d like a space where these three layers are held together — where you can bring an actual block and figure out, in community, which layer it’s really living in — that’s what we do inside the Miracles For Me community on Skool. Come in, bring the block you’re working on, and let’s figure out where the work actually wants to happen.

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