How to Honor the Healing Cycle (and Why We Still Struggle With "I Should Be Beyond This by Now")

Fundamentally, I believe that healing occurs when truth and acceptance meet. And the block I want to take you through with to this episode for me blocks both my truth and my acceptance. So, I invite you to gather some up right now for yourself as you listen. Breathing in truth and courage and surrendering into acceptance and love. This is the Healer's Journey podcast. I'm your host, Inge Broer, and I'm a deeply flawed human being and also a really accomplished healer. I have hit record on this episode I think over 15 times now.

I don't know if this is going to be the one, but it feels like it might be because I'm finally accessing a little bit of that compassion for myself that I need to really share what's true for me in this one. So, every week on this podcast, we tackle one block on the healer's path. Each of these blocks comes with a desire, an aspiration. And the aspiration of the one I want to talk about today is really longing to to honor and live our cycles. And this applies to me this month. I've been really watching even more closely my menstrual cycle and how my energy fluctuates through it.

I started learning about this uh around 2020 2021 from a cognitive place and I was pregnant at the time. So I couldn't like live it. I could just watch it and like nod along and be like, "Uh-huh, I recognize this." And then when my cycle, my menstrual cycle returned after a couple months after having Hendrickk, I started honoring this cycle a little bit more, planning two workouts in the first phase and then no workout while I was bleeding. And that really really worked for me. And then I got pregnant again.

And then some more time went over and I couldn't practice this. And now it's been about eight months that I'm working this. And in the membership that I'm a part of, it's called the holy body. This week, this month is all about the cycle. And what I noticed is that at my last bleed, I had a very, very busy time. It was our son's birthday. We did a really fun birthday uh celebration. And I didn't get, my body didn't get the deep nourishing rest, the quiet, the time to commune with the muse, the time to be psychic as Uh, it wasn't there.

And all month I've been sort of dragging the debt of that. And now my bleed has come again. And I have these podcast episodes to record and I cannot do it. I cannot do it. And so I really feel like I should be beyond this episode by now. See, I'm I'm being very meta with this. I should be beyond it. I should be moving faster. I should be moving um in a more efficient, streamlined way. And there's like a bit of a hidden shadowy shamy voice inside that says I should be beyond by the by this by now.

I'm a fraud. I don't want people to know how much I'm struggling with this one episode. But also another part of me knows that in the cycles of contraction is where the a lot of the healing happens and a lot of the new ideas get birthed. And so I've done many sematic practices. I've done a lot of healing work on myself these last couple of days to move through this block. And I want to share with you what I've been noticing for myself. And part of my intention in this podcast was to share myself more freely.

And I think I've been hiding a little bit. So one thing I've noticed is that whenever I say this block, I should be further along by now. I feel a contraction in my back and neck and it leads to a slight headache. Now these headaches have been my companion almost my entire life and so has this block. I can the healing work I've been doing is like taking myself to preverbal times to times where possibly I needed to grow up a little faster than I was really ready for through nobody's fault. Um, and there's a grief.

I've been praised for being smart and intelligent a lot of my life. um having a lot of potential and not just by my parents but like by like any grown-up at large. And that put my system in a sort of pressure whenever I don't understand something, whenever I'm confused about something, whenever I'm literally not further along. And it shows up in in everything. It's a big perfectionistic tendency. So if you're really attracted and called to doing healing work and you also resonate with the themes of perfectionism in the way that you won't attempt something unless you know you can do it at ridiculously high standards.

It's hard for you to be satisfied by a piece of work you put out there. Um this is a key for you because healing work is nothing without its cycles. It is a deeply psy cyclical way of living. It's a lifestyle. Cycles, expansions and contractions, expansions and contractions. And some of the periods of expansion can be really long and periods of contraction can be really short. But I think what the key is is to with a lot of self-compassion and with a lot of care and with a lot of tenderness, meet those periods of tender contraction with curiosity and love.

I'm sure you'll agree that if you think of your biggest periods of expansion, they were preceded by contractions that you met with your full healing presence. You got nourished by others. You got support. You dove in yourself. you metabolize some of that energetic hurt and pain, creating room for something new in your nervous system and energy system. But what's really tricky about talking about this is that we all know this cognitively. We all could speak about this eloquently. And there's another deeper layer that is really tricky and thorny, but you who are my soulmate clients, you are really intelligent and really nuanced and incredible human beings as well.

And you can handle that there's another layer of I should be beyond this by now with the whole resistance of the contraction because we know the contraction is where the good stuff is birthed from. And so now there's a shame around resisting that. But guess what? We're human and we have a programming in our brains that says go towards pleasure, go away from pain. Even if another part of us cognitively knows that going towards pain armed with curiosity and love is the thing that transforms everything and makes everything so juicy and delicious and beautiful and everything.

when we're depleted, when we're tired, overriding this strong go towards pleasure and away from pain is not self-evident. And so I'd like to dismantle with you the the meta layer of I should be beyond this right now. And what if we can all just like put all our spiritual ego stuff on the ground for a second and Take a rest and maybe honor that. Speaking spiritual truth, seeking to live them can be exhausting in itself. It can be a new set of impossible standards that we hold ourselves to. And ironically, they can hold us back from the true tender Lush, luscious remembering of learning to love our soft human, fallible bodies.

And that as healers, we're not above that. In our healing work, we'll meet people in their tender places that sometimes echo our own. And this can lead to three possibilities. One, we're honest and embodied and truthful with the fact that that resonates with us. And we're also able to not make it about ourselves. We're able to honor that it's not our turn to suffer from that one. We're able to honor that we have lived wisdom, lived experience around that one. That's option one. Option two, we stiffen like I know that one, but uh I don't like to look at it.

I don't like I don't have the space for that. I don't want to. And what we do is we go in our heads. We become more clinical. We become more quote unquote rational. But what we lose is that beautiful generative relational field. that we're creating in energy healing sessions. That's extra important in energy healing sessions. And the third option is we make it all about ourselves. He's like, "Oh, you have that one. Well, me too. Let me explain how it goes for me." And that can serve. It has served my clients more times than I can count.

But it's very slippery if you don't own the fact that you are different from your client and that you sharing is only for them to feel maybe a little bit less alone. If you start processing on their nervous system space, there's a line that's crossed. And I'm going to own and name that in this podcast. I'm learning to do that in a different format. And I'm not getting it right every single time. I'm not ningling it right every single time. I probably meander sometimes in a way that it's borrowing your nervous system.

You're holding space for me. And some other times those very same meanderings might help you really feel that you're not alone and that someone else out there is having the same kind of thoughts as you are. And so I'm learning and you're learning and I'm not beyond having figured out the exact tone I want to hold in this podcast. And if I let it stop me, I think we all miss out. And I think that's true for all of our healing work. whatever form it takes, there's room for you going back to the same things again and again and again.

That's where your expertise is. I circle around themes of perfectionism again and again and again. I just named that. It makes me an expert in helping people move forward, even when they can't get it perfect from the get-go. My dad tells me the story about like the second time I skated. I know this was a theme for me as a kid. I was like, I already know how to do it. Don't bother me. And it formed kind of like an expectation that I should get it right from the get- go. But healing work is something we learn by doing.

And we never get it right from the get-go. And we still make mistakes deep into it with many years of experience. And it's a a living frequency that we're cultivating. It's a lifestyle of devotion to actually honor our cycles of contraction. as an opportunity to bring more love into the world, more care. And when we do that, it translates into easier love and care for our clients, for our students, for whoever we're working with in the world. But we've got to let go of the story that if you become a healer, you stop being human.

got to let go of a story that once you learn and embody your tools, you will no longer have cycles of contraction. If that's why you want to become a healer, think again. But if you're one of those revolutionaries who knows that every iod of processed pain, of alchemized rage, of whatever and you are a vessel to do that work. Thank you. Thank you. because you are giving a gift to the world and you don't need to do it constantly. You don't need to make this into the new whip. You do get to just be a blob of a human sometimes.

But I want to tell you a little bit about a vision I've been having. Something I'm interested in developing, a curiosity I have. It's what if we could get like a lot of different healers together and create some kind of a system where we can show up whenever we're in a period of contraction or we're interested about something and just kind of ask for help. And because we're part of this membership, somebody can come in and be like, "Oh yeah, that's an expertise I'm developing. I would love to hold you in that.

And so then we kind of flip, we alchemize what's going on in healer number one and we help healer number two develop her expertise more, which then also helps healer number one develop more expertise, which then grows her ability to hold her clients. and their both their nervous systems are now at a higher frequency, at a higher level. And let's say healer number two has a hard time in that session cuz their stuff is kind of coming up. They ask, "Okay, I had a session. Something that I feel like I should be beyond is now in me.

Can someone hold space for me?" And then healer number three helps. And it kind of is this like ripple and then we could really collectively in a nourished group undo so many of these wounds, these collective wounds that we are carrying from a deeply violent history in many of our cases. And instead we get to activate the resilience, the community, the rising tides, lift all boats. And I'm also going to name that I've been having a certain vision, that kind of vision for four years now. And I'm not ready.

I'm not ready to really hold it and to start it. But I am ready, I think, to start talking about it. I am ready to say, "These are things I'm thinking about. Come talk to me about them as well. Come tell me your version of this vision." If you're a new healer, come tell me like if that would really feel supportive to you. I know so many healers who are amazing and they want to work in a team. How can we work as a team while still working individually in all of our businesses in different local areas?

These are questions that it feels like I'm literally building a new world in my own body and I'm not beyond certain blocks yet and I'm working on and I'm offering myself deep grace in it. And that's what I invite you to do as well. So to conclude, if you feel like you should be beyond this by now, welcome to the club, sister. And I also know that you're such a devotional serviceoriented person. And if you need some help going to the places you don't want to go alone, reach out. There might be a way for us to do that.

And I really mean that. My healer embodied students right now need new people to have their case studies. So if you're looking for a really lowcost session or even free session, reach out through Instagram. I can connect you each. All four of them are incredible. I have different gifts. It would be my pleasure to connect you. This has been the healer's journey. I'm your host, Inge Broer, profoundly fallible human being and also exquisite healer and revolutionary in training. I hope to see you in my world soon.