Why You Do A Lot Of Inner Work But See No Progress

Do you feel like you've been doing endless inner work but you haven't seen your life changing as much and you feel like you're stuck in the same loop repeating the same cycles over and over and over again?

You've heard stories of transformations and healings from different people when they started meditating,

When they started following a specific therapeutic practice and you're wondering why isn't it working for me?

I'm a big believer in the power of inner work.

I've seen its transformation in my own life over the years and I really believe that taking care of the psycho-spiritual side of our being can have a powerful impact in the rest of our life in how well we are feeling and we are taking care of our well-being in its truest sense because we can do all the exercise,

All the diet,

All the this,

All to that but if the psycho-spiritual aspects of us are not aligned and we haven't had a chance to understand ourselves,

Understand our being,

Understand our shadow side,

It's gonna be really hard to navigate and take care of ourselves from that place of reverence and respect for ourselves.

Even though the title is about why you're not getting what you're looking for in your inner work journey,

I think it's important to first talk about how healing is not linear.

Healing sometimes happens in phases,

In segments.

You feel like you made progress and then you have setbacks.

Healing happens in spiral.

You feel like you're repeating the same thing over and over again even though that can be really frustrating for some for a lot of people and personally I remember the moments that I was frustrated especially around my health doing all the things that I felt like it was supportive for my health but still feeling that I was stuck and I wasn't making progress.

So healing happens in spiral and you need to be trusting that process and especially if you see a little progress and you see a little bit of a light at the end of the tunnel and if you're there keep moving forward keep showing up for the work because one day the accumulation of the work that you've done and the number of time that you chose to show up for yourself and for that deeper knowing inside you that healing is possible you look yourself in the mirror and you are in awe and in gratitude for the progress you've made and who you have become along the way.

I definitely experienced that in my relationship and also in my health and I remember after dealing with autoimmune illness and PCOS and a lot of skin condition I remember when one day I woke up it wasn't like one day it was like probably five six years of trying different naturopathic doctors,

Trying different modalities of therapy,

EMDR somatic therapy and a lot of different things that finally I woke up and I realized that I feel like I have arrived like I look at my skin and my skin is clear I'm no longer worrying about my skin that oh I'm gonna eat this thing and I'm gonna have a flare-up I'm gonna do this thing and then I'm gonna have a flare-up so if you're there keep showing up my friend there is a light at the end of the tunnel but the purpose of this track is around the aspects of your lives that you feel like no matter how much you're investing energy and you're doing the inner work you're constantly stuck in the dirt and you're not coming out of the dirt and I definitely experienced that in certain aspects of my life that I felt like I was doing the inner work but I wasn't seeing the result that I wanted and recently I had this powerful meditation practice that this whole thing came through obviously it's not something that I invented but I feel like for me the way it came through it was really powerful and that might be supportive for you as well so sometimes we do inner work we keep doing the inner work to say oh look at me how hard I'm working over here but nothing changes almost we're doing the inner work with the intention of proving look at me how broken I am look at me oh see there is something tremendously wrong with me because if it wasn't then all this work would have paid off you unconsciously create this cycle of self-pity that the more you do the inner work the more you prove that you're unfixable the more you prove that there is something tremendously wrong with you you are a fraud and you never meant to have a good life or get what you desire or live the life that is filled with peace and grace and all that is your intention that's where shadow work can be insanely helpful so we all have those unconscious part of ourselves that for whatever reason they've either been rejected suppressed or made wrong so then we no longer associate with them but they are in a way running our lives and until that we decide to bring them into the light and confront them and hold that aspects of ourselves that will believe it's fundamentally wrong or fundamentally inadequate and we learn how to love that part of ourselves how to bring that part of ourselves to our conscious being then that's when we set ourselves free so I want you to look at your life or in that specific context that you feel like you're not making any progress and look at all the drama that you are unconsciously creating for example I'm gonna use the example of you wanting to earn more money nor have more abundance in your life what do you do is you maybe do some work around increasing your capacity for money for more abundance in your life maybe you do meditations around it maybe you're doing some somatic work to increase your ability to show up in a bigger way in your life and you also do a lot of activities around bringing more money into your life but because the narrative that is running the show is no matter how much work you put into this it's not gonna happen you are unfixable you can't be someone who has a peaceful relationship with money who is in that state of the flow of giving and receiving right so what happens is the foundation that you're operating out of the reason you're all like you're doing all this work is only to prove your subconscious right to prove your subconscious that I'm unfixable I just can't like I would I always be in poverty I always be poor I always be struggling I always will have drama with money so what happens maybe you're doing a lot of work around that maybe you're showing up maybe you put yourself out in the world but the narrative is what to prove that you can't have it so then you subconsciously create this loop that you do all this work and then now you're proven that you're unfixable and you can't have what you want and no matter how much you're trying abundance is not gonna be part of your life this example can be replicated in house involving it can be replicated in your relationship but when you actually acknowledge that subconscious pattern that is running the show the part of you that is desperately feeling unloved and feeling that it doesn't belong and it can belong into the category of people that they have a peaceful relationship with their partner or they have this healthy life when you hold that part of you that we often consider dark or we consider negative that we're not even allowing that part of us to come forward to show their concerns to show their fears to show the depth of hurts that they feel by feeling inadequate now we can move towards doing all that work no longer to prove our unworthiness but rather we're doing that work from a place of reverence from a place of peace from a place of knowing that we get to have that we get to create that there's a deep sense of faith that yes this is my deepest desire and it is safe for me to create it and have it and experience it fully in my life an interesting thing is when this kind of pattern shows up oftentimes you feel like you're actually working really hard you almost feel like you're torturing yourself even when it comes to the inner work so you're trying to do more inner work you're reading more books you're doing doing more and more and more and more because you believe that maybe if you do more and more and more then you might have a way out what happens when you understand the underlying driver of your decisions and the way you show up through shadow work and through awareness maybe you actually stop doing a lot of stuff and the activities and the physical realm that you're doing because for the first time you recognize that the reason you're doing them is not to actually create abundance to prove your subconscious right and then you realize that actually the kind of abundant life that you want to live it's not being created by the activities you currently are doing and then that that's when you start feeling this shedding skin like you feel like you're really stripping away a lot of things that you're doing and you're decluttering your life from activities from peoples from narratives that you're telling yourself from behaviors if there's something that you really been working hard towards and hasn't worked out I highly recommend sitting down with the current narrative and the dramas around that specific subject matter that specific part of your life that you believe is not working and reflect and see why are you doing this is there anything else that unconsciously controlling your life if this resonated with you and you want to do some more work around this to dig a little bit deeper I have some journal prompts for you that I highly recommend sitting down and doing some journaling practices and when you're doing this journaling practices I want you to really cultivate that sense of presence that you're holding space for all parts of you the parts of you that you consciously are aware of and the parts of you that you're not aware of so the first question that I want you to reflect on is there a fear or belief holding me back from pursuing something I desire do I secretly feel I don't deserve good things and how does this belief show up in my life what would it feel like to accept the parts of myself that I've been hiding or rejecting what message does my shadow have for me if I truly listen to it as you're writing and reflecting on this I want you to cultivate as much compassion as you can I want to leave you with this writing that came through after this particular meditation and I'm hoping that you can keep that close to your heart as you're discovering more about the side of you that is filled with magic and beauty child there's nothing wrong with you you don't need all the inner work to prove your wrongness to yourself you spend so much of your energy to prove your wrongness to yourself but my beautiful there's nothing wrong with you drop the shame the guilt and the smallness led the inner work show you ways of stepping into your joy embracing your wholeness setting yourself free