I have been in the psychological, emotional and spiritual healing professions for almost 40 years.

And how I define healing is the process of supporting people to live more fully from what is the most true and alive for them. To be all of who they are. To be unabashedly real. To recognize that their soul cannot ever be damaged or broken and that the true magnificence of who they are is always available to them.

Which means that I have also been passionately engaged in the process of discovering and working with what gets in the way of that experience of embodied wholeness and celebratory self acceptance.

And one of the big things that can thwart our soul restoration is our resistance to the healing process.

It seems that we are often in a place of division within ourselves. That we have two different parts of our mind and being. And that they don’t play well together.

These two parts go by different names. Ego and soul. Personality and essence. Conditioned and real. Inner critic and intuitive wise person. Tamed and untamed. False or true self.

I use a lot of these terms interchangeably because they all point to the same dynamic.

We sense deep in our bones a powerful connection to an essential part of our being, something that we are born with that is the sacred repository of our gifts and talents, that is always there and can never be destroyed but can be blocked, obscured or overtaken by our early childhood training.

Sadly, there’s not a mechanism in place in this western modern culture to honor and support who we were meant to be and become from the moment we were born. Instead, many of our essential gifts and talents are judged and actively suppressed as too much or not enough.

We are taught that we are too loud, or too sensitive, too independent or too needy, too adventurous or too quiet, too boisterous or bossy or emotional or intense. Too artistic or intellectual or otherworldly.

Or we don’t measure up to some external standard. We are given the message that we aren’t smart enough or pretty enough or or athletic enough or lovable enough.

Sometimes we are just not seen or recognized at all. Our safety and value comes from being invisible. Disappeared.

Who we learn we are supposed to be is most definitely NOT who we really are.

But we can forget that and get tangled up in identifying and believing in these early directives from our families and teachers and society. And live our lives from a place of disconnection with the true source of power and love, which is our own authentic self.

Luckily, our wild soul, our wise essence our truth and our realness is continually pushing to be seen and heard and acknowledged. To be brought back home and be fully expressed. It never gives up on us. It will fight to make itself known until the day we die.

And that desire of the soul to assert itself is always met with resistance from the part of our mind that is trying to keep us in the box and conforming to our familial and cultural expectations.

The resistance to revealing your realness can be INCREDIBLY intense.

We hide who we truly are in the first place because when we dared to show our true self as children we were met with being shamed or humiliated or rejected or with outright punishment and abuse.

Plus, we’ve often been living out of that place of not being real for so long that even WE have come to believe that this diminished, shame based self is who we truly are.

Moving through that resistance to reclaiming our natural beauty and brilliance means that we first have to feel all of the painful feelings that are associated with how our real selves were initially shrouded. It’s allowing the shame and grief and fear that we felt when we revealed our tender vulnerability to be experienced fully once again.

Facing our resistance means taking that journey of sacred descent into the underworld of our psyche and confronting those inner demons of inadequacy and diminishment, allowing ourselves to die to the old identification with being too much or not enough. Only then can we be reborn as wholehearted and radiant humans.

In my role as creative soul facilitator I am honored and privileged to witness that rebirth through the creative process over and over again.

And I am also called to be the midwife helping to guide folks through the often painful and confusing messiness of the resistance journey.

Just recently I held a workshop where the group participated in an exercise taking turns giving everyone in the circle one word descriptions of positive qualities that they saw in each other.

One student was told among other things that she was gorgeous and beautiful. And it brought her up against some strongly held beliefs around her sense of inadequacy regarding her physical appearance.

These messages that were delivered with such generosity of spirit touched on a deep place of shame in this dear woman. And the shame was so overwhelming that she didn’t even want to try to paint what was going on for her. The resistance was incredibly strong and it took all of the courage she had, plus a big dose of encouraging support from me and her circle sisters, to stand in the intensity of the emotion and paint her truth from that place.

But because she was held, by us and herself, with so much love and compassion, she was able to do it. Allowing the toxic messages from her family to be released through her brush actually brought her to a place of deep peace.

And in her next painting she was able to joyfully and effortlessly paint herself as the radiant goddess that we in the circle already knew her to be, feeling empowered and triumphant because she didn’t allow her resistance to stop her from expressing her most fundamental truth. Which is that she WAS beautiful. Inside and out.

So when you sense your soul stirring and awakening, asking you to reclaim her in all of her wise splendor, and you feel the resistance begin to rise, try to remember that soul mending doesn’t lie in avoiding the discomfort that true healing often requires.

By bravely and compassionately being willing to simply be present to all the distress and uneasiness that overshadows your full aliveness you will find yourself almost magically transported to a place of inner peace, self love and true empowerment.

Allowing one more corner of your quintessential nature to shine again brilliantly into the world.

The online playdate, Resistance RX: Magic Mojo For Mucho Creative Momentum with me and Andrea Schroeder is coming up soon ( Tuesday, August 23rd 11 AM- 3 PM PST) and we have a holy-hells amazing group of people gathered and a lot of magic in store for YOU!

We are so excited to share this with you.

This is going to be hugely transformational, healing and magical.

(Probably in exactly the ways you least expect, which is what tends to happen in these things).

I for one, can’t wait for the resistance healing party to begin.