What If You're Not Behind? Reclaiming Your Healing Path & Timeline as a Sensitive Healer

I am reporting from the trenches of yet again having a little cold, slightly sick children, being a little bit thrown off of my idealized ideal timeline. And I want to invite you in. I want to invite you to talk about when we feel behind. When it looks like everybody else is going full speed ahead, doing amazing things, and we ourselves are left behind, are behind somehow can't get it together. Feels foggy. It feels yucky. Feels a little bit resentful. Great. Yummy cocktail. So, let's talk about it.

This is the healer's journey. I'm your host, Inge Broer, and today's block, the one that we are tackling, is feeling behind. It probably doesn't really need an in introduction. Everybody knows the feeling of being behind in some way, being on the wrong timeline somehow, that things aren't moving and smoothly enough, fast enough, in the right direction enough, that there's too much resistance, there's too much stuff in the way. And it looks like we have this temporary hypnosis that it looks like other people don't have the same problems and other people are going full steam ahead.

It feels pretty yucky. The thing is I think that most of us aren't a really aware when we feel behind. I'm basing this purely on myself. I'll say it I'll say it in a more honest way. I am not always aware of when I feel behind. How it shows up for me is I'll get easily sort of frustrated. I'll start to try to do things really fast. Skip steps. I um I mess things up. I make mistakes. I kind of run around in 50 different directions all at once. And then when I'm starting to notice how deeply ineffective all of that is, I do my favorite numbing activity, which is to go and scroll on Instagram.

And what do I see on Instagram? Instagram has figured out that I have a block around feeling behind. So, Instagram feeds me, and I don't know if it feeds you this as well, but it feeds me posts like, "If you're not making a thousand dollars with every story or post, you're doing it wrong. I made $100,000 in my first three months in business. And if you haven't reached that m milestone, too, this is why you're doing it wrong. Get 30 perfect leads in 30 days." And all of it reinforces this belief that what is happening on my timeline isn't good enough and therefore I should jump on somebody else's timeline.

I should buy a program. Yeah, I should buy something. And here's what I think is really happening. I think the system of capitalism that shows up in social media in particular but everywhere our attention is what leads to money moving hands and when we think we can save time or we can remove resistance for something we will trade money for that. So the messages coming at us, they're incentivized to really press on that pain point of I am not going fast enough or the pace I'm going at is wrong in some way.

But here is the rub. I think for a lot of sensitive, heartled, and innovative people, the ones I like to imagine him talking to, going on to someone else's timeline isn't going to work for you. Because the creation, the something that you are here to offer the world can only come from yourself. And it can only come when you're walking on your own timeline, when you're deeply grounded in yourself and you actually start to command time. Now, can those programs that promise you 30 leads in 30 days, whatever it is, can they help?

Can they accelerate that timeline? Of course. But only if you're operating from that deep energetic sovereignty that you are the creator here. You are on your own timeline. You are clear on what you value. Clear on what you're deciding to create. Clear on what it will take to do that and willing to move through the resistances. Willing to weather another season of colds, willing to make decisions that are challenging and hard, willing to uphold boundaries you'd rather not, and somehow energetically take charge of time.

Now, this is probably a bit of a out there concept for some of for maybe a part of you. Um I invite you to try it on in on the last like what if you are the creator of time? What if you are the source of time? What if time builds um bends to your the quality of your attention to the quality of your intention? And when you're working from that place, the concept of being behind makes no freaking sense. Behind for who? Behind on whose timeline? We only have one moment to ever do anything and that moment is right.

And anything that pulls us out of that moment, anything that tries to hit on our insecurities and pain points and tries to save us is something that pulls us out of that type of presence that is actually generative and creative. This is so highly conceptual. Let me tell you a story of when um I felt the most behind and that was the roughest one of the roughest periods of my life and a source of so much like provided the seeds for so much goodness in my life now and talking about my postpartum period after having my son this is four years ago now I had had a glorious, wild, incredible experience birthing my son, but it was also physically traumatic.

Um, and it took a long time for my body to heal. In some ways, it hasn't fully healed yet. So, it was a time where I had made a clear decision to give up one-on-one work, to stop seeing clients one-on-one in my home, to really take my maternity leave. We're super super lucky in Quebec. Got a full year of maternity leave. um and to take it and to really be with my newborn son. Now, I had we had tremendous difficulties breastfeeding to the point where my unmedicated birth seemed like to pale in comparison with the breastfeeding.

Of course, I had like that aminesia that happens after, but it um it was a really rough journey, but I I don't know. I was somehow hellbent on this being the the solution for us and it isn't for everybody and please for the love of everything holy I think you can hear the emotion in my voice don't take this as my way is the way for everyone this was my way we travel a lot and I wanted the breastfeeding because of a lot of things that are unique to us I know families who bottle feed and they're glorious and amazing amazing and doing great.

So, please don't let that hit some kind of insecurity in you if you're a young mother and hearing this. But yeah, my body was I was still carrying an extra 20 30 lbs. I was uncomfortable. I wasn't moving. Uh it took a long time for me to be able to go for walks and then when I did, I would possibly pee myself midway through It was a really rough time and I've never really known myself to be consciously um having too many body image issues. But that time um I really didn't feel good in my skin. And I kept asking other mothers I knew like when did your body kind of come back?

not wanting to admit how much it was bothering me, how bloated I felt, how not pretty I felt. And two of them had told me, oh well, 9 months, 9 months about and it wasn't happening for me at 9 months. I was still feeling all it took a while for me to understand that, okay, this is my journey. It's not something that is happening to me. This is my journey into motherhood. And I need to figure out what I need to do for my body here. And I had to get it out of my mind that I was behind somehow, that there was like a timeline I was supposed to be on and that I was failing somehow.

And this is a timeline that's completely arbitrary. It's just that it happened that way for two people, two people I know and love. So it was it there was a few mindset reframes that I did at that time that started really really really paying off because at that time I was sort of thinking okay well I'm going to go and do some intense exercise but I can't cuz there's this tiny baby and I'm also like just not there like my body can't handle that right now. Um, so one of them was I'm an athlete in recovery.

And that somehow allowed me to sort of hold on to the an identity I'd have really had at a teenage as a teenager to lean back at that strength. As a teenager, I would I was in three sports teams at once. I played ringette, volleyball, and soccer. And there was about one month in the year where they all over overlapped. They were all there. So every single day I had either one practice after school or two practices after school. It was really intense. So I I found that identity back in myself and I added in recovery to it.

And the reason that was so powerful for me was that it soothed a part of me that I thought that I would never be athletic again now that I was a mom because being a mother really does transform a lot. But I realized being an athlete or moving my body is something that's important to me. And then it helped me with the inner recovery really go back to okay well an athlete in recovery they do physical therapy exercises. They do the little tiny things that and that helped me let go of all the timelines in my head that I was supposed to be on and simply let me actually find something that I could do in that moment.

It helped me find power, my power back in that moment. And another mantra I was using at that time a lot was I'm going slow to go far. And that was all about really setting the foundations, not skipping over anything uncomfortable, digging into the things that there was resistance, digging into all the foundational things in my life that had been shaken up through of course at this point extended period of COVID plus having a tiny baby and a husband that was scaling his business um and very busy with I was taking really great care of us, but I felt alone.

at the same time. So, um, a real like let's dig into the foundations here. Let's set up how do I want to live this life as a mother now. I'm not on anybody else's timeline. There's no like bounce back. And oh my god, if you're on this journey right now, you've probably seen a quadrillion posts or things about like get your pre-baby body back. Well, that's again on a an imposed timeline. You want to get on your own timeline. And if that is part of it and it feels empowering to you, that's amazing.

Do it. But if it doesn't, you need to be on your own your own pace, your own timeline. So I dug into all the foundational aspects of my life that I had until then conveniently skipped over. So before that time I had conveniently sort of skipped over uh really learning to meal plan and to cook. Well no cooking was good but to meal plan and to run the household when it comes to food. That's one thing I slowed way back down to give myself that foundation. give us that foundation. Another one was um managing the house and where things should be.

And I was sitting in the house for hour for days and days and days and days with my tiny baby on me and looking around me and being so deeply dissatisfied with the just the seeming like random gifted things that you accumulate, you know, when you're in your early 30s, late 20s and you're you haven't been really intentional about your house. So that too slowed it way down to get my house the way that I really wanted it. And it made me realize that because I'm always somehow afraid of being behind.

And let's let's let's admit it like running a business is a stressful thing because the your livelihood depends on your capacity to make money move. And that can be a stressful thing. And if you don't have all your foundations right, what you're going to do is you're going to try to skip over them. Um, yeah, pretending like they don't matter as much as they do, but never really feeling grounded. So until you slow down enough and really act where you need to be acting, where you actually see your life for what it is and meet yourself where you're at and move from there, the needle's never really going to move.

So the slowing down really does allow you to go far. The slowing down allows you to look at the foundations. Another thing at that time was very much looking at my thoughts and my mindset, especially around my relationship with my husband. I noticed that it was really toxic in there in my own mind and I had to do something. I had to learn to communicate better. I had to learn. There's so much I had to learn. And I'm not going to lie, like really going deep into that, it got us to a moment where we really nearly called it quits.

And yet, I made a very powerful decision at that moment of like, I don't want that. I want us to be really solid. And it changed it forever. And we are such a good team now in a way that we weren't at the beginning of this journey. But all of that required me to be on my actual timeline in my actual life looking in the face of what actually needs my loving attention, my healing work. So, put in a different way, I'm saying that I stopped thinking about what things should be looking like, and I really took the time to heal the parts of my life that had that I'd been skipping over, that I'd been pretending like were fine, but in the end, I was um not fully grounded in.

The same has been happening with motherhood. It's been um a real journey for me to I mean learn the scripts of dental bearing and finding that they like do not they do not have the intended result with my son. There's so many tricks that seemed like so like oh yeah I get this I I get how to parent they don't work with my son. Now I'm starting to see they really do work with my daughter. It wasn't bad advice, but it just was not um on my timeline. So, I wasn't like behind with my parenting. It was just it wasn't meeting my son where it was at and me where I was at and undoing this unweaving this and starting to see that there is a sort of in collective incentive to grab our attention to to press our pain points so that we can feel behind or we can feel that we can buy some kind of adventure.

vantage seeing that that is actually so deeply a distraction. So much kind of a something that happens when something that actually freezes us up more than it frees us up. So something that puts a block on our evolution because we're in the realm of shoulds rather than allowing us to really be with what is and move from there from the inside out. So here's what I'm trying to remind myself of today. This is embodied, but I need the reminder constantly again and again. Moving fast is great as long as I'm grounded, as I'm connected to what actually matters to me, as I know where I'm going.

Because moving fast without those foundations, it ends up you running in a loop. Me running in a loop, chasing my own tail. and it feels like I'm doing a lot, but actually I'm not being very effective at all. So, it is possible that you needed that same medicine today. Um, here's how I want to land this. I invite you to feel your feet and wherever they are right now. Feel your legs, feel your feet, your pelvic area, your buttocks. Take a deep breath and say to yourself, I am here. And see what happens if you try on the thought, what happens if I stop running?

What happens if I meet the moment as it is? What actually needs my attention? Where can I actually place my attention, my energy so that it moves me in the direction I want to move? And then go do that thing. It is often simple for me. When I move really fast, I forget to drink water. And then a few days later, I'm really foggy and really irritable and sort of incapable of moving. So that frantic speed actually slows me down. So when you slow down enough and you actually drink the water and you actually prepare some healthy food and you actually Give yourself a break when you're tired.

You go so much further. This has been the healer's journey. I'm your host, Inge Broer. The music has been by Lana Chakra. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope I get to see you in the next