I didn’t set out to become an intuitive healing practitioner.

Like many people drawn to this kind of work, it emerged through my own lived experience — through periods of inner change, uncertainty, and the quiet sense that something deeper was asking to be listened to.

I’ve always been a sensitive, reflective person — someone who notices what sits beneath the surface, who feels things deeply, and who naturally tracks subtle shifts in people and situations.

But for a long time, I didn’t understand this sensitivity clearly. It wasn’t mirrored back in a way that helped me make sense of it or value it.

Over time, through my own healing process and training, I began to understand these qualities differently. What I had experienced as “too much” or “too intense” was actually a form of awareness — a way of perceiving emotional, psychological, energetic, and spiritual layers of experience.

This became part of how I now understand human experience more broadly.

Not as something fixed or linear, but as layered — shaped by what we feel, think, carry in the body, and experience on deeper levels of awareness.

And this is the space I now work in with people.

What I offer now

I work one-to-one with people who are moving through overwhelm, uncertainty, inner strain, or periods of change where something in their life no longer feels workable in the same way.

These sessions are not about fixing or analysing from a distance.

They are a grounded space to slow things down and work directly with your lived experience — so you can begin to see more clearly what is happening internally, and what feels right from here.

My work is relational and intuitive, and draws on emotional, psychological, energetic, and spiritual dimensions of experience.

How I work

In sessions, we follow what is present.

This might include thoughts, emotions, body sensations, patterns, memories, or subtler layers of experience that begin to reveal themselves as things slow down.

At times, we may also work with deeper patterns within these layers of experience using intuitive and energy-based approaches, always guided by what feels appropriate and supportive in the moment.

The intention is not to impose direction, but to create the conditions where clarity can begin to emerge naturally.

Over time, this often supports a return of clarity, steadiness, and a more grounded sense of direction and self-trust.

Why I do this work

This work is shaped by both lived experience and professional training in holistic counselling, trauma-informed practice, and spiritual and energy-based approaches.

It is also shaped by many years of witnessing what happens when people are given space to slow down enough to actually feel and understand their inner experience without pressure or judgement.

What I’ve seen again and again is that when this happens, something begins to reorganise internally — not through force, but through awareness.

People often begin to feel more settled, more present, and more able to respond to their life from a grounded place.

An invitation

If something here resonates, you’re welcome to explore my work further or book an intro call.

You don’t need to have clarity before you begin.

We start from where you are.

With love,
Kym

✨ You might also like

Here are a few other reflections and stories you might find nourishing, especially if you're walking your own path of awakening, transition, or rediscovery.

It's okay if you've done heaps of healing work and you keep getting triggered or you can’t get over what hurt you.

It's okay if you're anxious, unsure, or overwhelmed.

It's okay if you're exhausted and you can barely find the energy to get out of bed.

It's okay if you feel lost, wandering a desert with no clear direction.

It's okay if you haven't figured out what you want to do with your precious life.

It's okay if you're struggling to find joy or meaning in things that once made you happy or in anything at all.

It’s okay if you’re not over your grief yet.

It’s okay if you find yourself getting angry (there’s a lot to be angry at in this world.)

It’s okay if you cry easily (this world needs your tears and sensitivity.)

It’s okay if you’re not where you think you should be at, or wish you were at in your life yet.

It’s okay to be scared of the future (there’s so much uncertainty and rapid change.)

It’s okay to be jealous of your friends or loved one’s success.

It’s okay to feel lonely.

It’s okay that there are bumps and difficulties in your relationships.
 
The most loving and healing thing you can do for yourself (and for others) is to meet yourself as you are. To make your current experience okay, without trying to change or fix it.
 
Your experience is your experience—it's what's true and real for you right now. Being against yourself and your life adds to your pain and can keep you stuck in the experience you want to change. Sometimes you can be against yourself in ways that you don't realise thanks to an unconscious internalised nasty critic or abuser.
 
For now, in this moment, take a breath and see if you can give some space for yourself, your feelings and your experience.
Allow yourself to experience what you are experiencing right now without trying to change it. To be where you are and who you are in this moment.
Maybe say a little hello to those difficult feelings or experience and tell that internal nasty critic to back off and give you some space.
 
When you stop fighting against your experience and trying to make it something other than it is, you can take a different approach. Because what your experience really needs is deep compassion, tenderness, care and loving witnessing.
 
From this place of allowing and compassion, organic healing and transformation can begin. It may bring you into deeper contact with pain or discomfort at first, but it will be easier.
 
It can be kind, gentle and loving, not forceful or shaming. You can be kind, gentle and loving towards yourself.
 
Take a moment today to breathe and allow yourself to be as you are.
It’s okay to be tired.
It’s okay to not have all the answers.
It’s okay to be messy.
It’s okay to be a work in progress.
It’s okay.
 
You’re not alone in this.

With love and courage,

Kym xx

PS If you need some help to find your way through and out of the pain and suffering of feeling like there’s something wrong with you, book a session or free 20 minute chat to find out how I can help you.

PPS If you enjoyed this blog post and found it useful, consider subscribing to my soul letter, The Way of Courage. You'll receive helpful content and insights directly in your inbox, including some that I don't always share on my blog. Join me for deeper, more personal insights.

Have you ever asked yourself either or both of these questions: What’s wrong with me? Why aren’t I like everybody else?
 
These are questions my clients sometimes ask me in session. I also know they are questions many people ask themselves quietly inside and never voice to anyone else, because I’ve been there and done that too.
 
In my late 20’s, I entered my first Dark Night of the Soul. A long period of suffering and despair as the life I built that I thought would make me happy unraveled.
 
My long-term relationship had died but I stayed in it. The job I had loved had grown into something that was no longer suited to who I was yet I stubbornly stayed in despite the stress and anxiety. I was lonely and isolated, and too embarrassed and fearful to show or tell anyone what was happening inside me.
 
I looked around at my colleagues, family and other people I knew who didn’t seem to be struggling or isolated like I was and so I asked that question: What’s wrong with me? If everyone else seemed to be able to live a happy life with ease of social connections, then surely there was something wrong with me that I couldn’t. Some flaw, something irrevocably broken or wrong.
 
On top of all the existing pain and suffering, my innocent yet ill-perceived answer and reasoning added layers of shame. I was ashamed of the state of my life and especially ashamed of my loneliness and perceived wrongness so I did my best to pretend I was okay and hide my misery.
 
Asking “what’s wrong with me?” is never the right question to ask, because the question is fundamentally flawed. It assumes that there can be something wrong with you. It usually comes from a belief that you are or can be wrong or flawed. And that belief is often developed at a very young age, when your consciousness is still developing and can’t really understand what is happening at the time.
 
Asking “What’s wrong with me?” is a cry for help from those younger parts of ourselves that didn’t receive sufficient witnessing and guidance from an elder or caregiver, wasn’t witnessed at all, was emotionally neglected or abused. It can form so young, when you're a pre-verbal even, if a parent is unable to consistently meet your needs. Without witnessing and guidance, the young psyche makes up stories and reasons for why things are they way they are, and it usually blames itself in order to maintain connection and belonging.
 
Self turns on self.
 
Instead of being able to see and understand that “hey this person is being really mean to me” or “I’m a really quiet, sensitive person amongst a group of outgoing extroverts” the self tells a story that those other people are are right or normal and I am wrong. It’s a story that’s kept inside, reinforced again and again until it becomes a fact to the self. In doing so we end up consistently othering ourselves and never feeling like we belong anywhere, never feeling good enough and hiding who we really are.
 
This story and belief is common. Many of us hold it or have held it inside. It’s also a heart-breaking story. The belief and the shame cause so much pain and suffering, and the trait or quality that has been judged goes into hiding and isn’t allowed to express itself causing more suffering whether it be pain, deadening or depression. This is a huge loss of soul, loss to the soul and loss to the world.
 
From my experience sitting with my clients who have asked “What’s wrong with me?” what has been judged in them or made to be wrong is usually a gift or uniqueness that may be different to the traits of their family or social groups and not understood by them yet alone appreciated or valued. Some families and groups have very rigid and fixed ideas about how a member of their group should be (spoken or unspoken.) These can be the complete opposite of your innate nature.
 
Although disallowed by those around them, the traits and qualities are usually a gift and much needed medicine to the world because they are different and often the opposite of what is dominating the group. Quiet when there is too much loud. Sensitivity and deep feeling when there is too much rationality and intellect. Chaos and spontaneity when there is too much seriousness, orderliness and rigidness. Or you can even flip these around. The opposite can also be true.
 
One of the great fallacies that I grew up with was believing that when I turned 18 I would become an adult and stop being a child, just like flicking a light switch.

But being human doesn’t work that way.

Yes you become an adult, but you will always have younger parts of you that live inside you. They remind you not to be too serious, have more fun, tap into your imagination, be outlandish, take naps, have a hot chocolate with extra marshmallows, paint outside the lines and make a big, colourful, joyful mess!  They also hold pains and unmet needs that require your care, your nurturing, your witnessing and re-parenting.
 
So dear one, if you ever ask me “What’s wrong with me?” I will not only tell you that there is nothing wrong with you but I will witness for you all the amazing qualities, traits and gifts that live inside you and your soul and help you to see that about yourself, because you are more amazing and brilliant than you realise.
 
I will talk gently and lovingly to the young hurt child inside you and be that loving witness and presence that was missing back when “there’s something wrong with me” started.
 
I will help you learn to be that witness and parent for yourself, to love and affirm yourself deeply and reclaim the expression of those misjudged traits and gifts so you can be free to be yourself even if that’s very different from the people around you.

Because this world needs you as you, with all the gifts and medicine that can only come through you.

And your soul needs you to become as you as you can possibly be. It's why you're here.  To be you, express you, experience life as you and gift life and others as you.

With love and courage for you and your soul,

Kym xx

PS If you need some help to find your way through and out of the pain and suffering of feeling like there’s something wrong with you, book a session or free 20 minute chat to find out how I can help you.

PPS If you enjoyed this blog post and found it useful, consider subscribing to my soul letter, The Way of Courage. You'll receive exclusive content and insights directly in your inbox that I don't always share on my blog. Join me for deeper, more personal insights.

For too long you’ve been told that you’re too sensitive, too emotional, too shy, too weird, too deep, too complex, too quiet, too different, too much of the vibrant living qualities that make you you and unique.

You might have heard it from your parents or caregivers or siblings when you were growing up. And even now you’re all grown up, you might still hear it from them.

Maybe you heard it from friends, colleagues or bosses.

You’ve most likely absorbed it from media, advertising and collective messaging.

Maybe they told you to toughen up or grow a thicker skin.

Maybe they said you’re overreacting or being too dramatic.

You might have been asked, “Why are you making such a big deal?” or “Why are you so sensitive?” with that tone of criticism and condescension… you know that tone that is used as a question but is actually a declarative judgment complete with daggers piercing your skin and heart?

You’ve probably been told that you need to learn how to handle criticism and be stronger. Don’t be so touchy! Don’t let things bother you so much! Don’t be a baby!

You probably believed what they told you and internalised it, which means you think there is something wrong with you, that you are too emotional, too sensitive, too different from everyone else. Not tough enough. Not strong enough. Why am I always crying? Why aren’t I like everyone else?

Inside you, along with those beliefs, is the deep hurt and pain that comes with criticism and rejection and this kind of verbal assault.

Inside you is shame from feeling like something is wrong with you–that you are bad.

Inside you is an emptiness and depression as the sensitive parts of your soul go into hiding, move far away into the background or even leave, unwanted and not wanting to be in this harsh environment.

But there was something missing at the time you were told all these things.

Something essential that would have made all the difference, and that something is actually a someone.

Someone who sees the beauty, perfection and uniqueness in who you are with your combination of sensitive gifts and qualities.

Someone who takes your side, stands up for you and protects you from the meanness and judgment of others.

For a moment, I want to be that person for you, if you’ll allow me.

Imagine me standing by your side in physical form or as a guardian angel.

This is what I would tell you and what I would do...

Beautiful sensitive soul, your loved ones, friends, bosses, colleagues, the media and collective have got it wrong.

They do not understand the beauty, depth or power of being a sensitive human being on this planet. But I do, because I have walked the path to heal the injuries to my sensitive nature and reclaim its gifts.

So as a highly sensitive soul to another sensitive soul, let me show you how incredible all of your supposed “too muchness” is.

Your sensitivity is your greatest gift and it’s a gift and medicine that this planet needs now in massive proportions.

This planet needs more people who can feel their deep feelings and respond to them in themselves and others.

It needs more conscientiousness and deeper contemplation, quiet and thoughtfulness.

It needs more people who can sense and feel what is going on around them and who have the courage and emotional intelligence to respond and act and not ignore it.

Your empathy offers profound comfort and understanding to the people, creatures and nature in your life.

Your awareness and intuition guides you through life's complexities and leads you to insights that others might miss.

Your deep inner world and ability to dream and tap into the imaginal realms fuel your artistic and innovative endeavours. It brings new ideas, insights, poetry, art and other creations into the world.

Sensitive soul, when someone calls you “too sensitive” or any other criticism of who you are, it tells you more about them and what’s happening inside them than it does about who you really are.

They are telling you about their own hurts, as well as marginalised and disowned parts of themselves that they’re trying to keep at bay.

They are telling you about their own inability or discomfort to be with sensitive feelings and emotion, as well as their beliefs about hiding and not showing feelings or vulnerability.

They do this by projecting their feelings onto you or others, and criticising you for traits they struggle with internally. This is called projection, and is a psychological defence mechanism where individuals attribute their own unacceptable feelings or thoughts to another person.

It is an attempt to shut you down so they don’t have to feel their own discomfort and pain.

What is often more true is the inverse or opposite of the judgments that they place on to you. It’s not that you’re too sensitive, but that they are what they judge in you as too sensitive or they’re not sensitive enough.

Pause…

Pause for a moment and contemplate that.

Can you see how that is true or might be true? How the person or people calling you “too much” might be exactly what they are criticising you for, either a little or a lot inside where it’s hidden? Or how they might have been told they were “too much” when they were younger and are just passing it on? How they might be the complete opposite of what they are calling you and how they are holding themselves up as the norm or standard and making any other way of being wrong?

Now take a deep breath in to your belly, exhale and let that go.

Some of our deepest injuries, trauma and shame is caused by a lack of witnessing and protection at the time of the event or soon afterwards.

When you are young, you are more vulnerable, not having yet developed all the boundaries and psychological skills to protect yourself against other people.

You are like a sponge, absorbing the energies, beliefs and ideas of those around you. When the criticism is coming from your parent or caregiver or someone bigger in power than you, you are more vulnerable, because they are big (in power) and you are small. Most parents don’t like it when their child fights back or argues back. It is disallowed and so often there’s no other choice but to take it in and maybe even apologise for just being who you are.

Do you know what I would do if I were there with you when you were told you’re too sensitive or too emotional or too much?

I’d stand right by your side or even in front and tell them that you’re not.

I’d tell them to stop it, stop speaking, shut up.

I’d tell them that they are being mean, cruel even and insensitive.

I’d tell them how amazing you are and how much I love your feelings and sensitivity and the way you express yourself.

I’d tell them to wake up and look at what they are doing–”can’t you see how you are using your words and power to try and hurt a human being and their soul?”

And if they wouldn’t stop, do you know what I would do?

I’d take you by the hand and take you some place away from that person.

I’d sit with you while you feel your feelings and cry and your nervous system regulates so you start to feel safe again.

Then I’d tell you all the beautiful and incredible and unique things I see about you and your sensitivity, and how worthy you are of protection.

If I could go back in time, I would protect and defend you and your sensitivity so fiercely that you were never injured.

But I can’t physically do this.

What I can do in the present is help you clear and untangle all the judgments and criticisms you ever received; to process and heal the trauma of being wronged and shamed to be who you are; to discover all the ways your sensitivity and true nature is a gift, and help you retrieve the parts of your soul that hid or fled.

Because my sincerest hope is that you will love who you are–who your soul came here to be with all the nuances, quirks, vibrancy and uniqueness you are.

That you can feel safe and free to be and express your truest self in all the ways you feel called. 

That you can thrive as a sensitive being in this often rough and tumble home we call earth.

With love and sincere courage,

Kym xx

However, this perspective offers a limited understanding of the complex nature of both grief and love and sends a confusing double message about both. It suggests that there is a price of love, which we all know is given and received freely and cannot be bought; this perpetuates capitalist thinking and insinuates that love is transactional, when it is not. It can cause you to diminish, invalidate or ignore grief that arises that isn’t associated with love. This disenfranchisement of grief can lead to loneliness and isolation and exacerbate the pain you are experiencing as well as the longevity of your grief.

Watch my Youtube video below or keep reading below for the written version of this article….

If grief isn’t the price of love, what is it?

Grief is the process and range of emotions that we go through in response to loss of any kind. The quote, “Grief is the price of love,” really speaks to bereavement, which is a specific type of grief related to someone dying (including animal companions.)

Grief affects everyone in different ways, and it's possible to experience any range of emotions. For some people grief can be very overwhelming and even become complicated where symptoms continue for a long time and get harder to cope with rather than easier and can have intense and overwhelming feelings that impact day to day living.

While grief will be experienced in the form of bereavement when you lose a loved one through death, or when a relationship ends. There are many losses we experience that result in grief where there may not have been love.

Some of these types of experiences you may have that cause grief include:

• You are fired or made redundant from a job or there is a restructure at work that changes your role and responsibilities, team structures or colleagues change

• You have to move home

• You lose the safety or predictability in your life

• You lose our health or physical capability - this includes disability or a condition or disease progressing

• Dementia or memory loss personally, or a loved one has dementia or memory loss and the person you felt you know has gone

• The loss of plans, hopes, dreams or opportunities, the lost potential of what could have been possible

• In response to natural disasters or climate change

• When a belief that you’ve held for a long time is shattered or changed

• Loss of identity through spiritual awakening or kundalini processes

• When your idea of who someone else is shattered or changed because of deceit or truth emerging

• The parenting or love you wished you received but didn’t

It’s also possible to carry or experience grief that isn’t yours but that of a parent or an ancestor in your family system.

And when you lose a loved one through death or the end of a relationship, it’s not just the person that you grieve, but the relationship itself and what that gave you including social connections and status.

The painful burden of disenfranchised grief

The reason I want you to know and recognise that grief is not just about love is because any loss you experience that you believe or societiy considers less relevant can lead to disenfranchised grief.

Disenfranchised grief is a burden you carry alone because nobody sees or understands what you’re going through, believes that it’s a big deal or matters, or understands why it’s taking you so long to “get over.” This means you can’ t talk openy about your experience leaving you isolated and alone with your grief. This makes grief more painful and can compound its longevity and I don’t want this for you or anyone.

If there were only 3 things you take away from reading this blog, I hope it is this:

1. Grief is about loss

2. Grief is a process as well as a range of emotions

3. Grief is not always directly linked to love

Grief is a really big, deep, sensitive and sacred topic and experience, one that I have much compassion and tenderness for as I have been through my own long and painful journeys with grief and disenfranchised grief and supported others through theirs. I offer this blog to you with sensitivity, compassion and care. I truly don’t want your grief to be disenfranchised ever.

If you are struggling with big emotions, to function in life because of your grief process or feel that you have to hide your grief from others, please reach out for help, whether that is from me, a trusted loved one or another therapist. I know reaching out for help requires a leap of faith and a burst of courageousness, but staying isolated and alone with your experience is more painful.

With love and courage,

Kym xx

While it can keep you stuck, trapped, missing out on beneficial experiences and the good things in life and even get you into trouble at work when it shows up as avoidance and procrastination, it can also be a wise protector.

The challenge is to meet your inner resistance in a way that you can understand what its deeper message is, so you can make aligned choices and respond instead of react.

My experience with inner resistance

I want to share a little story about my own recent experience with inner resistance and a 7 step approach you can use to work with your resistance, procrastination or avoidance.

You can watch or listen to me talk about inner resistance and how to move through it here or if you prefer to read, keep reading on below the video….

The beach is one of my favourite places to rest, dream, explore and play. I’ve written previously about how it is a powerful liminal space for healing.  So normally I jump at any opportunity to go the beach when the weather is just right  - not too hot, not too cold or windy.

But the other weekend I almost didn’t go. Although my husband and I planned the trip before we went to sleep, when I woke up in the morning I had such a strong inner resistance to going arising from within me that it almost stopped me in my tracks.

The resistance was a like a strong energy inside my stomach pushing everything outside me away and it wouldn’t allow me to take one step towards getting ready to go.

Maybe you’ve experienced inner resistance in a similar way?

It can also be a quiet  (or not so quiet) inner voice that firmly says no or I don’t want to, or it can feel like an energy that pushes things away, or an anxiety or discomfort that moves you into avoidance or procrastination.

If you just listen to that initial message and take it on face value without questioning it, it can stop you from doing things that you really want to do. And that’s what almost happened me—why I almost didn’t end up going to beach. Fortunately I knew to investigate it further and I’ll explain my process below.

While inner resistance can hinder and be a challenging obstacle, not all resistance is detrimental. Sometimes, it serves as a protective barrier, guiding us away from choices and actions that may not align with our values or needs or be best for us.

So, how do we navigate resistance without allowing it to make decisions in your life on autopilot?

 I believe the key lies in fostering a relational approach— one rooted in curiosity and gentleness rather than overcoming.

Self-help and coaching industries like to teach people how to overcome perceived limitations or obstacles. But I find this approach can be like bullying yourself. It has roots in self-abuse and can cause shame.

Instead, a relational approach allows you to get to know your experience better rather than just reacting to it. You get to know the wisdom and deeper message within the resistance so you can choose how you want to respond instead of reacting.

7 steps to working with you inner resistance, procrastination or avoidance

Here’s a 7-step relational approach you can try to work with your inner resistance, procrastination or avoidance to get to know its wisdom, message and maybe even begin to transform it:

1. When faced with resistance, the first step is acknowledgment.

   Name and acknowledge that you are experiencing resistance, procrastination or avoidance.

   Simply acknowledging its presence without judgment can create space for understanding and exploration.

2. Breathe with your resistance.

   Sometimes just breathing with your experience can be enough for it to dissipate and resolve. Breathing slowly and deeply into your belly stimulates your vagus nerve and activates your parasympathetic nervous system, bringing you into a state of rest, digest and safety.

3. Cultivate curiousity.

   Curiousity is one of the most important qualities and metaskills you can learn to cultivate in life and is essential to any inner work you do as it keeps you open to new ideas and information.

   When you are curious, you aren’t looking at yourself in an analytical way, which can close down tentative and sensitive parts of yourself a bit like a turtle pulling its head into its shell.

   Approach your inner resistance with a sense of openness and wonder. Be willing to be surprised by your experience.

4. Tune into your resistance a little bit by feeling, sensing and noticing it in your body with your gentle curiousity.

   You don't need to go too deeply into it especially if it's quite overwhelming. Just notice it from a distance, where it is in your body, its sensations, temperature, colour, if words or images emerge or you can ask your resistance for this information, remembering to be gentle and curious.

5. Notice how old is the resistance. Does it feel like a young part of you?

    Sometimes resistance can arise from a young part of you that has split off and holds a lot of energy, power and emotion and operates outside of your everyday conscious awareness. When this happens, young parts can hijack your life by making decisions for you on autopilot. This is not something to shame them or yourself for, because it has served a purpose and helped you in a way that you have grown out of.

    So if you find the resistance is coming from a young part of yourself, approach it with care and respect. You may need to be tender and loving and sometimes also firm.

    See if you can find out what it what it needs. Maybe it needs reassurance or some soothing, attention or understanding. Maybe it’s really confused and needs information and updating about how life is now or maybe it has things it needs to tell you to help it feel safe.

    By meeting the young part of yourself in this way and giving it what it needs, the feeling of resistance may start to subside. Sometimes more tending, care and dialogue is required

6. After inquiring, come back to your heart centre, and ask your heart what’s really true for you?  

   What step does it want you to take? What's the step you need to take but might not want to take?

   Then breathe with any answers that come to you, strengthening your connection with your heart and what is most true for you.

    Maybe the truth matches what the resistance was telling you or maybe it’s telling you that you don’t have capacity right now, or this choice or action isn’t for you because it isn’t aligned, safe or in your highest good. Or maybe it says something else.

    By coming back to your source of truth and to what I call your big Self —your conscious aware self—you can be aware of the choices and actions that are aligned and the direction you need to go in.

   Breathing with to strengthen and embody this connection and knowing can sometimes help your desire to become greater than your resistance so you can naturally flow in the direction past the resistance.

    

7. Finally, connected to your source of truth, the last thing to do is to see if you can take a step that is aligned, even if it’s small.  And it’s okay if you can’t.

    Your heart and your resistance may need to have a longer conversation.

    Sometimes we have other edges that arise that need to be known and resourced before we can take the step. And sometimes our resistance can be really strong and have many layers. Your young part may be carrying a lot of pain and trauma so it needs more time, support and healing for the protective mechanism of resistance to subside and free you to do what you really want or need to do.

If you find yourself grappling with resistance in your own journey, know that you're not alone. It happens to all of us.

If you need some help and support, you can book an appointment with me. I'd be honoured to support you.

With love and courage,

Kym xx

Some members of my community have been telling me that they’re in various states of freeze that they've been in for quite some time, or that they’re really challenged by going into a freeze response in certain situations such as being criticised by a loved one or having anger directed towards them.

So in this helpful article, I explain:

• what a freeze state is

• why you can get stuck in a freeze response

• the typical approaches people react to a freeze and why they don’t work

• how radical self-compassion can help you through a freeze state or difficult experience; and

• I guide you through a process that combines Tara Brach’s RAIN with somatic touch to help you through your experience

• AND there’s a BONUS audio recording of me taking you through the process so you can just listen and do the practice

What is a freeze state?

A freeze state, also known as dorsal vagal shutdown, is where your dorsal vagal system, the more primitive part of your parasympathetic nervous system, activates in response to information and triggers in your environment and body and it slams on the brakes, limiting your ability to take action.

At its extreme, when you're in a freeze, the body won’t move. You're frozen in place, waiting for what your nervous system and brain is neuroceptively perceiving and registering as danger to pass.

It can look like you’re playing dead, lifeless or limp, so that you are not seen as a threat to “the scary bear” of danger in your environment and it will lose interest in you.  You can also be in partial freeze where you find you can’t make yourself take some action that you need to take in your life or even activities that bring you joy. Your body simply says no . You may feel a tension and restriction in your limbs as the brake gets pressed down to stop you doing anything.

Freeze and dorsal vagal shutdown can also look like:

• Your mind going blank and you can't find words to express yourself or communicate

• Being unable to process information or make decisions

• Feeling numb, disconnected, spaced out or flat

• Depression

• Feeling apathy or hopeless towards life

• Feeling helpless

• Exhaustion

• Heaviness in the body 

Why do you get stuck in a freeze response?

You may have seen documentaries or videos of animals in the wild such as bison or wildebeest being hunted by lions and then going limp once they’ve been caught.  This is the freeze response. What often happens is that the lion may put them down believing that they’re dead or lose interest. The frozen creature then shakes off its frozen state and comes back into a parasympathetcally activated state where they can then run away and save their life.

That shaking off part just often doesn't happen for humans and so we can get stuck in the freeze response because we haven’t been able to shake ourselves out of the freeze or recognise that the danger has passed or there isn’t really anything life threatening in our environment so we can come out of freeze.

This is why you need to tend to and care for your freeze response to help it to pass and for you to come back into safety.

There’s nothing wrong with you when you freeze

Sometimes people tend to think there’s something wrong with them when they’ve gone into a freeze response. I know that I have, especially if I’ve been in a situation where I need to speak but I just can’t. When in freeze, our inner critics can kick in and shame us for not being able to take action.

But it’s important to appreciate and really take in that being in a freeze state doesn’t mean that something is wrong with you. It’s not your fault that you’ve gone into a freeze response. It’s not something that you decide that you’re going to do. It happens so quickly and outside of your conscious awareness that you cannot control it in the moment.

Your freeze response is activated by your primitive brain and is designed to protect you from what it registers as danger before you consciously recognise danger, because in the wild and more primitive human times, by the time you consciously recognized danger it would be too late and the scary bear or dangerous animal would already be attacking you.

The two ways people tend to approach freeze state and why they don’t work

We tend to take one of two approaches when in a freeze or shut down state.

Firstly, you might try to wait for your nervous system to come out of the freeze state in its own time. But unfortunately, that often means that you can stay in a freeze state for much longer than is necessary. You may eventually come out of freeze in your own time but you can come out of freeze more quickly if you take some action to help yourself come out of the freeze response.

The second approach that people tend to take if they're in a freeze state is to try and get themselves out of a freeze state or out of and away from their experience in a way that doesn't really tend to or care for their experience - so trying to push, override or take action. This is like being in direct conflict with the state you’re in and your current life experience. Instead of getting you out of freeze, your system may respond by slamming the brakes on harder. You don’t unfreeze.

So to help yourself out of a freeze response or you need to take action to care for and tend to your experience and yourself.

Radical compassion and somatic exercises: a more sensitive and loving approach to your freeze or shut-down response (or any challenging experience you are having)

A really beautiful process that can work well for sensitives, empaths, caring, compassionate, nurturing people is meditation teacher and psychologist, Tara Brach’s RAIN practice.

RAIN is an acronym, which stands for recognise, allow, investigate, nurture. It is a mindful process whereby you gently explore, tend to and presence your experience.

 RAIN can be applied to anything you are experiencing in your life. I find that when it’s applied to a freeze or shutdown response combined with some somatic exercises that it can bring a gentle warmth that can help to begin to “defrost” the freeze and ease you back into safety, social engagement and flow again.

The medicine in this process is the qualities and metaskills – the way you approach each step. It requires gentleness, loving curiousity, welcoming, a willingness to be with and for your experience, not against it.  It requires you to feel what is happening in and around your body. It won’t work if you are too cognitive, analytical or mental about your experience.

RAIN is a practice of radical self compassion, which I believe is a medicine, metaskill and quality that we need more of collectively and individually, especially if you grew up in an environment where there wasn't a lot of nurture, where you were perhaps pushed to achieve things or to do things earlier than then you were ready for or there was just a lack of kind of tenderness and loving nurture in in your family.

Applying RAIN and somatic touch to your freeze state or challenging experience

Here’s how you can apply RAIN and somatic touch to your freeze state.

1. Starting with R, which is to recognise what is happening

The first step is recognising that you’re frozen, or don’t know what to do, or can’ find words, or have gone blank, or feel shutdown, or whatever challenging experience you are having. Then just notice a little bit more deeply what sensations are in your body, what thoughts are going through your mind and what emotions you feel.

Things I notice when I recognise a freeze state in myself include:

• My mind is blank

• It feels like my brain is clicking over but I can't find information.

• I can feel a tension in my body. My muscles in my arms and legs feel constricted, holding me in place.

• I feel empty or numb

• I don't know what to do.

• I feel hopeless.

• I don't know how to get myself out of this.

 In this step, you want to become aware of what’s happening in your body and what the major feeling or experience is and give it a name.

2. The second step is A, to allow life to be just as it is in this moment

 This step is really important, because often in freeze or whatever challenging state we are in, we don’t want to be there, we’re trying to find a way out, which is to be against it. This can lock you into a battle against your own experience.

So in this step, you’re finding a yes or okay or nod towards what your experience currently is. Fighting or ignoring your experience can cause more pain.

Okay, I'm in a freeze. I'm in a shutdown response. I'm having this experience of feeling depressed or hopeless or helpless. I can't find my way out right now and it’s okay. This is my experience right now and saying yes, okay or allowing it to be in your own way/

You may need to stay here for a bit and just breathe into your belly or tension and ease into allowing your experience.

You may like to put a hand on your heart and somewhere lovingly on your body. See if you can help your mind relax so that you're not against where you're at in this moment. You're not trying to find your way out and you're not being against your experience of life. It's okay.

3. The third step is I, to investigate with a gentle curious attention

So bringing in a deeper inquiry, using your curiosity, gentle, awareness and noticing to what is happening in your experience. This is about being present with your experience as you track it through your body and system.

You may like to scan your body for sensations. What do you most strongly feel. What tensions are here.

Can you name emotions that come up and where they are in your body. Maybe there's a fear in you throat or stomach. Maybe grief sits in your heart or behind your eyes. Maybe you just feel empty in an around you

See if you can identify any beliefs that might be causing pain or difficulty.

You may need to take some time to inquire and wait to see what arises. The thoughts can be quiet or hidden. You might notice phrases like “I don't feel safe. It's not safe to move forward. It's not safe to be me. I'm going to be attacked or rejected or ridiculed or become destitute. Or maybe it’s I don’t know what to do.”

Notice what you most dislike about your experience.

Notice if there's a really scared or hurt part of yourself that might be reacting and sending you into the freeze and seeing if you can just gently inquire with this part of you about what it needs from you and what it might need from someone else.

While this step is called Investigate, it's not about analyzing yourself. It's not about being really cognitive or self-critical. It's about noticing what is arising. You're practicing being present with your experience in a deeper, loving way.

4. The last step of RAIN is to nurture with loving presence

Once you’ve investigated your experience and got a sense of what you need, then this step is about responding and giving to yourself what you need. It could be reassuring words or wrapping your arms around yourself or imagining a loved one sending you love or speaking wise words.

 If you don't know what you need or how to respond you can just bring compassion to yourself.  Or you can imagine what you would say or do if there was a small, young child in front of you who was terrified. How would you respond to that sweet young child?

You'll probably find that your tone of voice changes and becomes softer and gentler. You offer a spaciousness and loving presence. You're not asking what is wrong but reassuring that “hey, I'm here with you. It's okay. You're safe with me.” You may gently embrace the child or sit down beside them and put an arm around them.

In this step you are cultivating deep compassion and care for yourself and giving it to yourself. This is where I like to bring in somatic techniques. You may like to gently rub, pat or squeeze your arms and other parts of your body.  Rubbing your hands up and down your thighs can be really soothing, calming and grounding.  

As you do, speak reassuring words to the parts of you that are scared or hurting. You’re okay. I’m here with you. You’re not alone. Everything’s going to be okay. We’ve got this. Just being in a loving space with yourself and encouraging and reassuring yourself.

It’s really important to receive and to take in what you are saying and the nurture you are giving yourself and not just say the words or do the action without feeling it. So let yourself hear what you are saying to yourself AND take it in and receive it into your body and being by feeling the compassion and nurture. Breathe and feel it in your body.

You may feel some tension in your body start to melt. It may feel a little bit painful. There could be some pain around the body. You might experience tears, which is very normal when you start to come out of a freeze response especially if you’ve been in a deep or long freeze or if you’ve deeply missed feeling nurtured in your life.

You can listen to me guide you through the process by clicking the button below

What if it doesn’t work?

Remember that not every technique or approach works for everyone. So if you try RAIN and you don’t feel like it helps you the first time, perhaps try it again another day. Some approaches require practice. Sometimes, a technique is just not for you and it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you if you don’t find it helpful.

Sometimes when we’re in freeze states, we need the help of another person with a safe and regulated nervous system to help us come out of freeze. If you’re needing support, then you can find out how you can work with me here or send me an email.

With love and courage

Kym xx

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More helpful articles you might like

For several months now I have felt like I am in a liminal space, caught between old versions of who I was and who I am becoming but aren’t quite yet as old identities and ways of being release and new ones form.

It’s wintertime where I live, so stillness, rest, hibernation, inward focus and contemplation of the metaphoric seeds to sow for the next cycle of growth are the major and natural themes of this season. But my experience has been beyond wintertime blues.

I have felt lethargic, with little to no creativity or inspiration, no desire to go anywhere or do anything. My life has lacked clear direction, traction or forward flow. Depression (which Jeff Foster calls deep rest), listlessness and freeze states where my body wouldn’t let me move towards anyone or anything have been my companions at times.

Not even counsellors or therapists are immune to the deep challenges of human experience or nervous system responses. Fortunately, my counselling skills and trauma knowledge along with support from skilled and trusted practitioners has enabled me to ride through this difficult period.

In the last few days, I have experienced an incredible turnaround in an unexpected way.

This week I spent a few days in country Victoria to care and support a family member through a healing process. It was the first time I have been outside Melbourne and away from home in 18 months.

So it has been a welcome surprise and gift to return home and discover that I have been released from the rut I was in. I have more energy, drive and inspiration, as well as a renewed sense of meaning and vision. The pathlessness I had experienced for so long is finally starting to dissipate and open up. New opportunities and possibilities are starting to appear.

I’m grateful for this turnaround and all the good feelings that have returned to my body.  As a deep, contemplative soul, I have reflected on why I have experienced this turnaround and gotten out of a rut without doing any inner work on myself. What was it that I did and that happened that helped to bring about this shift?

Here’s the process to get out of a rut that I discovered and how it helped.

1.    Give yourself a break from your problems. Shift your attention to something else that is life affirmative.

The first step that made a difference was that I had to drive a long distance to where my family member lives and my focus was on helping them. I ceased to dwell and ruminate on my own problems, experience and stuckness. My focus was on helping my family member and doing something positive, supportive and good.

This meant that I stopped putting pressure on myself to get unstuck, make changes or take action and I stopped wasting energy thinking about my challenges.

Ruminating on your problems can take a lot of energy, be very draining and not resolve anything. Often we keep thinking about our problems to try and solve them, but as Albert Einstein said, you can’t solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it. When you’re so focused on your problem, often you can’t hear your intuition, outside guidance or inspiration. Sometimes the answers you need are not rational or linear. They may seem a little crazy, unrelated or tangential but to hear them, you need to open up your awareness and not stay so focused on the problem.

Also, taking time out from needing to solve your problems or make things can happen can also help to realign you with universal timing. Sometimes we want an answer now but our want is not in alignment with universal divine timing.

2.    Do something new or different.

My family member has recently moved to a new town, one that I have never visited before.  My husband encouraged me to take the longer scenic route to drive there so I passed through the beautiful Yarra Valley wine-growing region, Kinglake National Park and past Lake Eildon. This route was quite winding and hilly compared to the shorter, direct more linear route along the Hume Highway.

Just the drive up alone up there took me out of my linear thinking as the route was non-linear and it exposed me to the beautiful landscape and a new town that I didn’t know where I got to discover, including finding where the best coffee is. I also got to care for my family member in ways that I don’t usually get to do from a distance.

When you go somewhere new or that is not well known to you, or you try a new activity or one that you don’t do all the time, you bring the energy of the new into your life.

If life has been a bit groundhog day repetitive, where you do the same things every day and week, your energetic system and the energy of your life can become quite stale and stagnant. We need the energy of the new to nourish, replenish and inspire us.

3.    Go into nature either somewhere you love or somewhere new

The route I drove to my family member’s town took me through beautiful landscape then while I was there visiting, I took time every day to walk beside the lake and river and take in all the trees and birds.

One of the many and most beautiful gifts of nature is that it can bring you into the altered state of consciousness of wonder and awe. Just being in a state of wonder or awe is healing because of the elevating energetic frequency of this state. It can naturally clear and heal pain, hurts, sadness and difficult energies.

In this state you also become very present and receptive to the world around you and it can become more possible to receive inspiration, ideas, solutions and answers to prayers and questions.

4.    Move your body

As stated above, one of the things I did was to walk in nature every day. Movement can help bring you into a flow state while keeping your problem-solving mind occupied.

If you do something you enjoy, your energy field will be elevated by joy or other positive feelings, which will help you feel better. These positive feelings will be magnetic and you may start to attract people, ideas and solutions to you.

Movement can also help you get out of your head and more into your body or being state. While we like to think about our problems, inspiration, guidance, ideas and answers don’t tend to originate from your thinking mind. They can be dropped in through your crown, third eye, heart centre or aura or already be deeply encoded within your chakras and energetic system or hanging around just outside your energetic body waiting for an opening to come in or for your more open awareness to recognise them.

A loving note: If your body is in a freeze state, then it may be very difficult or feel impossible to start moving because your nervous system has the brakes on. If this is you, be very gentle and kind to yourself. Reassure your body that it safe and encourage it as you would a young child, to take a small step towards movement even if that is just to have a cup of tea in your backyard. Some gentle heart and belly breathing may help.

5.    Do something of service

The purpose of my trip to the country was altruistic to support my family member through a healing process, help them around their home as they have mobility and health limitations and offer companionship.

According to the Mental Health Foundation UK, there is evidences that suggests that altruism promotes physiological changes in the brain that make you feel happy and good about yourself. It also creates belonging and reduces isolation, helps you keep things in perspective, and can have ongoing positive impacts for you and the person/organisation/creature you helped.

My personal experience is that this is true. I feel more connected to myself, my family member and life, and I continue to feel good about what I did.

I hope this article offers you some ideas about how you can get out of a rut. Remember, they are just suggestions which may or may not work for you. If you try them and feel like nothing changes or you’re still stuck in a rut, know that you haven’t done anything wrong and there’s nothing wrong with you. What works for one person doesn’t mean it works for everyone.

If you need some support to find your way out of your rut, you can learn more about how I can support you here.

With love and courage,

Kym xx

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I’ve been contemplating the question of “Are you for you or against you?” for a few days now. Idea and words effortlessly streamed into my mind in the safe contained space of my shower, which is always a magical portal for ideas, inspiration and insight.

As I sat down to write about how our inner critics work against us, the words have frozen inside me and it feels like a drawer-bridge crashed down in front of me so I can’t move forward and write. My stomach is constricted. Feelings of dread, horror and shame arise. My arms feel jittery and weak. I want to go and do something else that doesn’t feel as hard or scary.

Have you ever experienced something like this?

Maybe it wasn’t as result of writing. Perhaps you wanted to reach out to someone to take the next step in a friendship or relationship, make contact with someone you haven’t spoken to for a long time, apply for your dream job, go somewhere new on holiday or take a creative class alone, speak in public or bring up a conflict or issue in a relationship or something else entirely.

You may have concluded that you’re on the wrong track, that what you’re feeling is an indication that you shouldn’t proceed. If it feels bad, maybe you’re just not meant to do it? Or maybe what you long for just isn’t for you? Why would doing something you love or really want to do feel so bad? But this often isn’t what it signifies at all.

Instead of writing about inner critics in this article or even a more soulful poetic piece as I often love to do, I’m sharing an important piece about navigating the freeze response on your growing edge – where you want to step towards something you long to experience but freeze and get stuck and can’t go towards it. It can be very painful, lonely and upsetting.

Without a map – a clear understanding– of what is happening you can stay stuck for too long or give up and never get to where you long to be.

In the past my freeze response has kept me stuck for extended periods of time. I’ve had so many stuck places that I think I deserve a gold medal or the title of the Queen of Stuckness. I also know from my own experience and feedback from my audience that it is really helpful to be able to understand your own internal process and behaviours by seeing them modelled and explained in others.

Writing and sharing this article is also my way of directly working and moving over the edge I hit sitting down to write, as well as unshaming my own freeze response.

Symptoms of your growing edge

The place I arrived at, frozen and wanting to avoid writing was my growing edge. An edge occurs where you’re about to do something new, step into the unknown, make a change big or small, let go of an old identity or step into your life in a new or powerful way. You usually have no map of what lies over the edge because you’re going into new territory.

It is normal that fear arises on your growing edge. Here you can experience all sorts of feelings and behaviour such as procrastination, confusion, doubt, numbing through bingeing on Netflix, food or substances, and avoiding the very thing you want or need to do.

This is also a place where our unhealed trauma wounds can arise. Sometimes on our way to creating the new or entering the unknown, the trauma or scary experiences of our past get triggered and reactivated in our current experience.

The presence of fear doesn’t mean that you’re on the wrong track.

It usually means the opposite. You’re in exactly the right place with an opportunity to grow, heal, evolve and create the dreams you long to bring to life. To create something new you must leave the safe container of the old.  Nothing new exists in the old.

While we often think that we need to take a flying leap or push ourselves over our edges, there are kinder, gentler ways that we can help ourselves over them and prevent ourselves from getting stuck. Sometimes there’s even ways we can burrow under or around instead of having to dive into the fears and trauma.

What is most helpful is to slow down here, recognise and name that you are on an edge and explore what is happening on the edge and over it because mastering your edges and edge behaviours will help you to move more easefully and gracefully over the many edges you will face in your lifetime without getting stuck for too long.

What causes the freeze response

This experience of freeze and feelings of fear, horror and dread aren’t new to me. Recently, it has occurred frequently when I sit down to write a new article or newsletter that shares my personal ideas or inside world with others or when I put myself out there visibly in the world – to take a risk, be seen and be vulnerable with others.

Thanks to my training and personal therapy, I can see and understand exactly what is happening inside me and over time as I have worked with and healed, the response has lessened in severity and I get stuck here less and less.

Inside me, in my stomach area live all my young parts. You’ve probably heard of the term inner child? I tend to refer to my inner child as young parts because there’s not just one inner child but many younger parts that split off and froze during my childhood when faced with overwhelming experiences.

So today, when I sat down to write, a young part of me was triggered. She was terrified that if I share my ideas or inner experience that she’s going to get really hurt again, ridiculed and shamed, repeating what she experienced many, many times with her mother and she wants to avoid this at all costs.

Based on my past experience and the way my nervous system is assessing sensory information primarily from my internal environment (because I can tell you there’s nothing scary here in my current external environment just me, my sleeping cat and my laptop), my primitive brain assessed that if I write the article as intended that I would be putting myself in a dangerous situation. So my nervous system responded quicker than you can click your fingers and sent me into a freeze to stop me, as well as a flight activation to get away from the trigger i.e. writing.

You can read more about how biology contributes to your stuckness here.

Unshaming the freeze response

All of this happened in an instant outside of my conscious awareness and without anything I could do to stop it. But I can respond to it and lovingly support myself out of freeze and into what I want to do.

If you’ve ever gone into a freeze in any situation and not been able to move, act or speak, you may have felt a lot of shame or embarrassment because you believed that you should have been able to respond and that there is something wrong with you because you couldn’t. I want to lovingly let you know and reassure you that there’s nothing wrong with you.

A freeze response is a biological protective response that happens outside of your conscious awareness. Like me, it’s possible that something in the present is reminding you of a past trauma where the original fear or panic hasn’t been fully discharged so your original reaction of freezing repeats again. With therapeutic help, you can be supported to heal the original wound and learn how to care for and help yourself out of a freeze response.

Here’s some suggestions to start.

How to work through the trigger and freeze response

1. Acknowledge and name what is happening for you

As I sat frozen at my laptop with feelings of fear and dread arising, I became curious and interested in my experience and simply asked myself kindly, “What’s happening here?” To start with I simply named my experience:

• I feel frozen

• I feel like there’s a barrier in front of me stopping me moving forward

• My stomach is constricted and has feelings of fear, dread and horror

• Ah, there’s a young part of me in there

• My arms are feeling tingly, jittery, weak and tense

Naming and acknowledging what I was experiencing helped to breakdown my experience into smaller digestible components so it wasn’t one big fearful experience.

Dr. Daniel Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry, developed a strategy called ‘name it to tame it’ which addresses the idea that naming emotions can help you to identify and regulate them.

This can be extended to naming anything that has been influencing or controlling our behaviours internally or externally. Naming and knowing means you can find effective ways to work with it. Naming alone can be a very empowering and relieving act.

Note that if you haven’t worked with your young parts before or have a very traumatised young part, you might not be able to identify that you have a young part that is triggered, this is because the young part can pull you into it so you and the young part are one in a process called blending. This is where counseling/therapeutic support can be helpful.

2. Belly Breathing

As I wrote down my experience, I breathed long and slow into my belly.

Breathing long, deep and slow into your belly with equal exhale will stimulate your vagus nerve and help bring you back into a state of rest and digest where you can access deeper states of wellbeing. It sends a message straight to your primitive brain that you are safe. It’s such an effective technique and you will notice that I write about it, recommend it and use it often.

You might like to try my Heart & Belly breathing exercise, which you can do anywhere and only needs 1 to 3 minutes to receive benefits.

3. Ground yourself in the present moment

I paused and looked around my room and named objects I could see – the curtains, the picture of me smiling in front of a Lake Garda sunset in Italy, my cat whistle breathing into her bedding – of course I patted her too, which is very regulating and calming for the nervous system.

Looking around you and taking in what you can see will help to ground you back in the present moment. When you are triggered, you can be pulled into the past implicit memory and live it like it’s happening again, so belly breathing, looking around and reminding yourself where you are now, how old you are and that you’ve grown up will help bring you back into the present moment and re-establish safety.

4. Caring for your young parts

Part of becoming a mature adult is learning to care for your young, inner child parts – it’s just that most of us have never been taught to do it.

I used to think that growing up was about becoming an adult and leaving childhood behind, but we don’t leave our childhood behind. It comes with us, as well as the many young child parts that live inside us. When you become an adult it becomes your role to parent them and care for them when they become upset or triggered or have needs for closeness, connection, fun and joy.

You parent your inner child through your own loving presence, being willing to be with those parts as they feel their feelings to completion, and offering them the loving words they’ve needed and perhaps never heard.

I lovingly witnessed my scared, horrified little one inside. I reassured her. “It’s okay. I’m here (meaning big Kym is here.) Nothing bad is going to happen. No one is going to attack or hurt you. I won’t let them. “

And I reminder her, “It’s not your job to write this article. It’s mine. This is part of my work and calling in the world, and you little one, get to go and play and paint and read and whatever else you would love to do.”

As I did this, the feelings in my stomach subsided. I felt more peaceful, calm and relieved.

You may like to read Become a Safe Space to Process Your Emotions for Liberation and Wisdom to learn how to tend to your feelings (which includes the feelings of your child parts) safely.

5. Explore your growing edge

For me, the above steps were enough to be able to keep going and write this article for you. I have done a lot of healing and work with my inner child parts, am a trained counselor and healer and I know this edge of mine well.

Some edges are bigger and more complicated than others. Sometimes you need to hang out and explore what is on and over your personal growing edge from the safety of this side of the edge before you can go over it. You may need to reclaim powers and gifts or build skills. You may need to call in allies. You may need to cultivate new and more helpful beliefs.

There can be difficult energies through ancestors and past lives or past experiences that can stop you and keep you stuck here. You may need the help of a practitioner to help you name what is happening in your process and find your way over.

My sincerest wish for you…

So dear Soul, if you have been trying to move towards your dream or make a change in your life and have found yourself stuck, it is my sincerest wish that this article helps to give you a picture of what could be happening inside you –in your body, nervous system and psyche- that might be keeping you stuck and offer a map of how you can begin to work with your freeze/stuck response.

Supporting people on their growing edges is one of my gifts and greatest joys. I have an incredible ability to name, discover and hold down your growing edge so you can work it, go over it successfully and evolve. If you are in need of support, discover how you can work with me here or reach out if you have questions.

With love and courage,

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge that unshaming is a term that I learned from psychological activist, David Bedrick whose work is all about unshaming the unheard and marginalized voices inside individuals and culture.

I would also like to acknowledge and offer gratitude to my teacher Myree Morsi for all she has taught me about working and healing our growing edges.

You may also like….

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2. My free safe harbour healing meditation to help you relieve stress, anxiety and worry

When your original plan fails or no matter how hard you try or what you do you just can’t achieve your goal, what do you do? Do you come up with plan B?

Maybe. 

Or maybe you suspect or even recognise that perhaps there is something in your human planning and deadline setting and trying to make things happen that have lead you here.

Or maybe your goal, dream or plan really was, as David Whyte says, "...too small for you to live."

You have arrived in the perfect situation to surrender your planning and let the currents take you where they take you while you don't single-mindedly do anything.

For now, you don't have to plan it all out or think it through. 

You can surrender all your thinking and scheming and planning for the experience of life, which is exactly like the vast ocean—it carries and supports you even when you're not aware that is what is happening. 

All you have to do is be like driftwood—dreaming, dancing, drifting along with the currents of your life.

I know, it might feel counter-cultural or in conflict with how you’re wired or what you’ve been taught about how to make your dreams and goals come true.

I know that stopping and letting go and not having a destination to aim for can feel really scary. What’s going to happen if you’re not controlling your next move?  How will your life end up if you’re not working towards something?

Letting go of what you know and embracing the unknown can feel unsafe and dangerous.

But….

…there is magic in not-knowing and enchantment in mystery.

You cannot fight the current that carries you in this life if it is trying to take you in a different direction…

…well you can try to fight for as long as you like until you’re too exhausted or frustrated to fight anymore.

Maybe being like driftwood is the medicine you need and the faster and more easeful way towards the fulfillment you really seek.

So try this…

Let go of your schedule, your timetables, your calendar, your planning, your busyness and your need to fill in every waking moment with productive doing.

Go outside, exactly as you are.

Go to a park or a forest, a beach or any open space.

Follow your feet that follow your eyes opened as if born anew and seeing for the first time.

Go where they go in circles and lines and zig-zags.

Go to what calls your attention, to what flirts with your senses with its bright pretty colours or curious patterns and shapes.

Wander without aim, without rules or constraints.

Wander with curiosity.

Wander knowing that it produces nothing specific yet yields everything…

Because wandering this way will help you reconnect with the instinct of your soul and your soul’s dreaming for your life that was cut off and lost when your life became ruled by your calendar and time, and the idea that you have to do things, be productive and achieve something for your life to matter.

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Sometimes when I’m working a big growth edge in my life, I wake up feeling fear and dread in my stomach, mostly fear. When I feel intense feelings that I don’t like my old pattern is to get rid of it by pushing it away, ignoring it or dissociating from it. This was how I survived some overwhelming felt experiences in my childhood.

The problem is that these strategies may bring some temporary relief but they aren’t very effective in the long-term.

Resisting any unwanted feeling tends to amplify it and can lock it in, especially if the feeling is coming from a young part of you that needs your holding and care and another part of you is pushing it away. Trying to ignore it on the other hand can lead to reactive behavior or disconnecting from the body you are here to inhabit and fully live through.

In this article I will explain:

1. the role your feelings play in your life and why they matter

2. what you need to know about tending to your feelings (and what not to do)

3. and how to become a safe space for you feelings so that you don’t get stuck in them and can discover the wisdom they may hold

   
   

The role of feelings and emotions in your life

Feeling and emotions are energy in motion. They have different qualities and sensations.  Sometimes they just need to be given space to move through you and you don’t need to know more than “oh grief is here” or “I’m feeling scared.”

Other times they are the bearers of information and even wisdom. They tell you about your needs being met or unmet, what you like or don’t like, what you need more or less of or when a boundary has been crossed. Anger is a great information-bearer of boundary violations although often an edgy emotion for women to feel due to the cultural judgments that have been placed on women being angry and the associated denial and disavowing.

Sometimes our feelings are messages from young child parts deep inside us. They can communicate how they felt about a similar experience from the past or how your current experience is affecting them based on their experience from the past. Feelings from our young parts want to be safely held, cared for and supported to be expressed, known, freed and regulated. This is how they heal. They will often communicate with you about their needs and how they’ve been impacted in the past.

What you need to know about tending to your feelings

Sometimes your feelings don’t want to be healed. Trying to heal them can make them louder, resistant and more uncomfortable. This usually happens when the way we tend to our feelings is more of an attempt to fix them than to be a safe space for them to arise.

Just like when you tell someone how you are feeling, you’re not usually telling them because you want to be fixed but to have a safe space to for your deep and tender feelings to be received and cared for. Depending on the other person’s comfort level with the feeling being expressed and conditioning around feelings, they may try to problem-solve or fix your feeling so they feel more comfortable. We can do this to our own feelings too.

Sometimes you can have big and overwhelming feelings arise from traumatised parts within you that flood your system. When this happens you will feel pretty dreadful, on fire with sensation and emotion that won’t subside. You will need to find a way to ground yourself back in the present and close the trauma door that opened and flooded your system with overwhelming feelings and sensations from the past. You may need the help of a loved one or therapist or to call a support line such as Beyond Blue in Australia (call 1300 22 4636) or Lifeline Australia (call 13 11 14).  If you become flooded be very gentle and kind to yourself and find a helpful way to soothe.

Other times you may need to titrate your feelings by feeling them for a breath or two or a minute then when it becomes too uncomfortable moving your attention away to something else for a while – your pet, a tree or flower or cloud outside your window.  Take time out and read a book or go for a walk then come back to it later. This can help you to slowly move emotions with difficult sensations through your body and build a tolerance to them too.

Because emotions and feelings are energy, sometimes it can be really helpful to give them expression through dance or movement. It can help them move through you while you notice the sensations.

How to create a safe space for your feelings

Here are 4 steps to creating a safe space for your feelings.

1.    Don’t judge your feelings

Unfortunately many of us have been taught to label our feelings as positive or negative. I was taught this in my counselling studies as well. I think it’s better not to judge our feelings at all. I believe we do a disservice to them when we label them as positive or negative.

Not judging your feelings also includes not starting by questioning ‘why am I feeling this way?’ There can be subtle or not so subtle judgement in asking why, premised that if we can understand why then we can fix the problem that is causing the feeling and make it go away.

Feelings are for feeling. Emotions are for energy moving through you.

Sometimes we never know why a feeling is there and we don’t need to – the feeling just is and is passing through.

Later you can be curious about the feeling but the first step as I’ll explain below is to welcome it.

2.    Appreciate the role, beauty and vast array of your feelings

Part of our human experience is that we feel. That our bodies can experience all sorts of sensations and feelings is one of the reasons that our souls incarnate. Your soul cannot have the same human feeling experience without your body.

Your feelings communicate your full experience of life. While you may prefer some feelings over others, you cannot really pick or choose or avoid certain feelings as they communicate your experience of life in any given moment.

If you’ve ever seen a list of feelings it’s pretty incredible how many feelings a human being can feel and what they tell us about our life experience. You could think of each feeling as a different colour in an artists paint palette. The more colours there are, the more intricate and colourful the painting that can be created or expressed.

3.    Cultivate the metaskills of welcoming, allowing, accepting and curiousity

Metaskills are our feeling attitudes. You can think of them as the feeling way we approach something.  Metaskills is a term coined by Amy Mindell, a psychologist and one of the founders of Process-Oriented Psychology.

There are many metaskills that help you become a safe space for your own feelings, including non-judgement, compassion, kindness, tenderness and deep listening. You can probably think of others you would add. I believe that welcoming, allowing, accepting and curiousity are a great foundation to start.

1. Welcoming

The Sufi poet, Rumi, has a beautiful poem that speaks to our human experience of feeling, called The Guesthouse.

Rumi describes being human as “a guest house. Every morning a new arrival” of a different feeling as a momentary visitor. 

“Welcome and entertain them all!” encourages Rumi because essentially “each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”

You can read the whole of Rumi's poem The Guesthouse as translated by Coleman Barks here.

Or you can go to https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/guest-house/

Alternatively, you can listen or watch Coleman Barks , who translated it from its Persian form into English, read it here

Welcoming is a practice and an intention and not something you will necessarily immediately be able to do for your most difficult feelings. Learning to welcome them will create ease in your body and nervous system as well as a passageway for feelings to be able to pass through.

2. Allowing

By allowing, you give permission for the feeling to exist. It doesn’t mean you like it or have to like it.

Allowing gives the feeling space to be so that you’re not in resistance to it or against it or in conflict with it, which can exacerbate, heighten and lock in the feeling.

By allowing you come into relationship with the reality of your life experience.

3. Accepting

Accepting can be done very simply just by acknowledging “grief is here” or “sadness is here” or “I have this heavy, burning sensation in my stomach.”

Accepting acknowledges what is here in the moment.

Accepting doesn’t mean you have to like the feeling or experience but works with the reality of your present experience so you’re not fighting against it.

4. Curiousity

An attitude of gentle, loving curiosity shows an interest in your own experience. It is not forceful or prying or problemsolving or fixing.

Curiousity has an openness to learn from your own feelings. It helps you be receptive and willing to learn from your feelings and any young parts that might be sending feeling messages from their deep and hidden places within you. It makes you available to hear and learn from the information and wisdom that your feelings hold.

Conclusion

Emotions and feelings can be really difficult, challenging and overwhelming at times, especially when they are related to old trauma experiences that are surfacing for healing.

By becoming a safe space for your feelings and experience of life, you can not only make those more challenging feelings easier to experience but you can more deeply and vastly experience being the beauty of being human and can be more closely relate and in touch with your own needs, likes, dislikes and desires which can help you navigate your life more fluidly.

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This is what happens after life cuts you down to the ground, when change has been forced upon you, a relationship or job ends, health leaves you, a loved one dies, your dream is crushed or a combination of many stressors and pressures makes your life seem hopeless, untenable and you can’t go on.

You may feel stunned and startled, hollowed and halted, broken and dishevelled, cut off from everything you knew and were growing towards.

Daylight may have ceased, replaced by never-ending darkness.

You may find yourself in a deep dark cave or walking in the abyss of no-man’s land or standing at the end of the road pushed up against an unbudging brick wall panicking as you need to move forward whilst the wall of invisible forces, internal or external, or the systems of our society push back against you stopping you in your tracks.

Fear, worry, anxiety, grief, despair and depression may own your body or maybe numbness steps in to make it somewhat more bearable.

Your inner critics berate you, taunt you, shame you until you find the power within yourself and learn the skills to tell them to shut up and put them in their place.

The young protective parts that live within you may lock you down and stop you doing anything in their innocent way of trying to keep you safe and you must learn how to parent them so you can direct your life.

You may have well-meaning loved ones around you trying to offer you encouragement and positivity and reassurance that all will be well but they don’t sit with you in the darkness and disintegration and meet you where you are. Hopelessness must be embraced before hope appears.

Your night time dreams may be vivid, scary even, but powerfully encoded with all sorts of cryptic and mythic messages about your plight, what needs to be examined and known. Often they serve as keys to unlock doorways to your psyche, your dreaming, your life and the interior castle of your soul.

In times of change and unknowing, your nervous system may send you into fight or flight or, when you can’t flee your own life, it will send you into freeze. It may make you fawn and try to appease all that is not working. Your deep, loving breath and self-compassion will support you here, or you may need the help of a loved one or a therapist with a steady and regulated nervous system to help you find safety in the present moment again.

On this edge between old and new, in the midst of unravelling, uncertainty, loss and lostness, you must become intimate with your experience. Learn to tend to your feelings and hurt parts with sensitivity and care. Discover who you are in the ways you never knew before.

Look, listen, feel and learn. Avoiding this can cause you to get stuck here for far too long or if you do manage to move forward this untended material will appear again at another stage and maybe block your way once again. The intelligence of your life stream wants you to learn what it wants you to learn.

Here in the dark, liminal space you have much to shed and compost. Even if you don’t want to let it go, you must. Who you were got you this far but who you are becoming requires a new skin and way of being.

Not all will be lost, for you can weave a new skin from the threads of brokenness, wisdom, dreaming and new life. Ask any good gardener and they will tell you that compost is the rich material that feeds growing new seedlings and sustains plants and crops. Offer your old life as compost for the new.

If you find yourself stuck here for too long or that you are repeating unwanted patterns in your life then you need the help of a wise elder, a soul guide, a therapist to help you see what is hidden or out of your sight and track down the doorways and medicine to help you move through.

When life is too intense or you are rocked by changes that shock you, soul parts will leave and you will feel empty, depressed, powerless, sick or like something is missing inside you.  You must become a safe haven and friend for your soul, so your soul parts will come back and heal. The soul loves and needs safety.

You must reclaim power and gifts including becoming the one who has been broken open by life so that your light and deep feeling nature becomes a beacon and gift for other souls here on earth even in the ordinary everyday ways you live your life, work, play, create and love.

Eventually nature will have her way. There is a season to all of life and endings must give way for new beginnings.

Your roots will be deeper and stronger having drawn sustenance from your tears and sobbing, the pain of desolation, the barrenness that breathed you when your dream or life as you knew it was snatched away.  And from your willingness to be in intimate relationship with the full experience of life, to look, listen, learn and be honest with yourself, to reclaim claim gifts, qualities and powers that you never knew you had.

One day, maybe tomorrow with sunrise, maybe next week, maybe next month when the moon is full or in months to come when spring returns, you will rise back up and you will bloom more beautiful than ever before. Radiant with all your scars and all your new growth.

Despite everything, you endured. You risked, you loved, you lost, you got stuck, you shattered and died, you were reborn and you lived.

In the end you win, twisted, stretched, scrunched and moulded into intricate living wisdom that cannot be learned from reading books, only from embracing and bowing to life herself, no matter how willing or unwillingly you fell to your knees and plunged into the mud and the darkness.

Need help through a significant life change or a dark night of the soul?

This is my area of expertise and passion.

Learn how I can help you find your way out of pain and struggle and into a state of safety and ease where you can enjoy life again.

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Dear lost, searching, trying, sensitive soul,

If change has been forced upon you. If the rug has been pulled out from under your feet.

If what you had has been lost or taken from you and you’ve been thrown into a sudden abyss of darkness and uncertainty.

If your way is lost, you’ve lost your vision, become directionless, disoriented, confused and you don’t know what to do, who or where to turn to.

Your body may be panicking. You might be fearful and anxious, desperate and scrambling to find a way out of your situation. Your nervous system will be automatically making you react into fight, flight, freeze or fawn.

But don’t rush to take the first step that comes to mind to get you out of your experience and away from where you don’t want to be unless the house is on fire or you are in some other kind of immediate danger.

Don’t scramble to retrace your steps to find out where you went wrong to end up in this place for nothing is wrong despite what you may think. This may be confusing but stay with me and you’ll understand.

And to that voice inside you that is beating you up, blaming you, telling you how useless and hopeless you are, how you’ve stuffed everything up and are or will be a failure, or die lonely and destitute, say in as fierce and commanding voice you can muster, “Shut up! Go away! Leave me alone!”

Instead, take some long, slow deep breaths and carve out a space to rest exactly where you are, even if it’s just for five minutes as you read this.

If you can, breathe with your experience and notice the sensations in your body of the anxiety, fear, stuckness, confusion, unknowing, uncertainty and visionlessness, deeper and deeper with each breath you exhale.

If it becomes too intense, you can take a break. Look at the tree outside, an object in your room or pat your pet. When you’re ready come back.

Through breath and being you can be with and befriend your experience, befriend yourself and your life right now. It needs you. You need you.

You are alive and life is supporting you exactly where you are.

You have breath. Your heart is beating. You have the earth beneath you holding your weight.

The discomfort you feel isn’t necessarily a sign that something is wrong. Nor is it something you have to escape or even figure out. There is another way. I will show you.

The happiness you may have had and lost doesn’t need to be rediscovered right this very moment. The way forward doesn’t have to be known and planned.

Slowly you will adjust to what at first felt uncomfortable and made you want to scramble to find your way again.

You will find that you can look around at where you are now with curiosity, love and compassion; as you do, the fog will lift, the mountain may dissolve,  a path may reveal itself that goes under or around.

As you soothe your body and reground in the present moment, you can listen more intently and hear more clearly what is arising from within you, from the universe, Divine, God or Creator, and from your Soul.

You can receive guidance, support and the wisdom of your own answers because your body will become safe to open, to receive, to hear.

You will discover that you are standing on sacred ground, that being stopped in your tracks or the way forward disappearing beneath your feet came to serve a sacred purpose. It may be a time for rest, renewal, reconnection or redirection.

This sacred pit stop may help you strengthen and recommit to your vision or allow a new one to arise along with a new path to walk.

Or maybe you discover that you really did take a wrong turn and you can retrace your steps to that point and continue on. But this discovery is done without harshly judging and beating yourself up.

It involves discovering and opening the gifts of your wrong turn for it will hold lessons that grow your wisdom and power, fine-tune your ability to track your way and listen deeply to your soul’s guidance.

Don’t jump ahead and miss this step.  Don’t be in a rush to carry on and arrive.

You may stay here for a minute or months depending on what your soul needs to experience and discover.

If you were really meant to be there already, you would be there. If you were meant to know what to do, you would already know.

Our modern culture overvalues arriving, knowledge and achieving. It undervalues soul learning, true wisdom and meaning-making.

The fruits are always in the journey not the destination.

Slow down and be here where you are. I’m right here with you, believing in you, your multitude of gifts, your wisdom, your power and the intelligence in the unique unfolding of your life’s journey. It will look like no others.

Hold out your hands, with your palms facing up and open so you can receive your knowing. It will arrive in its own divine timing and way.

And when it does (for it will), scoop it into your heart to treasure with gratitude.

 It is the gold your soul came here to seek.

With love and courage

PS. For some practical steps and resources to help you feel safer in the midst of your experience, you might like to read my previous blog, Why you’re stuck and unable to find your way forward and what do do about it.

There will be times in your life, when change is forced upon you, the rug is pulled out from under your feet, where what you had is lost or taken from you and you are thrown into a sudden abyss of darkness and uncertainty. The way is lost.

There will be times on your life journey when you lose your way, lose your vision, become directionless, disoriented, confused and you don’t know what to do, who or where to turn to.

You may feel immense fear, panic, dread, and confusion, worry or even numbness or shame. You’ve lost your sense of safety. You may obsessively take action to try and get yourself out of your current situation without success or get stuck in a freeze state not knowing what to do and not finding answers no matter how much you think about it. Maybe you are sleeping too much or procrastinating.

When things stop working in your life or where you are trying to reach a goal but can’t find your way to get there, you can easily jump to the conclusion that something is wrong, that you’ve made a mistake and that you need to fix things to make it work again.

It’s biological

There is a biological reason for your experience.

Your nervous system is constantly absorbing sensory information from your external environment and internally from within your body to assess risk – to work out if people or situations around you are dangerous or life threatening and you need to take action to protect yourself.  

Dr Stephen Porges calls this neuroception. In his book, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, he explains that, “neuroception takes place in the primitive parts of the brain, without our conscious awareness.”

When your nervous system detects danger it will automatically trigger processes that can send you into fight, flight, freeze or fawn to keep you safe. This happens so quickly that your rational cognitive brain won’t even understand what is happening yet or make sense of it.

You have probably experienced being in a situation or witnessing something where your heart starts to beat more rapidly, breathing accelerates, your blood pressure starts to rise and muscles tense or you start to feel dead inside and frozen in place before you’ve even begun to mentally process what is happening and that you don’t feel safe.

When your nervous system and body are loudly signalling to you that you are in danger, it is natural to conclude that something is wrong. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that something is wrong. It just means that based on your previous life experiences and your nervous systems processing and assessment of the information at hand that risk is here. It has assessed you as being unsafe and wants to return you to safety.

This automatic process can be lifesaving if you are in a situation that endangers your life. However, if you’re not in a life-endangering situation, this automatic process and unconscious assessment can try to keep you so safe that you get stuck and unable to take any risk or actions towards your goals and dreams.

Why your goals, dreams and new experiences feel life threatening

Your goals and dreams and anything new you want or need to do and face in your life lives in the unknown. It’s what is known in process-oriented psychology as being over the edge. The edge is the boundary between what you know and what you don’t know.

To go over the edge towards the new thing requires that you take risk to move out of what you know and into the unknown where your goal, dream, new thing or different life or way of being lives.

But how do you get there if every time you think about what you want or what you need to do that is new, different and scary (but not life endangering) or you try to take action to make it happen, your nervous system sends you into a state of fight, flight, freeze or fawn?

How to stop freak outs on your growing edge

To stop the freaking out, fear, panic, fight, flight or freeze on your growing edge, you start by attending to your body’s experience and retrain your nervous system.

Here’s how you can do this.

The first step is to re-find safety in the current moment.

This will bring you out of your automatic response and help your brain come back online so that you can assess your situation with your conscious awareness.

One way to do this is to breathe slowly and deeply using a polyvagal breathing exercise such as The Basic Exercise or Heart and Belly Breathing, which can stimulate your vagus nerve to bring your body and nervous system back into a state of rest and digest.

If you’ve gone into a freeze state, your body and nervous system will also benefit from having some gentle or even firm touch or squeezes to wake it back up into the moment. You can work your way up and down each arm with squeezes or even firmly rub your thighs.

The second step is to help your nervous system understand you’re not in life-threatening danger

Eckhart Tolle says, “Stress is a sign that you’ve lost the present moment. The next moment has become more important than life itself.”

To this I would add, you have not necessarily consciously chosen to focus on the next moment to make it more important so it’s not your fault that next moment has become more important. As explained earlier, your nervous system may be automatically doing this for you via neuroception and its assessment of future risk if you do or don’t take certain actions.

What is helpful to recognise from Eckhart’s statement is that by grounding yourself back into the present moment and helping your nervous system see that your are safe and experience being safe in the face of change can help you experience greater levels of safety in this moment and in the face of this change. Over time, your nervous system may not have the same life-threatening reaction to your current experience.

To help yourself ground more deeply in the present moment try this…

1. Name objects you can see in detail

   As you start to feel safer, continue the polyvagal breathing then look around you and name things that you can see. The walls, curtains, photos, household objects, trees outside your window. Name them in detail.

   As you name what is here in the present moment, your focus will be in the present moment, not the future and you will become anchored in the here and now where there is no danger.
   

2. Speak calming, soothing, safe words to yourself.

   It may also be helpful to hear your own voice say soothing, safety-reminding words like:

   “I’m okay.”

   “I’m safe.”

   “I am breathing.”

   “I’m facing something new that I’ve never experienced before.”

   “I’m capable.”

   “I’m resilient.”

   “I don’t have answers right now but they will come.”

   “I have found my way in my life to this point, I can do it again.” 
   

3. Do this as you continue to do polyvagal breathing or long, deep, slow breathing. And then notice any good feelings or sensations that arise in your body even if it’s just a little bit of peace or ease and breathe with those good feelings. This will signal to your nervous system that you’re a yes to experiencing more of those good feelings so it will seek them out for you.

Want some resources to help you find relief from panic, anxiety and stress, and find safety in the face of your situation?

If you are feeling very stressed, anxious and overwhelmed, it may be easier to be guided into feeling safe again. My free Safe Harbour meditation is designed to help you find safe harbour from fear, anxiety, stress and overwhelm and help you find safety again in the present moment.

I have also written a Love Letter To Your  Stuck or Panicked Soul full of soothing words and a wisdom map to help you discover a different way out of your situation, one that is safe, loving, curious, empowering and wisdom-making.

Wondering what you can do next?

Once you feel safer in your body and grounded in the present moment, then you may be able to start to enquire more deeply and with your conscious awareness into your current situation and experience to see and understand what is happening for you on this edge.

I really want to stress the words ‘may be able to’ here, because sometimes what we need to do first is build our inner resources and capacity to face what is on our growing edge and on the other side of it. Sometimes there are traumas known or unknown, difficult energies or characters in our psyche or our life that stalk or ambush us so that we keep getting stuck on our edge or pushed back into fight, flight, freeze or fawn modes.

Often when we are in the thick of a personal process or experience, we simply can’t see what we cannot see.

You may need safe, wise and loving outside persepctive, help and support to help you get over your growing edge, out of your stuckness and current challenge.

So if you can’t find your way out on your own, don’t give yourself a hard time or let your inner critic do that either. Humans are wired for connection. We are meant to support each other, care for each other, heal and elevate each other.

I love supporting people on their growing edges and it’s where my shamanic, empathic and intuitive gifts really shine. You can learn more about out how I can help you by clicking the button below.

So let me ask you this…

What comes to your mind when you hear the word healing? What does healing mean to you? What are you looking for when you seek healing?

As with many words in the English language, we give them different and multiple meanings so that not even different dictionaries define healing in exactly the same way.

Dictionary definitions of healing

Here are some examples of the definition of heal from different dictionaries:

• Dictionary.com defines it as to make healthy, whole or sound; restore to health; free from ailment, to mend, get well.

• Merriam-Webster includes to make free from injury or disease, to cause (an undesirable condition) to be overcome, to restore to original purity or integrity.

• The Cambridge dictionary includes: if a bad situation or painful emotion heals, it ends or improves, and if something heals it, it makes it end or improve.

In addition to having no one agreed meaning, there are many words treated as synonyms for healing such as repair, restore, fix, and cure that we use interchangeably, at least in our conscious or unconscious expectations.

What healing isn’t

Healing is not curing or fixing.

Sometimes people seek healing hoping for a cure, for problems or ailments to be removed or fixed.  Sometimes this happens as part of the healing process and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it isn’t possible to be restored to an original state, but what happens through healing is that we birth ourselves in new forms.

The origin of the word healing

If we come back to the origin of the word heal, which in Old English is hælan, in Old Norse is it heila, and in Old High German it is heilen, the original meaning is whole.

So to understand what it means to heal, we must consider what does it mean to become whole?

Here’s some Dictionary.com definitions of whole:

• Comprising the full quantity, amount or extent

• Containing all elements properly belonging; complete

• Undivided; in one piece

• Not broken, damaged or impaired, intact

• Uninjured unharmed, sound.

My definition of healing

When you come to me for healing, here are some of the ways I am helping you into wholeness:

1. Soothing emotions and clearing emotional residue from the body and energetic system.

2.  Clearing energies that aren’t yours that you have picked up from others or environments or you have carried through other lifetimes so that you can be unburdened, unblocked and rest as you.

3. Disentangling you from patterns and behaviours formed in this life in response to different experiences or have come through past lives or ancestors.

4. Processing trauma and trauma energies and to support the nervous system so that you can experience deeper levels of safety in your life.

5. Connecting and relating in new ways to yourself, loved ones, life and your life experiences.

6. Supporting clarity so you can see what lies outside your primary awareness that you can’t see from your current viewpoint. This can include:

a.     connecting with and integrating gifts and qualities that have been marginalized or never known

b.     supporting inner child parts who are hiding or very hurt

c.     retrieving soul parts that have fled or hid

d.     helping you gain clarity and find your direction and next steps.

e.     empowerment by connecting with your personal and spiritual power

My own definition of healing is coming into a state of wholeness through soothing, clearing, disentangling, processing, safety-making, connecting, relating, clarifying, retrieving, unshaming, accepting and empowerment.

In my work, healing is about helping you feel safe so that you can be who you came here to be and do what you came here to do.

Curious about healing with me?

I am currently offering a limited number of FREE 20 minute Mini Healing sessions. Click the button below to book yours now.

Because what I think the writer didn’t understand is that regardless of whether you’re exhausted or feeling energised, the beach draws us to it because it is a magical and powerful, healing place.

Positioned between the land mass and the sea, the beach is a liminal place – a space between two others, a threshold and transitional space.

What is a liminal space?

Liminal spaces are places of healing, growth and transformation because they lie between the known and the unknown, the past and the future. At the beach, we know the land behind us by sight. In front of us is the sea and what lies beneath its surface is unknown.

I experience the beach in its liminal form as a vortex for healing and dreaming energy. It grounds me in the present moment firmly held by mother earth on the sandy shore while looking out over the expanse of sea to the endless horizon, I can open my heart and mind and dream into possibilities and receive inspiration.

Father Richard Rohr describes liminality as “a form of holding the tension between one space and another.” He says that, “it is in these transitional moments of our lives that authentic transformation can happen.”

 How do liminal spaces show up in your life?

During the course of your life you will arrive in liminal spaces many times. They’re not just physical places like the doctor’s waiting room. In therapeutic language it’s often referred to as the growing edge. These can include the likes of:

• the ending of relationships including divorce and separation

• the ending of an employment arrangement such as redundancy, being fired, quitting without another known job to go to, the end of a business or partnership

• deciding to move house or towns or countries but not having another place to go yet

• finishing a creative project and waiting for the next one to reveal itself

• deciding to retire

• any time you finish one chapter in your life but the next one hasn’t started yet

• when you know you need to make changes but don’t know what to do or are avoiding change

• perimenopause and entering menopause

• pregnancy

• marriage

• going on a pilgrimage

They can also be internal shifts than the above externalized examples, like:

• when we are called to let go of an identity or way of being

• we need to claim personal powers or gifts or qualities that have been marginalized or existed outside our everyday awareness

• where we need to step up in our life in a new and powerful way.

Why is it hard to be in a liminal time in our life aka on our growing edge?

Being in a liminal time in your life can make you feel fear, worry, anxiety, uncertainty and even panic.

You are moving into the unknown, which the nervous system may perceive as dangerous and may send you into fight, flight, shut down or even fawn mode to try and make what’s no longer working work for you work so that you can find the solid ground beneath your feet again without the change and to feel safe.

On your growing edge, there’s no new structure yet. There may be nothing concrete to aim towards, maybe jut some fuzzy or distant idea or sense or nothing at all. It can be a bit like being a sailor on the sea on a cloudy night without any landmarks or compass. It can be very disorienting.

Sometimes we get stuck on our growing edge or try to avoid being in this place. We can go round in circles or resist changes that our lives call us to make. It can be very frustrating and painful. And in the process, we delay realising our dreams.

What can you do if you are in a liminal time in your life? Here’s 3 tools…

I know the pain and beauty of the growing edge intimately having traversed many of my own, big and small.

Helping my clients through their liminal landscape, on their growing edge through change and transitions in their lives is my favourite work to do. It can be an incredible opportunity to know yourself more deeply, connect with soul qualities and gifts and to align or re-align with your soul’s and life’s calling. To be more you. To do what you came here to do.

If you find yourself in a liminal time in your life where you need to change or transition, here’s a few tips/tools to help you:

1. Heart and belly breathing.

   It’s difficult and often impossible to see clearly or make informed decisions when you are highly stressed, anxious or overwhelmed. So spend at least a few minutes everyday doing some heart and belly breathing (or more often if you need.) Put one hand on your heart, the other on your belly and breathe slowly and deeply so that you fill your belly, then slowly exhale. This is a form of diaphragmatic breathing that stimulates the vagus nerve and activates the relaxation response of your parasympathetic nervous system which brings you into a state of rest/digest.

2. Spend some time at the beach.

   Spend some time at the beach rr if you can’t physically get to a beach, use your imagination to take you there. Nature is such an incredible natural healer. As the beach is a liminal space, it holds what I call the energetic maps for being in a liminal space that you can absorb by just being there. It is a physical in-between space. You can hang out there feeling held and supported by the sand-covered earth beneath you, while simultaneously experiencing the land behind you (representing the past or known) and the sea before you (representing the future or unknown). You can feel the power of this place and breathe it into your aura, energetic system as well as through your fascia at a rate and frequency that is comfortable for you. You can then bring this sense of safety into your liminal life experience so you feel safe in your internal experience of your life change.

3. Listen to my safe harbour meditation. This meditation can help relieve the anxiety, stress and overwhelm that can result when you land in a liminal space in your life and help you find a sense of safe harbour on your growing edge. It’s only 13 minutes long. You can access it here.

If you’re facing changes in your life, relationship and/or work or needing to make changes within yourself and some support, you can read more about how I can help you here.

But the reality for many people is that they don’t feel merry, happy, jolly or joyful. They are experiencing sadness, grief, loneliness, depression and anxiety. This might be you too.

These feelings can be exacerbated at this time of year because there is an expectation and focus on being festive and joyful to the exclusion of these other feelings that are ignored or pushed aside or even shamed (along the lines of “It’s Christmas! Be happy!”) These other feelings want and deserve care, attention and a place at the table as well.

When I write of this, I speak from my own personal experience…

My mother died on the 19th December when I was just 20 years old. I not only lost my mother, but I lost my family structure as I knew it, my sense of belonging and my Christmas traditions. A few years later, my grandfather died on the 20th December and I experienced more grief and loss at Christmas.

Mine was a complicated grief because of deep and painful mother wounds. My siblings (full and half) had their own unresolved wounds from my mother too. Because of this, it was easier (aka trigger avoiding) to not speak about Mum.

For many, many years, Christmas was an excruciating time of year for me.  Mum’s anniversary would trigger grief.  Our family gathered together before Christmas and on Christmas day I often had nowhere I felt like I belonged. I used to deeply love Christmas time but grew to dread it.

At out family Christmas gathering, I found it difficult to show up and join in wholly because I wasn’t happy or joyful and I felt like I had to hide it because we didn’t speak about Mum, grief, pain or loss, especially at Christmas. It was excluded.

When we focus on any one thing to the exclusion of others we push the other into the shadows. We make it unsafe for someone whose experience is in the minority to feel like they can turn up with their experience and feelings. They may exclude themselves and not show up as their true self, or if they do show up, they may present the face that is expected and hide the truth of who they really are. You’ve seen this a lot in the world in regards to race, gender and sexual orientation.

Excluding parts of a person or their experience is painful. You will know this from the times your feelings or needs have been ignored. It hurts or angers and shames. Shame can be an icky, sticky and tricky state because it requires safe witnessing to heal, which isn’t possible when there is exclusion or avoidance.

When I showed up at Christmas, I hid my pain as best I could because when I surveyed the room everyone else was happy. I felt like I was the only one grieving and struggling and had to keep it to myself. It also didn’t feel safe to talk about Mum because she was a triggering topic. I felt really alone in my experience and it was painful.

Then one day this changed.

Our family Christmas catch up was scheduled for the 19th of December, the anniversary of Mum’s death. I tried to convince myself but I just couldn’t make myself go knowing that the anniversary wouldn’t be acknowledged and Mum wouldn’t be spoken of. I felt anxiety, dread and upset.

So I confided this in my eldest sister. She understood, and to my surprise got on the phone to other family members and this is how our memory candle ritual was born.  

I was not the only one missing a loved one at Christmas. Other family members and attendees had lost sisters, parents, grandparents and partners too. So every Christmas gathering, we light the memory candle, name them and remember them and those who can’t physically be there with us.

At first it was awkward. It was new and unusual for us. Over time we have found our way to make it easeful.

The memory candle ritual was simple yet powerfully healing because

1. It creates a safe space for grief and loss to be present at Christmas.

2. It reminds us and that we have all experienced losses and unites us in the shared experience of loss.

3. It honours our ancestors, loved ones and diverse feelings.

4. It includes and allows the reality of what is and not just the easier, shinier more palatable parts.

Welcoming, allowing, including and accepting makes it safer for you to show up as you are and not hide these parts away.

I believe that the best gift you can offer anyone in your life is to welcome them as they are, to drop any expectations you have that the festive season should be a happy affair for all, and make a space at the table for people as they actually are. This is how you make Christmas truly holy, by welcoming the whole of people.

These days, I can more fully, easefully and authentically show up and participate in Christmas as I am. Because of my experience, this time of year evokes within me a deeper compassion for others.

In my world right now, I know people who are struggling with anxiety, homelessness, loneliness, financial uncertainty, family and relationship conflict, separations and serious illnesses. For some this is the first (or another) Christmas without a loved one, which brings with it with the loss of Christmas they used to know when their loved one was alive, the loss of the old family or social structure and even displacement through adult orphaning, exclusion or isolation.

If you see yourself in any of what I have written, I extend to you deep tenderness and acceptance of how you are, who you are, your feelings and experience. May this create a small safe space for you to be as you are with all of your feelings, more whole and de-pressured from the expectation of a joyful Christmas.

With love and courage,

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Buckle up, because this article is about an 8 to 10 minute read, but it’s worth it. If you want to thrive in your life and not just survive or be okay, it is essential to understand the roots of unsafety.

1. Unsafety exists on this planet and no one is immune to it

The unfortunate reality is that you were born into an unsafe world where there are wars, guns, violence, systems based on competition, scarcity, classes, unequal distribution of wealth, resources and power, poverty, slavery, famine, genocides, oppression and the forces of nature that are more powerful than humans alone.

Much of this is an ancient and complex problem, rooted in trauma.

Even if you are born into the safest country in the world where there is no war, and you have sufficient resources, access to healthcare, your basic needs are met and you live in a low-crime or even no-crime area, you aren’t immune from potential danger because unsafety exists in the world and it could come for you when you least expect it.

Spiritual teacher and author Caroline Myss teaches, “What is in one is in the whole.” Unsafety exists in individuals so it exists in the whole. As you are a piece of the whole, it exists in you too.

This risk of unsafety affects people differently depending on their human design, predisposition and conditioning towards risk and danger. Some people can tune it out completely, while sensitives and especially worriers can be acutely more aware of the dangers and things that could go wrong.

2. You were born into a traumatised world

As a result of the unsafety on this planet, people have unhealed trauma, individually and collectively.

Trauma is a response to an event or situation that overwhelms your ability to cope. Unable to process the intense fear and emotions that were triggered, the person suffers from ongoing adverse effects on their physical, mental, emotional, social and spiritual wellbeing. It effectively leaves a person stuck in a state of unsafe.

Understanding and treating trauma is a newer and evolving field in the history of humanity. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was only named as a disorder back in 1980 post Vietnam War. Even now our understanding of PTSD and the best way to treat it is deepening and changing.

This means your parents, grandparents and ancestors may not have healed the trauma they experienced. What is not healed can be passed on.

Even if you didn’t experience a trauma directly or indirectly yourself, you can still carry it within you thanks to intergenerational (ancestral) trauma and epigenetics.

This has been researched and witnessed within the children and grandchildren of holocaust survivors, who didn’t experience the holocaust first hand but bear psychological, emotional and physical symptoms of the trauma.

This leads into my next point…

3. Those who came before you have unhealed trauma and haven’t experienced enough safety and they pass it on to you in ways you might not even realise

Unhealed trauma and emotional wounds are problematic because they result in reactive, adaptive and unintended behaviours.

When something hits on a trauma or an emotional wound, a person can:

• become flooded with emotion

• shut down

• dissociate and not be present in their body anymore

• become very defensive or aggressive and reactive

• become overly rational or bend over backwards to please someone

  …not because they want to, but to feel safe in a situation where they feel unsafe.

You’ve probably been the unfortunate recipient or witness of road rage, where perhaps the act of you or someone else accidentally cutting in front of another driver instantly triggers their unhealed rage and as a result they react with scary and intimidating behaviour such as tail-gating, aggressive horn honking, gesturing or worse. 

Other behaviours are more adaptive in nature and affect how the person lives their life such as:

• avoiding certain people, places or situations

• addictions

• playing small

• hiding your feelings

• perfectionism

• being controlling of others and all aspects of life

• shutting down

• over-thinking

• criticizing your self or others.

You might recognise some of these behaviours in your parents/caregivers or even in yourself if you have learned them from your caregivers or adapted to trauma yourself.

Unhealed trauma can impact a caregiver’s ability to respond to a child in the way the child needs.

Trauma affects the way you show up and be present and responsive in the world. So your caregiver can be misattuned, or emotionally or psychologically abusive when they react from their own triggers or neglectful because they dissociate or are preoccupied with their own inner struggle.

Your caregiver may parent in the same or similar way that their parent cared for them and pass on behaviours and beliefs that don’t contribute to your sense of safety and wellbeing in the world. However, as the behaviour is normal within your family system, you might not recognise that these aren’t safe ways of being.

On top of this, modern life, society and work culture can leave parents time poor, exhausted, financially stretched and bearing the brunt of parenting alone without the support of a village. This can also test and impact their ability to be present and responsive to their children’s needs in safe and attuned ways.

Which leads me on to my next point…

4. You didn’t establish a secure foundation of safety in childhood

If you aren’t raised in an environment that is a welcoming space with consistent love, nurture, compassion, understanding, deep listening, as well as clear seeing and nurturing of your unique soul and blueprint, then you won’t have a secure foundation of safety and you miss receiving these essential maps of being a safe human being for yourself and others.

Your caregivers are responsible for providing security and care to you as an infant for your survival. Babies are born wired for attachment because it is necessary for them to survive. But if your caregiver is not consistently sensitive and responsive to your needs through misattunement, abuse or neglect, or because of loss of or separation from a parent then your attachment is impacted.

You won’t perceive your caregiver as a safe person to seek comfort from or a secure base from which to explore the world and subsequently you won’t perceive the world as a safe place. You miss out on the foundational wiring and maps to integrate safety into your nervous system and psyche and for your sensitive soul to embody and flourish within you.

This then affects the way that you move out into the world and form relationships. Some of the ways insecure attachment shows up in your life include:

• people pleasing

• having poor boundaries

• needing approval from others

• fearing rejection

• not knowing your own feelings and needs

• not reaching out to others for help

• being overly independent

• feeling anxious or fearful of becoming close to someone or them becoming emotionally close to you

• feeling anxious when you are alone

• low self-worth

• self-hatred

• shame

• not trusting others

• being needy or clingy

• wanting to escape or pull away when someone becomes needy or clingy.

Psychologically, insecure attachment can be healed through having a partner with a secure attachment style or through counselling therapy with a safe practitioner. Learning about attachment, how to regulate your own nervous system and emotions, how to feel sensations in your body and how to name your feelings and needs are also helpful.

5. Your chakras and energy system carry the impacts of negative experiences and energies that continue to make you feel unsafe

We know from physics that everything is made of energy, including human beings. Words, thoughts, moods, emotions, actions all arise out of energy and transmit energy. We can transmit energies that are positive, loving, uplifting and higher vibrational or energies that are negative, unkind, diminishing, injurious and lower vibration.

The early childhood experiences mentioned earlier along with any trauma or difficult experiences during your life not only have psychological impacts but energetic impacts. Your chakra system can close protectively so you are deficient in energy or it can compensate by becoming overactive.

Beliefs, codes and energies can get stored or stuck in your aura, chakras, cells and energetics and continue to affect you long after a negative experience is over or you have left a negative, impactful environment.

One of the chakras that I pay a lot of attention to is your root chakra, the first energy centre at the bottom of your spine/perineum. While a lot of spiritual aspirants are focused on the upper chakras, especially the third eye and the crown as portals to enlightenment and spiritual gifts, to me the root chakra is the most important for you to be here on this earth plane and to be able to embody your soul and gifts because it is the chakra on which you build the foundations of your life.

The root chakra is developed from the time you are in the womb to 12 months old and is associated with your survival, security, stability, physical health, prosperity, grounding and trust.

When this chakra closes protectively, you may feel withdrawn, low energy, stuck, anxious or suspicious. When it is overly active taking in too much energy in over-compensation, you may be overactive, aggressive, reactive and prone to over-working and greed.

Signals that your root chakra isn’t fully and healthily functioning include worries and fears about money, inability to manifest, hoarding, feeling disconnected, lower body weight gain and problems with legs and feet.

When the human body is impacted by trauma and difficult energies, parts of the soul will flee and hide or not come in and stay very far away. You may feel as if you’re not in your body or lifted up and out, not occupying or using all of your chakras or that parts of you are missing, that you’re not whole.

Missing soul parts carry important maps, knowledge, gifts and powers. Living without them keeps you locked in existing patterns of unsafe.

If you have done a lot of talk therapy or psychological healing but things haven’t fully resolved, it is likely that your energy system has been impacted and also needs clearing and healing. You may need to reclaim and heal lost and injured soul parts too.

6.  Societal systems try to conform you or only welcome part of you and they let you down.

Our school systems aren’t designed to teach you in the way that best works for your unique human design. You are expected to fit into a system that grades and compares you to others and doesn’t fully welcome your diversity or unique gifts nor does it protect your sensitivity or dreaming nature.

As a result, you may learn to leave parts of yourself out, hide or change aspects of your nature to fit in. You are given the message that isn’t safe to be wholly you and that acceptance and success only comes in a certain way.

The same generally applies to our work places. You are expected to turn up and do a role and your unique personality and quirks may not be valued or fully appreciated.

You must fit into the workplace culture even if it is unhealthy. You may be expected to be professional and leave your personal problems at the door. You’re not welcomed as your whole self. Maybe you hide part of yourself or change or mask yourself to fit in. Again, you’re given the message that it’s not safe to be you.

Then there are the work performance management systems. You are valued when you achieve the goals they’ve set for you but put on notice when you fail to excel, threatening an aspect of your security.

With families to feed, mortgages and rent to pay, many people will overwork and/or stay in toxic work places or jobs because they are scared of not having a job to pay their bills and the impact on their family. They pay the price in chronic stress, exhaustion and physical ailments.

In schools and the workplace where you are not treated and welcomed as a whole person, parts of your soul will leave.

Then there are the ways our healthcare and social security systems are designed.

In Australia, Medicare gives us access to basic healthcare but there is still often out of pocket expenses and/or long wait periods unless it is life-critical. Many people can’t afford the cost of private health insurance.

For those reliant on social security payments – well they aren’t even above the poverty line. Rental costs have skyrocketed in recent years thanks to the ever-booming property market. Many people struggle to find affordable accommodation and the wait list is years long.

Long story short, if you can’t work and earn well above minimum wage and afford your own life and health insurance, there may be no safety net for you if you fall. And that is unsafe.

7. The news, media and marketing are always broadcasting fear

Unless you avoid all newspapers and television news and advertisements you are being bombarded by fear messaging every day and unless you consciously clear the energy of these messages, it stays inside you.

The news and media uses fear all the time to sell its products to you, in the headlines to draw you in and in messaging to engage you, sell their products to you and keep you coming back for more. They strategically push the button inside you to make you fearful so you want to scan your surroundings for danger including reading or watching the news so you are in the know and can be prepared to act.

Because this is a constant tactic and message and you probably aren’t consuming media with this awareness, you will absorb fear unconsciously. You are being programmed with fear. Marketers use it too, pushing your FOMO (fear of missing out ) button.

One of the best things you can do for yourself is to be very conscious and selective of the media you choose to consume, be present and mindful when you consume it and learn how to disconnect from it when you are done.

So there you have it, my 7 reasons there isn’t enough safety on this planet and how it affects you even if you think you’re safe:

1. Unsafety exists on this planet and no one is immune to it.

2. Trauma is everywhere here too.

3. Those who came before you have unhealed trauma and haven’t experienced enough safety and they pass it on to you in ways you might not even realise.

4. You didn’t establish a secure foundation of safety in childhood and have normalised beliefs and behaviours that protect you or overcompensate.

5. Your chakras and energy system carry the impacts of negative experiences and energies that can continue to make you feel unsafe.

6. Our societal systems contribute to unsafety.

7. And the news, media and marketing continually broadcast fear and use it to make you buy their product.

Awareness is the first step towards change. While you can’t change the overall state of safety in the world, you can start with yourself.

One by one as we heal the wounds of unsafety within ourselves and become safe people for others in our lives, the medicine of safety will ripple out.

And you will build the strong roots necessary to thrive in your life.

Want to feel safer to be you?

I’m here to help you feel safe and heal from the lack of safety you’ve experienced in your life so that your soul can land and express its gifts, qualities, mission and essence through you.

Read about what it means to feel safe.

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