10 ‘mistakes’ I made in my healing journey
Perhaps the personal development world is calling you, and you are desiring to go deeper into personal enquiry and growth so to show up more fully in the world.
It is a beautiful, and necessary time to do our work.
The personal development and spiritual fields are heavily influenced by the masculine with a focus on mindset, higher consciousness, and transcending the body. Yet this separates us from the wisdom that lies in the depths of our bodies, and bypasses our messy, chaotic, earthly existence as something less than sacred.
Your very existence is sacred. It is time that we reclaimed the depths of who we are.
I’ve been reflecting on the ‘mistakes’ I’ve made, what the feminine energy can offer in the personal development space, and what I I could have been better aware of before committing time, money, and energy into ‘the work’.
Read on for the 10 mistakes I’ve made along the way - but before you do so if you haven’t grabbed your free Embodied Self-Care Guide: Rituals to Awaken the Feminine, make sure you do so below! Enjoy!
10 mistakes you may be making in your healing journey
Believing the answer lies outside MYSELF
We’ve heard this before, we know it yet it’s so easy to fall into the trap of looking to the next best teacher, or mentor, or practice to consume, with the eager anticipation that they or it will show you the way. We hold so many barriers, and resistances to doing our own work, and it’s completely normal to hand it over to someone or something else.
Your truth is not found in the hands of the universe. It is found within.
It can feel lonely, utterly terrifying, as well as truly empowering to fully embrace this truth.
Find a practice and/or a practitioner that establishes you as the authority on yourself, no one else.
OUTSOURCING MY HEALING
We love to outsource our problems! I have been there myself countless times, and I see many womxn who come to me with the desire and the expectation that I can do their work for them.
Many practitioners will do this happily, offering clearing and balancing work, perhaps some insight and discussion where perhaps you participate, but you are not leading the session. Undoubtedly you can leave feeling really nourished, at least for a few days.
But is this empowering? Personally, relying on another person to re-balance me is not. I see these kind of appointments as nice tune-ups, or cup-fillers, but relying on another person to do your deep inner work will never be helpful in the end.
Now I’m not saying to do anything alone, but rather to give thought as to who is leading the session, and who is the expert in the room.
I believe you are the expert on you, and your truth and your answers lie solely within yourself. You do not require me, or anyone else to diagnose and ‘fix’ you.
What’s more, no matter how intuitive or well intentioned another is, they are still human, and there-in runs the real and all too common risk of projection, and when you’re trying to connect with yourself the last thing you need is someone else’s stuff being placed on you.
The bottom line is this, you cannot outsource your own healing. Find someone who supports you to access your inner truth without interference.
Focusing on the surface
“They keep doing this!” or “If I lost weight I’ll be happy”. It’s easy to see these things as the cause of our unhappiness, or as roadblocks on the way to self-actualisation. But there’s something going on behind this (and behind that again) that lies at the root cause of any challenge you are currently facing.
Yet it’s easier to see what is in front of us, and attribute blame to something or someone else than look deep at what the root cause may be. The things that are currently causing you pain or frustration are the sign posts to something deeper that is going on.
The feminine lives in the depths. Meet her there.
Dig deeper to find the real concern. “What is under this?” is a key question to ask yourself.
SElf- GASLIGHTING
“The customers weren’t rude; they just had their own problems going on. I should be more understanding next time". “It’s not that bad, it could be worse”. “Stop overreacting”. “Stop being silly”.
Thoughts we can often think to ourselves when we’re trying to snap out of whatever rage, pain, or discomfort we’re currently feeling. And yes, sometimes your self-critic can be a healthy rain-check, but not always.
If you find yourself invalidating your reactions, dismissing your emotions as unimportant, believing your talents and gifts are superficial or fabrications, or questioning whether certain situations did or didn’t happen - then you might be gaslighting yourself.
Your reaction might seem unwarranted on reflection, but your emotions are always telling you something. Honour yourself, and honour what you feel and use them as an entry point for deeper enquiry to understand your needs and your desires and provide yourself with the self-care you need. These are messages direct from your soul and they are screaming at you for attention.
All of your emotions are valid and you have the right, and also the responsibility, to truly feel them.
Focusing on the mind
We live in society that has long dismissed the power of the body, and placed the mind in an exalted position. There is a shift happening however, as more and more research comes out on trauma and the holds it has in our body, and the memory our bodies have. Western Medicine is slowly beginning to realise that the mind-body-spirit connection as upheld by many of the indigenous practices and models such as the Chakra systems in the Vedic tradition, the Meridian System in Traditional Chinese Medicine, and shamanic practices around the globe all hold a great deal more truth than the mind-over-matter approach would like to admit.
Talk therapy will only go so far - see my post on Busting the Mindset Myth for more.
Accessing the depths and wisdom that lie within is beautiful and bountiful in itself, and a body-led approach is absolutely required if you wish to work on unresolved emotional trauma, rewire old patterning, and change behaviours and thoughts.
You experience everything in life through your body. Your body holds the score. Your body is wise beyond measure.
Pushing through
We’ve come out of the third wave of feminism believing we need to be strong, stoic, and do what the men do. The patriarchal message to keep pushing through no matter what runs deep in our veins. However it isn’t always to our benefit.
If your body is screaming out NO, if you’re feeling stressed-out and overwhelmed, if you are exhausted, then these are signs from your body begging you to listen in. Your body is trying to keep you safe. If you choose to push-through despite what the signals in your body are telling you your nervous system becomes even more activated, and there is a real risk that you will overtax your system, which only serves to reinforce whatever unconscious barricades are up, and can lead to a mountain of physical health problems as well.
The inner work doesn’t need to be hard, painful, and always forward facing - it’s time to leave the masculine drive behind, relearn the art of being compassionate and understanding with ourselves.
It is essential that we tend to ourselves while we stretch ourselves, and that we give plenty of room to recoup. We can move through whatever it is we desire to overcome gently, pausing as necessary, and stretching just a little more each time.
Spiritual Bypassing
Oh boy. Isn’t this one rampant. I see light, love, and crystals everywhere I turn. And yes, absolutely I believe that at the core of everything exists love, and that nature holds much power, but also we are living a very messy human existence. We cannot skip out of the 3D into the 5D while we are in this human form. Bypassing the darker, messier, harder side of life dishonours your feelings and dishonours yourself. It pushes aspects of yourself into the shadow leaving your fragmented and acting from a prettier, but far from whole place. Who is here for pretty?
The feminine is wild, chaotic, ravenous, as well as soft, nurturing and receiving. Embrace the full spectrum that is available to you, embrace the feminine.
To experience the dark, the rage, the pain - to surrender and lean into it is what it takes to be truly alive in this world. To focus on the happiness and joy alone is an empty, inauthentic wish that does not do justice to our very human experience.
Avoiding Discomfort
And then we come to avoiding what is painful and uncomfortable.
We are brilliant in our innovative ways to seek pleasure over pain and to distract ourselves from what we don’t want to feel. From shopping to sex, to sugar, to the social media scroll, there are so many alternatives available to us that we needn’t go deep ever, if we didn’t want to.
Do you swallow your feelings with food? Distract yourself with the Instagram feed? Find yourself so committed to work or exercise, with the happy by-product of all the feelings being pushed away.
Notice what you do in order not to feel what you feel. Every message desires to be heard, and will find it’s way to the surface someway or somehow eventually - often in ways and times we would prefer not.
The very nature of the feminine is to feel.
Embracing the discomfort is an intentional practice. It stretches us in ways that are not pleasant, but opens us to the truth that lies within our hearts. From the heartache and contraction comes inevitable expansion.
Consuming all the material rather than doing the work
This one is still pretty familiar to me. I love a good book, I love to learn more things, all the things, my appetite for knowledge and new ways is vast. So much so that I can find myself with an overwhelming amount of books, podcasts, courses, etc going at once. But I can see this in itself as an avoidance strategy. Reading, becoming more broadly educated about what’s going on is close enough to the mark to feel like the right thing to do, but it doesn’t equate to doing the work.
Here we find the feminine again, she wants to experience all the things. She wants to embody, and dance and come alive to what is known. The knowing itself is not enough.
The real work is experienced, not learned. At some point we need to put down the reading material, tune into our bodies rather than our minds and turn inward.
BELIEVING IT iS HARDER AND MORE PAINFUL THAN IT IS
There is no doubt that when embarking on a healing journey we will encounter parts of ourselves that we had banished, we will discover aspects of self that are hiding in fear, pain and shame. And it can be challenging to face what lurks in the shadow. But ultimately this is what it is about, to meet and embrace all aspects of self. To merge with love. To Come Home in the fullest sense that you can imagine.
Yes, the path is unknown and it can be scary.
But, equally it is illuminating, and freeing, and fun. It can be laced with pleasure and lightness and optimism. These are the gifts of the feminine - the full spectrum of feeling is always available to you.
And as you feel the things you desired not to feel you expand your capacity and your resilience. You will learn to embrace the resistance, the fears, the self-doubt and inner critic as valuable obstacles on your path, and it will become easier to navigate as you go.
We will always meet new edges in life, and as you journey you will find that you become up for more, and with that more edges will inevitably come. But ultimately what you are finding is that more of life is available to you.
In this journey your heart will open, and so much more will become possible for you. It’s a journey of a lifetime.
Keep your eye out for my next blog post on the 6 Key Criteria to Consider in Your Personal Growth Journey. Don’t want to miss out?
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xo
Jess