Doing All the Right Things…
I haven’t written here in over a month. A lot has been going on, both internally and externally. Internally, in the place where words need a little time before they become. Externally, in the way of new skills, classes, and upgrades that take focus.
A couple months ago, I started teaching meditation every week. Ironically, I have never had a perfect daily meditation practice. That has never been me. But “something” has been changing through this new weekly practice.
Once a week, I write a meditation. Two to three times a week, I prepare a space and sit with other people, guiding us back into attention, breath, body, awareness, stillness, and choice. “Something” is happening. A soft, slow realization; “Oh. We are doing this now.”
Since late April, I have also been deep in the final part of my hypno-coaching training, the practicum. I have been writing scripts, finding volunteers, practicing, and building a method that works for both my clients and me. And I have noticed the same “something” with hypnosis.
My practicum has included hypno-coaching in areas like intuition, self-control, better choices, motivation, and follow-through. I write the scripts. I speak the words. I guide clients into the inner state they are practicing. And it is affecting me, too.
That “something” has surprised me.
I know I am there for them. I know the sessions, whether meditation or hypno-coaching, are designed around their goals, their lives, and their inner work. But the practitioner is not immune. We are not standing outside the practice untouched by the work we are holding.
When I spend an hour speaking the language of trust, discipline, clarity, self-respect, and possibility, some part of me hears it too. When I guide someone else toward steadiness, I am practicing steadiness. When I help someone rehearse a new way of being, I am also standing inside that field.
This is one of the things I think we misunderstand about practice. We think it only counts if we are doing it perfectly, privately, and daily. Sometimes practice is where we keep showing up. We teach it. We hold it. We prepare for it. We make space for it. Then, slowly, it starts working on us too.
This week, I had a session that brought another layer of this into focus.
I was working with someone in a multidimensional energy healing session, and I could not feel their life force energy. That is unusual for me. I can always feel it. Sometimes the energy is bright and obvious. Sometimes it is tired. Sometimes it is scattered, heavy, guarded, dim, or tangled. But I always feel something.
With this person, it was locked down so tightly that I couldn’t access it.
What made it interesting was that, on the surface, everything sounded fine. This is someone who is grounded. They are spiritual. They pray. They go to church. They spend time in nature. They practice gratitude. They love their family. They are actively doing the inner and outer work.
In other words, they are doing the “right” things.
And I believed them. But their energy told a different part of the story.
At the end of the session, when I reflected back what I had noticed, they said something like, “Oh yes. When I don’t feel safe, I lock myself down so I can stay in control.”
And there it was.
The whole thing opened in that moment.
What I was feeling was not failure. It was protection. It was not a lack of spirituality, or gratitude, or prayer, or effort, or love. It was the body, the energy, the deeper self doing what it had learned to do when safety felt uncertain. It closed the doors. It pulled everything in. It chose control because, somewhere along the way, control had become the closest available version of safety.
This is what I can’t stop thinking about: how many of us are doing all the right things while still living under an inner lockdown? How many of us are praying, practicing gratitude, spending time in nature, helping our families, keeping our commitments, doing the healing work, reading the books, listening to the podcasts, and saying the right words while some deeper part of us is still braced?
Still guarded, still unavailable, still mistaking control for safety.
That is not a judgment. It is a question worth asking honestly, because there is a difference between looking grounded and actually being in relationship with yourself. There is a difference between having spiritual habits and letting those habits reach the places in you that still feel unsafe.
This is where practices like meditation, sound, hypnosis, and energy work become useful to me. They give us a place to notice the clench, the breath we keep holding, the places where the body says no even while the mouth says, “I’m fine.” They help us notice where discipline has become a cage, where spirituality has become another way to stay in control, and where consuming the work has quietly replaced practicing it.
That last part matters.
We can read the book, take the course, listen to the teacher, follow the guru, save the quote, nod along to the podcast, and something in the mind says, “Okay, good. We are doing this now.” But understanding a thing is not the same as living it. Agreeing with a thing is not the same as practicing it. Recognizing truth is not the same as letting it change how we move through the day.
Sometimes we are not avoiding the work because we are lazy or careless. Sometimes we are standing near the work. Studying it, talking about it, admiring it, even recommending it to other people, while still protecting ourselves from the part where it actually reaches us.
I am seeing this in myself too. Teaching meditation is changing me. Guiding hypnosis is changing me. Holding healing sessions is changing me. Teaching and attuning energy modalities such as Reiki is changing me. Not because I have arrived somewhere final, but because I keep being asked to enter the work more authentically.
That is the part I trust — the work is never done.
We keep meeting new layers of ourselves. We keep discovering where we are open and where we are armored. We keep learning the difference between peace and shutdown, between groundedness and control, between being composed and being connected.
And sometimes the smallest steady practice is enough to begin loosening the grip. One class. One breath. One honest question. One moment where we stop performing wellness and actually listen.
Not to prove anything.
Just to become available to ourselves again.
If this feels familiar, start there.
Not with judgment. Not with another book, another podcast, or another thing to add to the list.
Just with the honest question: where am I still bracing?
If you want a place to practice that kind of noticing, I offer meditation, sound, hypno-coaching, and multidimensional healing at Four Directions Alchemy.
You can explore current classes and sessions here:
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