There’s something I’ve been seeing for almost 30 years now, and I’ve seen it over and over again…
Women come to me after years, and sometimes decades, of doing “the work”. They’ve done courses, retreats, ceremonies. They’ve been to healers, coaches and they’ve read every book… and it really sounds like they know it all.
They have the language down pat, they can talk about their shadow, about frequency, nervous system regulation and they know about their past lives…and yet, something still hasn’t shifted. Or not at the level they know they need it to anyway…
They’re stuck but not in the sense that they know nothing, what they say to me is, that they just need this “final piece”.
And then when I sit with them I can see immediately what’s happening. They’re not actually doing the work, they’re just learning about it. That’s the difference… and it’s a big one.
Knowing that trauma is stored in the body is not the same as identifying exactly where the trauma sits in your body and how it’s been affecting your life for the last twenty years.
Understanding shadow work as a concept is not the same as actually sitting with your own shadow, owning it and facing it until it no longer has power over you.
And equally reading about conditioning and programming is not the same as recognising the exact programme that is running in your own mind that sabotages you every time you’re ready to make a move.
This is what I call spiritual bypassing. And it’s rampant in spiritual groups AND in many of the people who have moved beyond those groups too.
It’s a really understandable response to pain though and we all do it, or have done it in the past. The unconscious pattern is that : if I can stay in the learning phase, I never have to get to the doing phase, because the doing phase is uncomfortable. The doing phase asks something real of me and I don’t know myself in that new space yet so its safer to stay where I am and say that I’ve tried everything.
This learning phase feels like progress. Sometimes it even looks like progress from the outside. But it isn’t.
The women I work with in Sanctuary understand this and they move through this sabotage phrase with support so that they can actually make progress on the things that have held them back for years.
We go into shadow. We go into conditioning. We go into the body. We go into the patterns that have been running the show without your permission and we also work on the energetics involved. Gently releasing blocked energy from various levels of your body and we do it in a way that’s sustainable, real and grounded. Most importantly, we don’t stay in the shadow – because you’re not meant to dwell there, you’re meant to move beyond and that’s exactly what we do.
If you’re reading this and something in you just went ‘yes, that’s exactly what I need’ — then Sanctuary is where you come next.