The Fear of Being Celebrated

If you've ever felt that really big cringe in your body when you're about to get extra joyful, maybe brag about a success, shine bright in some way, and some part of you says, "Oo, you got to dim this. You got to play it cool. You got to chill. This is not becoming of a lady." We got to talk about this because it goes deeper than you think. This is the healer's journey. I am your host, Inge Broer. And every week on this podcast, we take one block on the healer's journey and we dismantle it. The way the one that we're dismantling this week is the fear of being celebrated.

So what I mean by that is that you are the center of the attention. People are complimenting you. People are telling you what they've received from you. People are celebrating your very existence. This happens, you know, in birthday parties, um, but also when we're marketing ourselves and we are promoting our services. So, this block has shown up for me in a surprising way. Just recently, I had no idea I had this block, but recently it came to my attention that there's a strong part of me that says that being celebrated, that's nice for other people.

I'm really a fan of celebrating other people, but not me. I find it's unbecoming. It's um improper. It is all sorts of weird cultural things that I don't subscribe to at all. unladylike. And so that gave me pause because if the healers of the world, if the people who like to work behind the scenes are saying, um, no, no, don't celebrate me. Let me stay invisible. Or are we not also saying, "Hey, my work should stay invisible and you should not value it and it should not take center stage as something valuable in this world.

It should just be done." Now, I got a bit of a story about how this came to be recently. So, our son just turned four and we threw him a pretty magnificent birthday party. And when I say we, I think I mean my husband. Um, so for a good 10 days before our son's birthday, he was up every single night just so excited planning this birthday party and it was glorious. Seriously. Um, so what we did is we got uh about eight of his neighborhood friends together. We got them all pirate costumes, their parents too, and we assembled at our house and we all took our bikes and we went around our neighborhood, which is in a little island, gathering treasures in different places.

Trust us, pirates, pirate music blaring, um, a whole freaking thing. And I think it's just so magnificent to see what my husband, a double Leo, Leo sun, Leo ascendant, how he shows his love. And so this Leo archetype of the the sun, shining bright, being big, being dramatic, taking up room, celebrating, turning everything into a party is so palpable in my husband sometimes. And it took me a while to understand that this is a version of love. I myself am a Virgo and the archetype of that is well let me work behind the scenes get the details right be a little bit nitpicky be of service in devotion of something else and that is totally what I contributed to the party.

I was like okay let's run through this. Let's see like all the details are organized well so that this can go seamlessly. But what I so what I realized around the time of our son's birthday is that I myself am very uncomfortable with being celebrated just for existing um uncomfortable with being center stage for um having a party thrown around me. And I wasn't aware of this because I can look very gracious. If somebody gives me a compliment, I taught myself to receive it and to say thank you. I've taught myself not to let it come into my ego story so much that I'm going to have a ego hangover the next day.

And so I thought, yeah, I'm pretty good with being celebrated. But imagining someone going the extra mile so that I feel comfortable. imagining somebody fussing over certain details so that I might have the best experience possible. The impulse in me is like, "No, no, no, no. Please don't bother yourself. I'm cool. I'm chill. I'm lowmaintenance." And why do I make an entire podcast episode about this? Because if we perpetuate that story, no, no, I'm good. I'm chill. I'm low maintenance. Where does that lead?

I'll give you a moment to think about it. If you run your entire life like that, who fills you up? You maybe because you're you've done enough selfwork to know that you can't pour from an empty cup. But if you're constantly saying to other people, don't celebrate me. Don't pour into me. I'm not don't trouble yourself for me. What you're saying is like, I'm not worth pouring into by other people. And there's like a sort of strange hierarchy that starts being created between the people who serve and the people who are served.

And I don't believe that's right. I believe the people who serve should be served. And I believe the people who are served serve in their serving. I get a bit word salady, but I think you're with me. I truly do believe that we all deserve to be celebrated, poured into, well compensated for our wisdom, our work, the way we love, we love in the world. I don't believe that should be invisible. So, how does this tie into the healer's journey? When is this going to show up? Well, for me, it's been showing up for years under the scenes in how I do my marketing, especially in social media.

Now, I have since day one prioritized a search engine optimization strategy, an SEO strategy. I love it. It suits my personality so well because people who are looking for something usually Reiki and then they find a website mine and I lay things out well and I present things properly and present myself as a good option to do Reiki with. And that worked really well for me for a really long time because I was very willing and open to work with almost anybody who was wanting to try Reiki with me. Of course, I dressed that up.

I got a little bit clearer on who I really wanted to work with. I presented my service to them precisely. I did gather testimonials all in this like service mentality. So you come through here, I will brag enough. I will show you enough of who I am so that you feel comfortable and confident to come into my world and to take the next steps and grow with me. And so I've been more and more comfortable with that kind of visibility that says here like there's some things I'm good at and I would love to offer them to you in a service-based ways way.

But now I am growing in my business. This is my podcast at 24. I am recording them, filming them. I'm putting them on reals. I'm doing so much more. And what I've always had trouble in social media is to take that like extra little spark of joy into it because this service does give me a lot of joy and I do want to celebrate and romanticize every little aspect of the life that I'm built. It is. I think I'm going to cry. Like, it is. I'm very proud of it. And I'm really aching to celebrate the fruits of my labor.

Except the fear is to be cut down a notch, to be misunderstood in that, to be seen as bragging and seeing myself as above someone else. I seem to be very sensitive to that. I've built most of my business really working hard to stay in that shoulderto-shoulder place. And it feels like there's an old paradigm. We're celebrating, we're romanticizing, we're receiving deeply. The magic is seen as something that is unbecoming, not proper, unladylike. I keep coming back to those words because truly that's what it feels like in my system.

It doesn't feel like something in my own life that led to this block. I am a tall puppy at 5' n. And I have somehow suffered from tall poppy syndrome my whole life. When I was a teenager, I remember somehow coming across the idea that you could either be pretty or you could be smart. And so the thing is, okay, I'm going to celebrate it. As a 16-year-old, I was like 5' 9, 135 lbs, super athletic, good bone structure. My teeth were crooked. They really were. I got braces since I had a really great haircut in seg 4 and every single day um people that were asking me if I was a model I was going to be a model whatever.

And so what I did is like I really subconsciously work to detract from my beauty. No makeup, never learning how to do my hair because smart was something that I I thought I valued more. And forget about being good at sports. Like having the trifecta was a lot. And I remember sometimes people finding out like they're like, "Oh, you're so pretty. Oh, wait. You also have really great grades and you play three sports. Like what the hell? What are you? You're like defying gravity in some way." Because there's these cultural messages that we receive.

It's like in the cultural water sometimes and that women shouldn't celebrate, that women shouldn't shine bright, that women shouldn't um relish in their own beauty and their own lusciousness and their own capacity to receive because that is dangerous. That has been grabbed that has been misused that has been mistreated abused etc. that lives inside of us. It lives deep in ourselves even if individually we didn't experience any one thing. We've heard stories and we take those into our bodies. And so it feels safer to go under the radar to use our healing gifts to make somebody else shine bright.

And I don't know how we change this collectively other than to rewire it in our bodies that as a women, we're safe to enjoy our own beauty. We're safe to enjoy our wisdom, our grace, our poise, our joy. We're safe to enjoy our pleasure if only for ourselves. It starts there. and starts reclaiming those facets, those capacities of our nervous system because there's a collective hypnosis out there that says, "Uh-uh, don't do that too clearly." There's all the words that we're called as women. I'm not going to repeat them that live in our shadow.

But with them is that pleasure, that beauty, that sense of celebration that our life can be a work of art. So, I'm going to share one more tiny story before we close this episode. I think it may have been before I got married. So, December 2017, I went to this enormous free workshop in New York City. I took the bus. I stayed with somebody who was also going to the conference and I don't remember what it was called but it was by Regina Thomas Hour also known as Mama Gina and it was in launch of her pretty iconic book Now, if you enclosed your pearls, you heard me say that.

Uh, me too. And that is exactly why I went. And we had a book club going for a while. And it was really the beginning of a reclamation of my femininity, of my capacity for pleasure. And what I saw there, it was a party. It was a blast. There was 5,000 women there dancing, crying, sharing, talking, celebrating. There was some very deep trauma release work being done there. And what I saw is when a woman takes the crown back and puts it crown of her sovereignty of celebrating herself, when she puts that back on her energy and she gets into pleasure and turn on even as she's talking about horrific things that have happened to her.

I've never seen something more powerful. I'm going to take that experience with me till the day I die. And I'm going to be an 87y old lady putting my crown on and refusing to let all the aches and pains and I don't know everything that's going to be troubling in my body rob me from the celebration of this. So what becomes possible when we dissolve this root? I'm just at the beginning of this journey. Even if that conference was in 2017, I'm still uncovering layers of this block. I'm shy to be openly grateful.

I'm even shy with my own nervous system to really tap into gratitude. It's a practice I have to be very intentional. Um, but what becomes possible, what I believe becomes possible is that we become models for other women. that they can stay safe, resourced in their nervous systems and seen and cherished and celebrated and adored. If you deeply long and desire to be claimed in a relationship, this is where it's at. If you deeply desire to have soulmate clients so happy and excited to pay you because paying you means they are subscribing to this love affair they're going to have with their life they're having with their life.

This is where it's at. If you want to be magnetic to new clients that are really aligned with you, this is where it's at. If you want to stop pouring your soul out into social media only to see crickets and then be completely crust fallen when that happens. And that has happened to me more than a few times. This is where it's at because you're so sourced from the inside out. You are so in love with what you're building. You are so celebratory of every gift that's coming your way that the universe can't help but giving you.

So hereby it's going to be a shorter episode today. I want us all to declare that the story that being celebrated is unbecoming unladylike un proper improper naughty in some way stops here. That narrative stops with you. Culturally we are propagating different energies all the time. And this is one that simply by making that decision you get to put a stop to today. And the gift you give other healers, other women who do unseen, unpaid, unseleelebrated labor, gift you give women who are on the path to burnout is you give them a little drop in the ocean of the collective that something else is possible.

This has been the healer's journey. I'm your host, Inge Broer. And if you want to live this at another level, I suggest you join me in healer embodied. We start August 24th. It's going to be a last minute decision for you. I know if you're listening to this later, probably another round in January. What we do in healer embodied is we intimately get to know our own healing gifts and we create we practice, practice, practice. That is the driving force. And we celebrated each other and we grow together and we let ourselves see and be seen in a group of other women and together we dismantle so many blocks on the healer's journey.