I told one of my best friends that I actually love being the teacher’s pet, and it’s true. And it’s not for the accolades or the pat on the back… but because I’m someone who really loves to be at the top of her game. I’ve never been driven by competition and I’m not a big game player. But I love to compete with myself and be at the top of my own game.
In school, that looked like being the kid who read stories to the class in kindergarten because she was the only one who already knew how to read. It looked like realizing I could get more than 100% in a class and getting curious about how high I could actually push it (I got to 106% in a non AP class). It looked like writing essays in my psychology class that made my teachers email me and go “WOW. That was one of the best essays I’ve ever read.”
I do the same thing when it comes to magic. The moment I learn something, the first thing I want to know is how I can make it better. How can I optimize it? How can I make it more precise and more impactful? How can I get more consistent results?
I’m one of those people who absolutely thrives on people telling me something cant be done or that the only way to fix something is through a medical procedure. Oh yeah? Watch me.
So, as I rose out of the depths of depression, self-injury, and anxiety, I started finding my way back to the magic. Back to the remembrance that I could self heal with the support of the body, energy, and spirit.
I also knew that growth happens in community, so I started looking for places to connect. I was led to groups with women who were exploring similar things and found myself under the tutelage of women specializing in intuition and energy work that felt so fun and engaging. But every time I found myself expanding, a similar conversation would play out…
“Angie! It seems like you’re becoming really magnetic in the group… you should go find your own space.”
“Wow, congratulations… I’ve never been able to do that. Maybe you should go find another mentor.”
And one by one, the sisters, mothers, and teachers I found would see the brightness of my magic and push me away from it.
It was baffling to me… Suddenly something beautiful became something I had an inherent sense of shame around. I slowly started sharing less of my discoveries, less of my gifts, less of the magic I was creating and kept it more and more to myself.
Flash forward… I hopped on a call with one of my mentors. I wanted to see how I could impact more people and she said 6 words. “Tell me 3 of your wins.”
I shrugged, almost brushing it off, and said “mmm, well I had a woman come in who was experiencing blindness in one eye. I did a remote healing, she had a big purge, and the next day she could see again.”
I said “I had a woman come in whose doctors told her she needed a hysterectomy stat. She had 14 day long painful periods, and painful ovulation that put her out of commission for half the month. I worked on her and 6 weeks later she was having painless 4 day periods.”
“I’ve had a 100% success rate helping women diagnosed with infertility have babies within 6 months.” I said. “I guess those are some of the bigger ones.”
I’ll never forget the look on her face and she stared back at me through the my computer screen. “Why aren’t you TALKING about these?”
There were so many reasons. Because I’m scared. Because it’s really not about me anyway - it’s them and spirit moving through me. Because every time I talk about it, the people who I looked up to get mad. Because, because, because…
There was so much shame wrapped up in my magic. Way more than I realized at the time. In some moments, it disguised itself as humility. In some it showed up as anxiety or fear. But ultimately, I had let the part of me that cares so deeply for people become weaponized against myself. And it demanded that I stay silent.
Today, my practices on shifting shame have been some of my most loved and used by my clients, and they’ve created some of the most potent results. But that was only the beginning.
You see, unmasking shame and de-weaponizing my sense of care led me to speak up anyway. But there was something even deeper… the wound that had to be healed for me to go from beginning to speak up about my magic, to being able to STAND for it in a big enough way to steward InSoma.
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