Why We Resist Our Own Healing: A Healer's Guide to Moving Through Fear, Grief, and Self-Doubt

Even after over 15 years on the healing path, most of which I've been a professional healer, I still resist my own healing. If you've ever signed up for a healing program, when you signed up, it felt like this is the most aligned thing I could ever do. There's nothing I want more. And then it comes time to actually do it. And you're dragging your feet. You're procrastinating. You're doing anything else but that. You're finding yourself getting more and more anxious, more and more avoidant. The whole thing feels like it's backfiring.

What's going on? Let's talk about it. All right, love. This is the healer's journey. I'm your host, Inge Broer, and this is one of the most consistent features of the healing journey. Okay. The block is simply you want healing. You start moving towards healing work and then it starts actually shifting things. It starts opening you up. It starts giving you insights and you close that so fast and you start avoiding it and resisting it. I really like the perspective of Steven Presfield who wrote the book The War of Art.

If you've never picked it up, you struggle over resistance. You might resist reading this book, but it might also completely change your life forever. His perspective on this is that the more soul aligned something is, the more true to your core something is, the more resistance you're going to face. So the block resisting our own healing. It's happening to me uh now. it's happening to me forever. Um, even if I know this is a future and I I really trust the process and I know that when I lean into the the healing work, there's really nothing but good stuff on the other side.

I still I'm still dragging my feet. So, it's happening lately. I feel like I'm really coming into a real new phase of my life. So my husband and I have started a community organization. We're um organizing a lot of events for in our neighborhood and it is asking me to really show up as a leader. The same in my business. I've refined my messaging. I've refined who I want to talk to. I've refined what I want to do here. And it's also requiring guess what? my leadership in my parenting. My son is almost four now and it is a seriously magical freaking age and he's imagination is getting going and he's starting to have more fears from the things in his head.

And guess what's that requiring? More leadership as his mother. less holding the baby, more teaching him how to work with his own imagination, with his own thoughts. So, what's happening in my body? My solar plexus is freaking the f out. I'm so anxious, stressed, I've been irritable, snappy. Um, that's partly also because I'm not sleeping that great because the whole fear situation. But um my body is telling me there's an upgrade here that needs to happen at a somatic level. The solar plexus is a chakra where uh we hold really our sense of identity.

And one of the things, one of the patterns in my solar plexus has been always to find somebody who I think is stronger, cleverer, more solid or something than me and kind of route my energy through them. That's I'm calling this codependency, but that's actually what I'm doing. I'm hiding behind other people. Now, my husband was happy to play around, play play with me, so we could be jolly codependent partners, but lately he's been so living his purpose, so um involved in what he's doing in the community leadership, and he is it's incredible.

He's doing such a good job. he's really leading this thing and I'm, you know, hobbling along trying to find my feet in my own leadership. Um, so he's not participating in these patterns anymore. And to be fair, I've been chipping away at this pattern for years and gotten a lot better of this. If you follow my work, you know I uh teach around empowerment a lot and finding your own power. That's not a big surprise. That's not a big coincidence, but lately, so those three factors plus um yeah, plus like the pattern is just ready to go.

Like there's a lot of power in me. The solar plexus also has your fire, your power to act in me. And the usual way is I I route it out. But now I'm invited to keep my own power and route it to the things I actually really care about and I want to have an impact on. And so, um, at first the sensation there and the invitation there, it just ended up being me snapping, being me irritable, really avoiding any healing practice, like pretty much at all costs. I did not want to go there. It also resulted in me doing more of my preferred numbing behaviors including overeing and scrolling and generally kind of collapsing slash like avoiding any human interaction essentially.

Um and then it became untenable. It became so sort of painful enough that I decided, all right, got to really move through this. Got to really have a look at what's going there. So, a little bit of journey journaling, a little bit of sitting with it, a little bit of meditation, sort of chipping away at the pattern, and I couldn't see what it was. It was I was totally in the dark with it. just little bit by little bit, little bit by little bit and eventually the pattern or the meaning I'm assigning to this became clear.

The way I'm choosing to work with this became clear and this is when you're already kind of further into the process. So when you are resisting your own healing work is usually because the healing has already started happening or the opportunity for healing is really showing up in a big way in your life and it is ticking up a lot of space. Um your body kind of knows and senses the invitation. It knows it needs to shift some energetic pattern. Um but you are busy with other things and you find this highly inconvenient and um that's one reason we avoid this.

This is inconvenient. This is going to require me to change. And the brain registers change as danger. The brain and the ego are very invested in creating a map of the world and then working within that map. And please don't change the map. Doesn't feel good when the map changes. But what is healing? Healing is that map changing because now there's another part of you that is um taking up more space. There's another part of you that is taking the lead a little bit more. the part of you that is being heard where you were kind of stuffing in the corners before.

So, this resistance makes perfect sense. Yeah. Um, and this happens even if you desperately want the change, there's still going to be a part of your brain that says like, "No, that's dangerous. This is going to take some resources. Maybe I don't feel like I have." Um, so if you find yourself, let's say in the middle of a 21-day self-Reiki, you're around like day six or day seven and the initial excitement of trying it has worn off and it doesn't feel like that much is happening, but at the same time, you're starting to feel like itchy and irritable and um like you you want to discharge the energy in some way.

You're right there. What's happening is that you're starting to um get closer to the healing that needs to happen. You're starting to get closer to the real shift, the real energetic pattern interrupt that your life is inviting you into so that you can be more free, so that you can be more you, so that you can be more impactful, so you can be uh clearer in your actions, you can act more on your values, like all of that is good things, right? But it's requiring a change. And this is often where people start dropping off the practice.

They're like, "Oh, this is maybe doing the opposite. I I feel a lot and I don't like this." And old survival parts can get scared, too. Like the reason you're configured the way you are is probably because it freaking worked for you at some point. Okay? So, I'll keep using my own example. Today I uncovered this pattern for me started when I was around 10 years old. And part of my story is that I um I went to kindergarten first grade in Vancouver BC. Then I did which is um we moved to Quebec. For those of you who aren't in Quebec, Quebec is a French-speaking province exclusively.

So, if you come to Quebec as a kid and you speak English but not French, most often there's some exceptions to this rule, English and any other language, of course, you go into a special kind of a um school which is a class which teaches you French and catches you up and kids learn super fast. So, in second grade, boom, I learned French. In third grade, I went to a new school. Uh, this was the school my parents put me in because the school they wanted to put me in didn't have any spots. Fourth grade, I went into a new school.

And then fifth grade, um, all hell broke loose for me. In fifth grade, I was finally in the same school. There was the same kids mostly. And at 10 years old, um, it it wasn't a great group for me. It was a small group and it wasn't somewhere I felt very safe. And so at that point, I think I really consolidated this strategy of find the loudest, strongest, most quote unquote powerful person in the room, which coincided with being the most hurt possibly um and ingratiate myself with them. So my pattern started really there.

And so it worked. It really worked. It kept me safe. It kept me going through school. nothing that big or bad happened. And so that part of me, that 10-year-old me is completely terrified of stepping out of the shadows of having a direct relationship with life instead of routing that through somebody else because that's how she figured out how to be needed and loved and safe. So that healing is starting to happen. And that leadership is going to require me to um step out of the shadows and not route my energy through somebody else.

And so that 10-year-old in me is shaking and she needs me to hold her and rock her and see her. Mainly that's what she needs because what happened is routing her energy through somebody else is she became invisible. And so in the practice I just did is I did a lot of rocking with her and holding her for a long time. Long time 10 minutes in the span of my life where this has been affecting me since I'm 10 years old. I'm 37 now. 10 minutes is nothing. But it's requiring all these like inner offerings to ourselves that when we start our healing journey, we are not equipped yet.

we don't know about these things yet. And so that it just shows up as resistance of like I don't want to do this. And that resistance is probably a younger part of you saying if you shift this I'm not safe anymore. And so the solution is to learn to hold your inner child. Something we do in healer embodied. Um so that's part of the resistance. Another part of the resistance is just pure grief. You've been who you've been for a really long time and now you're being asked or you're asking yourself to change and you loved who you were.

You don't know who you are yet. This makes me think of a strange like little side note story, but I think it's moving. When I was giving birth to our son, the doctor asked my husband if we wanted to come see my son be born. And my husband had this funny reaction. He's like, "No, I want to stay with my wife. I know my wife like she needs me like not it wasn't for me. It was like it was this sense of like he wanted to stay with who he knew even if this little boy was going to change his life forever and of of course he did and he has been and he continues to do so and he's the best thing that ever happened to us.

But that happens on an inner side as well. When a new part of us gets born and we want to stay with the old cuz that's the one we know. That's the one that's familiar. So, there's a grief. There's a letting go. After I had my son, I had such a long grieving period of who I'd been before being a mother. It was a complicated time for me, but it letting go of my day-to-day healing work was a really big thing cuz I loved that. And so, yeah, that grief shows up as well. And then in other times that resistance is actually because you're tired, because it's not really the right moment to go into the deeper places, then it does happen as well.

And so then that resistance, it's the one of the trickiest things ever. That's why it's quite helpful to have a mentor to help you differentiate if the resistance is like, do I actually need to back off or do I need to stick with this and run through it? But occasionally you need a nap and you need to rest and you need to put some scaffolding in place in your life so you can go deeper. So in my case right now what that might mean um I feel like I need to dial up my nutrition a little bit because of the overeating um and I need to move my body.

My body's asking for that. my body is asking for like, hey, if you're going to be um leading more, if you're going to be routing your energy directly into life, like I want you to be strong, lady, cuz I'm pretty scared under here. And so, I need to take some actual action in my life as well. And that can be another sign of the resistance. So, um a few things that can help here. Okay, just to kind of throw out my my goal in these podcasts is always to sort of normalize and give you some words, some framing for what you might be experiencing.

Things that you don't even know you're experiencing, don't even know are a thing and then hearing me say these are a thing. Uh like defame you from it and like defang the whole thing and you can like relax and laugh about it. Um, but today I'll also try to just like throw a few tips at you, things that have helped me throughout the years. So, um, one is asking yourself, what am I resisting? Not why am I resisting, but what am I resisting? And this mag this question is so magical. I don't understand why it works so well that it does.

You don't even have to answer it. But often like when you're in that resistance, just asking yourself, "What am I resisting?" dissolves some of it. Maybe that's just me. Try it out and come come tell me. Second, um you might be well served as I have been to reframe this resistance not as a signal that something is wrong, but rather that it's a signal that this is something that actually matters to you. If it didn't matter to you, if it was neutral, meh, you wouldn't be investing all of this energy into having such an internal battle with yourself.

So sometimes it can relax. It can help you relax. So just know like okay this actually really matters to me and there's resistance but it does matter to me. So that might help not letting it go because you believe that the healing journey is one of ease. This is one of the biggest beliefs out there that sounds really nice and good. um and often is but not always which is if it's not easy it's not for me. That just leaves us looping in our current comfort zone essentially. There are of course things that are easy that are taking us out.

Um but eventually we're going to be out of that comfort zone. It's not going to feel easy anymore. It's going to be some resistance. It's because you're growing. It's because there's something new. Now, that doesn't mean like you should go do the thing that is always blocked to you and just like bang your head on a wall. That's also not it. Um, but yeah. Next, this is sort of an ultimate framework for my whole freaking life. You're welcome. It is big dreams and baby steps. So, the big dreams are like the things that really matter to you.

Like, why are you even doing this healing journey on the first place? Is it because you want to upgrade your relationships and you want to be deeply loved and held and feel cherished in your life? Is it because you have a big idea you want to bring in the world? Is it because you've never felt like you really belong and it you you want something different? like you want to feel a sense of belonging and impact in the world. It's big dream and then you take the smallest baby step, the smallest tiny thing.

And a baby step is like the step you can do right now without resistance. And I've applied this to like absurd levels of tiny. So, let's say I was resisting uh writing a Facebook or Instagram, a social media post, and believe me, there's been so much resistance around that. The baby step I could do possibly was to open the app and click on u make a post and possibly and that was kind of like the baby step. And the next baby step after that might be like write anything in there. So the next baby step we're like I don't know what to write.

I don't want to write anything. I'm scared. I don't want to do this. And then the next baby step after that it's like actually what I really want to talk about is okay next baby step but I don't know how to structure it. I don't know what to say. I'm scared. Baby step, baby step, baby step, baby step, baby step, baby step, baby step. And eventually you get to something. So big dream, baby step. Next. Next is um let the resistance speak. Let it speak. What is it saying? This has also like radically changed my life.

If you've been in soft and true with me, what I would do is I let the resistance speak, but I would kind of have a caveat with it and be like, "Okay, I know that everything you're about to say is pretty much nonsense. Speak anyway." And then I'd either speak it out loud or write it down. Writing it down really, really, really works best. And then there's certain archetypes that I taught in soft and true. And I can show you exactly how to upgrade the power of what you're writing. But you need to know what the resistance is.

And here's the truth. The resistance is so much stronger when it's just banging around inside of you. It is shamy. it is telling you that you should just go back to sleep, but when it's out, you can see what the nonsense is that is rattling around. And um that often really, really, really helps. So, big breath. Let's say this together. We all experience resistance. And it doesn't mean a thing about I trust my healing. I trust my becoming. I trust that becoming more of who I am will allow more of my love and my integrity to meet the world.

And that's worth it for me to stay with this resistance, to move through it, to chip away at it, and to show back up in my practices. This has been the healer's journey. I am Inge Broer and if this resonates what I would love for us to do together this summer and this is unfortunately only for people who into Reiki. I want to do a 21day self raiki journey with you. We're going to meet the resistance. I I pretty much promise. And I want to do it with you in this very style. I'm going to be resisting.

You're going to be resisting. We're all going to be resisting. And yet, we're going to let this universal love tune us into a new frequency, a new level of being, and we're going to create a ripple effect in the world simply by doing 21 days of self raiki. If you're listening to this the day this podcast comes out, I have no links for you to sign up. I don't have anything already. Um, what I invite you to do is to come talk to me or follow me at Inge Heels I N G H E A Ls on Instagram and tell me you're in.

I'll take it from there. I will see you in the next episode.