Doing All the Healing Work But Still Not Happy? Reclaim Joy as a Healer

I had a new client tell me the most striking phrase the other day. She said, "I've been doing all the healing work, but I realized I'm not happy." This is a healer's journey. I'm your host, Inge Broer. And I was so intrigued by this phrase and it made me think of times where I was driven by this deep need to fix myself. This lasted for years and years and years. Actually, my healing journey began because I did something really evil. Um, I made a really big mistake and it sort of reinforced this story that I am bad.

Now I need to fix it forever. And this was a very powerful driver. I took all the classes. I threw myself into it. I like went to go and find every block, every shadow, every every part of me that confirmed the story that I was bad and threw myself at healing it. And truly, I'm painting a picture here that is desperate than it was. But it also worked. It also really worked because I had to dig. so deep inside of myself to find any semblance of self-compassion and love. And Reiki for me was hard because it didn't come naturally to me to connect with love from the universe.

I was like, "No, no, you earn love, okay? It's not free." Except, yes, it is. But I couldn't access that. And so, I was really driven by this before. And one of the things about my story is that I started my healing journey at the same time as I met my husband. So this was 14 years ago. It's when I started taking classes at the NHT institute where I worked. And literally the same work, same week, I went on a date with this guy from plenty of fish.com. That's how we met. I was like, "Okay, I think I'm done with the internet dating.

I'll go on one last date." and turned out to be very accurate. But so he witnessed me in this frothy intense discovery of myself. The biggest journey for me was the journey through the chakras and I went into each of these chakras and I went to find where I was imbalanced and I went to fix it. And one of the most impactful things that happened back then is that the teacher would keep coming back on this point. It's not this is no work is not about fixing yourself. It's about understanding yourself.

It's about accepting yourself. It's about finding some truth and then pairing that with love. And I swear to you, the first 10 times she said this, I just completely blocked it out. And then the time she looked at me straight in the eyes and it was like, she's been talking to me this whole time. And so what happened is that I got Yeah, I got really serious about all of this. But then a couple of years in like he'd get into these I guess they were fights but they were just him desperately trying to make me understand that I didn't need fixing that I didn't need to do one more course to do one more read one more book etc etc etc and so seeing his desperation in trying to communicate this to Clearly, you're seeing a pattern.

If I don't want to understand something, I don't understand. It takes a while. I did take a break at some point from self-development. And I started asking myself like what? It's like 7 years in, I'm kind of opening my eyes and what actually gives me joy? What gives me ease, pleasure, alignment? And I found that I was a bit at a loss because all of my joy alignment was fixing based. I know I'm a Virgo and I've got Virgo across my chart everywhere. So, this is kind of my thing. It's what I do. But it made me understand that I'd been so in the little wheel, if you will, that I forgot what it was all about.

And that's why the client who said this, who was also a Virgo, it struck me because I I really remember that. I remember that realization of what is this all about though? And you only now 7 years after that moment am I truly starting to warm up to the idea that pleasure that romanticizing the current moment that luscious experiences nourishing meals taking the time for something essentially luxury can be an extremely powerful ful driving force and I'm not saying that I had didn't understand this before.

I've understood this many many times. I've experimented with many many times but I've been scared to really give myself over to it as well. The block I'm finally coming to it. The block is I'm doing all this healing work but I'm not happy. And the desire behind that is to actually enjoy this life. And I don't know if you need to do six or seven years of really intense selfwork to get there. I think we can get there sooner. I think we can have the realization early on that we might have a drive to fix ourselves and we might have a deep shame in ourselves that we're not ready to really excavate and we need to do a lot of other things in the meantime.

We might still have the fixing drive going. the one that's away from pain, that's away from the image in our head of who we think we could be if we don't pay attention. But we might also cultivate a relationship with simple pleasure. What happened for me level with you a little bit more cuz this gets a bit complicated and nuanced. What happened for me is that I was following a version of pleasure and that version of pleasure led into the hole into the place of that deep shame and that moment of terribleness that I spent many years punishing myself for.

So I lost trust and pleasure. But I don't think we need to go through all these years of trying to fix ourselves to restart creating a relationship of trust with pleasure. We can do really simple things. We can learn to just touch our own body with kindness and to find a way to give ourselves pleasure and letting that be enough. I know for me my body was thinking that if I gave myself pleasure I would be so somehow famished for it that I would lose all all restraint and just run after it. And I think we have that for a lot of things.

I think if you check in with your body you might have that for if I let myself feel my sadness the sadness will be never ending. If I let myself even entertain that there's some anger in me, I might be angry for a decade. But what that's really telling, I think, is that we are starved for a certain kind. So in the starved for a certain kind of allowing for the grief to move through. We're starved for the kind of reestablishing of our selfhood that anger provides. We're starved for the nourishment of our nervous systems when we're afraid of pleasure.

And it can come up with all sorts of different feelings. I remember I had a real problem with chocolate and I still do, but it's it's different now. But I would like buy a whole bar of lint chocolate and just eat it whole basically like in one bite very Cookie Monster style. And I wouldn't let myself enjoy it. I would just kind of stuff myself with it. Kind of in this resentment. I do so much for others. Why won't anybody see me or notice me? I deserve this. But letting myself truly enjoy it. And when I would try that, I would take one bite of chocolate and enjoy it, it would bring up all these feelings underneath, all of this bubbling, all this fullness in my nervous system that was a lot.

And so I preferred to stuff it. So touching yourself with the intention of providing gentle, nourishing, loving touch, that's one thing you can do. Another one is slowing down enough and having one square of chocolate. Really, really taking it in. You can do the same with a fruit. You can do the same thing on a walk and feeling the breeze on your face. Really letting it in. One of the things this does is expands your nervous system capacity. for the good. Because when we're driven in the healing work by our shame, by needing to fix something that's broken in us, we might have a lower capacity for holding the good.

And why is this important? Because then when the good arrives and that inner shame tries to pull us back. So when things get really good, we hit an upper limit. There's a really good book called The Upper Limit, I think, by Gay Hendrix that I've read a few times that talks about this and the answer truly is savoring. So practicing your tolerance for letting more good in. And this matters because when things get a bit too good in the relationship with somebody else, we might start picking a fight.

When a little bit too much money comes into your bank account, you manifest a big expense. When um you get some clothes that are a little bit too luscious and yummy to wear, you get a big impossible stain on them. In other words, self-sabotage. And self-sabotage is something that so many of us healers can resonate with. And so I would invite you to explore growing your capacity for pleasure. And I will do it alongside you and noticing the little stories, the little sensations underneath and breathing compassion into them.

So, let's do it together. Let's end this podcast with a little practice. So, I invite you to find one way right now, and there's always a way to tune in to some kind of a sensual pleasure. So, maybe touching something soft, touching your own body. And I want you to notice the sensations of that. Notice the sensation of pleasure. And then notice what's underneath. What discomfort arrived? So, here's some options. A discomfort of wanting to go do something else. Distraction, fatigue, sadness, a thought of, oh, I shouldn't.

A thought, oh, I'm going to be punished for this. And don't pay it any much attention or breathe into it with I see you. Pleasure and pain were kind of coupled together in this nervous system and we're decoupling them and choosing to let it go. So for me underneath there's fatigue, there's a sadness and it's all okay. So let this episode be a bit of a permission to stop reading the self-help books and read a possibly a really steamy one. Permission to take a break from practices if your real only driving force is that if you don't do it, you're going to be a bad person.

Permission to let go of some rigidity. Most of all, permission to feel good. You're not going to lose your edge cuz you're going to feel good. There's going to need plenty of contraction. I promise. Permission to rebuild trust with yourself. Permission to stop healing your way of feeling, sorry. Permission to stop thinking your way through your healing journey and start feeling your way through it. With all the love, this has been the healer's journey podcast with Inge Broer. I would love to hear from you.

Did this touch a nerve? Come tell me on Instagram. I n g e h e a lsinga heels dear from you. Music husband by Lana Shakra. All the rest by me.