How to Feel Supported Without Earning It (A Reiki Perspective for Healers)

If you've ever felt exhausted by how much demand is placed on you at every single moment, this episode is for you. This is a healer journey. I'm your host, Inge Broer. I have two tiny children. I'm trying to grow a business. I'm running a community organization alongside my husband. got a house to rent and we travel five months of the year. Demands placed on me, I get it. I get it. And one thing I really decided to do early on as I had my babies is that I divorced the common script of motherhood, which is motherhood is sacrifice.

I got really serious about rewiring my whole system around support. And I'd been doing this work for years. As soon as I started Reiki, now hear me out on this, okay? When I started learning Reiki, I learned it that we are allowing universal healing energy from underneath the ground from the earth up into our feet and down our crown mixing in the heart coming out of the hands pouring out of us like that. We are a channel for universal healing energy and it is simple and it is beautiful and it is fairly easy to learn except except I was operating from a place of I need to earn every little iota of support I get not because my parents weren't very supportive actually they were very supportive but there's something in the culture about like or what I internalized in the culture that I grew up with that said something like women are here to support other people and so somehow my wiring in childhood with my friends I found a sort of relational niche for myself if you will in supporting others.

I like service but there we go. And so when I learned Reiki and I learned this like just allowing universal love through my body would tense up against it. My body would fight it. And in some ways it still does. The wiring inside of us that says that we have to earn support can be really deep. And I know that on the other side, what we really want, what we truly desire is to feel worthy of support just because you exist. And I truly think that is your birthight. And so this block made learning Reiki and really allowing that energy through challenging and brushed up against some core defense mechanisms I had.

And so here's I want to tell you a little bit about what my journey has been with allowing the energy from the earth to come support me. So at a base level um I can imagine it. I can feel it come up. At first I really had to picture it a lot and I was wondering a lot if I was doing it right or wrong, if I was using the right color, etc. But with time I started realizing that this was about trusting gravity which sounds crazy but I started realizing that I can actually give my weight over to the earth and it is simply how this planet work how gravity works all planets work that there's an force of gravity pulling me down and there's an equal force force of support keeping me up.

And water, it's different. Water doesn't support us in the same way. Water flows. But every time I connect to this, like really connect to it. And I invite you to do the same. Like wherever you are, whether you're walking, driving, sitting, just give your weight over to the earth. Sounds super simple, I know. Let yourself relax. into that support and no matter who you are that support is meeting you. You can be a serial killer and gravity works the same. So we long for this like I want to be feel worthy of support just because I exist.

Well, it's already here like all the time. I know it's not the support from other people, but this is somewhere where it can start because if your system is anything like mine, it likes the whole like pulling yourself up by the bootstraps idea. Somehow my system is wired in like a hypervigilance. I'm very sensitive, very empathic, very narrow, I guess, in that way. And I I pull myself up. I kind of create some tension around the hips. That's my default position. to learn to undo that. Still learning to undo that.

The pelvic floor is then sort of perpetually contracted, which if for any of you, you're going to be having children. And this is what your pelvic floor is doing right now. Now is the right time to learn to receive support before you have the children, before they move through the birth canal. this part of Reiki where we're allowing the nourishing, kind, compassionate energy of the earth to meet us. That in itself can be profound, lifechanging medicine. It can help you relax your pelvic floor. It can help your nervous system grow more capacity and calmness in that grounded place where support simply exists.

And you don't need to have this whole referendum in your mind whether you're worthy of it or not. The trouble is many of us resist this because if we really let ourselves be held, our vulnerability may pour out. If we let ourselves rest, if we let our muscles relax and deontract, the feeling and the emotion and the stuff we're holding for everybody pouring out. Try it. Find a place in your body that is tense. And now relax it. Often what will happen is that you will have sensation, emotion, thoughts come up.

And if you've learned that it's unsafe to feel, if you've learned that feeling equals vulnerability, if you've learned that there's no space for you, this is hard to do. So we practice it in Reiki. We practice this very very simply. We give ourselves over to the earth and we imagine the earth is meeting us. And I love the image of imagining the earth as like a really, really, really old grandma, as old as you. And she's seen it all. And she's not impressed by our pain. She's not impressed by what we're holding.

She's seen it all. And what I love to imagine, and I believe is true, is that the earth can actually metabolize and use this energy. It's like compost. Because we have this belief in the western societies, western individualistic societies that when we share our pain with someone, we are burdening them. We are asking them to hold stuff that is ours in their nervous system. But why do we think that is because we've collectively lost our connection to the earth and we've lost our ability to simply give it to the earth.

And so a good healer who has longevity, a healer who's going to be able to do her work in the world for years without burning out, without overloading her nervous system, is a healer who's able to let go, to let herself be supported, to give all that grief. She witnesses confusion. She witnesses all that anger. She witnesses all of that. not keep it into our body but give it back to the earth. And there's something I teach in healer embody that I find is really helpful that I want to share with you here today as well.

It's that all energy is essentially trying to find its way back to love. And if the earth is has this frequency of deep compassion, deep nourishment, support, come here child and weep while I hold your hair. We don't have to hold other people's stuff when their stuff is frantically looking for somewhere to be loved. You personally don't have to love it into wholeness. In fact, you can't but the earth. So you really become a channel where things energy flows. You don't have to hold on to any of it.

And in fact, you can start today. Whatever too muchness you're holding in your energy system, whatever you feel like you are at and holding the world on your shoulders, start at least asking the earth, feeling the earth supporting the world on your shoulders with you. And then if you can try to put the world on your shoulders onto the ground and let the actual world support the world. I think as healers, we often try to be middle men where it's not the most effective thing to be a middle woman. What's happening in a healing session is between that person and God essentially.

And you can guide, you can teach, you can invite them to find their own grounding to give their own stuff back down into the earth. But you can only do that if you've practiced it yourself. If you know that frequency and because Reiki is so beautiful to learn and so profound and it's touched so many lives, often it is taught quickly. But I've learned this practice 15 years ago now and I'm still learning from it. And so I've decided to keep teaching Reiki because it's got the blueprint of everything.

It's got the blueprint of how to be a healer in the world for years and years to come. But rare is a person who can absorb all the depth of that in a one day attunement class. So for the people who are meant for me, the ones who like structure in their learning journeys, the ones who have high standards for themselves, the ones who have high integrity. My Raiki one is 3 months. It's 12 weeks and we break apart every single aspect of Reiki and we embody it. We take it in. We rewire ourselves. to be a match to it.

And that not only makes us better Raiki practitioners in the long run, but it makes us better healers in general. And I've been teaching it just long enough now to see that the effects of it, they ripple out. I'm not making this only for people to become raiki practitioners, although that too, but I'm making this for people to really hone in to their own healer archetype. And the thing about archetypes is we can express them in so many different places and ways. So nurses using their intuition in a different way at work, owning it more.

of psychotherapists working a bit differently but simply carrying themselves differently in the world, asking questions differently and having a healing impact and themselves keeping less in their own energy system. And so if you want to experience the safety of being deeply held, if you want to feel worthy of support just because you exist, that's where you start with the relationship to the earth. And on September 30th, we start a new round of healer awakened. And I'm calling in an exquisite group of willing people who are curious about healing work, who've been called to it, but are really not sure they're up to the task yet.

who aren't sure they're ready for any kind of a professional shift, but want to give themselves some luscious time to absorb it all, to have some structure to rework their energy, to claim the posture of a healer because they know for the world to come and enter any kind of like rightness again, it takes a lot of people claiming that healer their posture. That's a small part they're willing to play imperfectly. They know that it might get a bit messy. There's going to be some real healing on their own end that's going to happen and they're here for it.

So, if you're one of these people, raise your hand. I don't even see you. It's a podcast. Raise your hand. And I invite you to have a conversation with me. You can come to my Instagram, Inge Heels, I N Ge H E A Ls, and DM me something like, I'm interested in the healer awakened. I'd like to talk to you. Clear step. There's no doing it wrong. And I want you to know something. In my world, there is no doing it wrong. You might not get to every material. You might not practice things perfectly. And yet, your presence and your willingness, your truly your willingness is the medicinal ingredient.

And what you'll see is that whole world's open. And at the end, I think you'll be just a bit closer to feeling worthy of support just because you exist. Worthy of love just because you exist. Worthy of living your purpose just because you exist. I can't wait for that to happen together. This has been the healer's journey. Music has been by Lana Chakra. I'll see you in the next episode.