One of the biggest life lessons I’ve ever learned was in an acting class a few years ago. It has even transformed my whole practice.

That’s what I think is beautiful about life, we can make all these connections based on things that seemingly are not connected at all. In the scheme of things, everything we learn becomes a composite within us, and is coming from the knowledge of a collective experience. So all things create what we are, and all ways of learning can enrich our direct experience.

Just a little background, at the beginning stages of my spiritual awakening, I was hungry for knowledge pertaining to healing and esoterics. But then at later stages, like the one I’m in now, I’m learning about broader concepts, life philosophies that broaden my whole understanding about life through nature, through disciplines. It’s really amazing how much we can pull from various subjects.

Anyway, in this acting class my teacher, who was a gifted empath herself, stopped me mid-scene and said, “Maria, you take care of your partner so much in your scenes. Energetically it comes through. Focus on your own experience, it gives your partner more to respond to,”

That clicked. Well, it took some time for me to really digest it. But I understood she meant that my default was that I wanted my partner to be okay, for my lines not to impact them too hard, but by doing that I was robbing them of their own experience. It wasn’t intentional, I had good intentions for taking care of their feelings, but by focusing on them so much I wasn’t contributing the other half of what was necessary for a scene to work. If I had a strong emotion, I needed to bring it, and if it took my partner back, that was their work. In totality, that was the scene.

Having been trained from a young age to naturally be a caretaker, it was like flipping my whole world upside down. I didn’t know how to have my own experience, my own emotions, if I’m honest. So the work began to take shape as I started to dig deeper and find my own emotions, those ones I pushed down in favor of helping others through their own.

In a scene from a few months ago, I remember having a very strong reaction and you could see how hard it hit my partner. He didn’t know what to do, emotionally. As he struggled, you could see that it transformed the way he related to the scene. He suddenly felt so vulnerable, and then he felt so bad because he saw/felt how his words had impacted me, and then our scene developed contours that weren’t there before.

As this framework settled into my life, I noticed that yes, obviously my job involves focusing on my clients’ experiences and emotions, but that the more I have my own experiences (and contain them, for the session) the more my clients have theirs. If I’m lost in the healing, if I’m not there, then I’m not holding space. Although I’m completely focused on my client, I also need to be a very anchored and strong force that comes with the entirety of my life experience and knowledge.

Back when I started healing, I was still working through a lot of the healer/empath dilemma. I was so sensitive to the suffering of others, and that pulls you into the dangerous rescuer dynamic. I always put my clients first, so much that I couldn’t really have my own life. I gave all of my energy, absorbed all their pain, and had nothing left for myself. I’d drop everything if a client needed me. And you know what, that’s not okay.

I will never bring my own stories into sessions unless it's necessary, as sometimes guides will ask of me to share personal experiences to ground certain lessons, but I think that to be a well-balanced healer requires you to focus on living your own life, discovering your own emotions for the 75% of the other time you’re not healing. My balance before was more like 20-80, 20 for me. I’ve noticed that even in that 75% though, it’s about my own healing. The more I can show up sovereign, empowered, the more my clients can too.

That’s something I’m coming to appreciate more and more about being a healer. It’s a calling for me that runs so deep, but more than that, it’s my ikigai— that sweet spot where you don’t feel like you’re working when you’re working. It comes so naturally to me, and I recognize that by having signed this “pact” so to speak to be of service, it means that I understand that healing myself is a continual process and essential for my work. So all opportunities are growth opportunities, and my whole life is based around healing, but not all allocated for the actual healing work itself. It requires you to have a strong sense of self, but also a well contained ego.

The process of stepping into ones' own power means owning oneself fully and truly. It means facing every part of you, especially the parts of you that you hide to be socially accepted. Shadow work is essential in this process, as most of us discard and disown elements of ourselves that we cover in shame and self-rejection. That means feeling the depth of negative emotions, "abnormal" (I say this in quotes because what I mean is, anything outside of what society defines as normal which is a rather limited box) needs and basically, anything about ourselves that we'd cringe at if someone else found out about.

For me, that was feelings of neediness, loneliness, sadness, a fear of rejection and vulnerability. If we all came out and said what it was that we hid away, we'd probably come to find that we all hide the same things.

On the spiritual path, if you're like me and have had a share of traumatic events, you'll likely dissociate or want to escape from the heavier feelings and move towards the lighter ones. As a shaman identified for me, this is a form of spiritual bypassing. Although it feels like we are on the path towards enlightenment, we do need to face the discomfort to be able to drop into our bodies because the truth is, our power is in our bodies. If our spirits journey out, our bodies are left defenseless and our visions lose their grounding. Often times in these moments we'll hit a "Detour" or what appears/feels to be like one. It will often feel like a trauma itself, but what it's doing is dislodging our deeper traumas in our unconscious that are matching this circumstance. These detours are what allow us to step into our power.

Throughout the process, it can be grueling, but keep in mind that we are only given that which we can handle. If you are a person like me, a very old soul, a healer, an empath, then you already know that you've signed up for a hell of a lot of challenges in this lifetime to refine you, to make you stronger and suited for the large undertakings ahead. We can only heal people as much as we heal ourselves, after all. Before my "detour", I was taking on the energies of other people, their pain, their wounds and not realizing that those were only being absorbed because they matched something in my past that I'd buried in my subconscious. On the other side of this detour, I realize how much faster I can go down my path now after clearing out all of the darker, residual aspects.

We are human- and as human beings we are wired to judge. And that judgment is information not for the other person, but for ourselves- it brings up our belief systems and what we fear within ourselves. We can use this as useful information in our transformation process as it makes us more powerful.

Remember that power is not what we are conditioned to believe it is: it is not masculine, domineering, aggressive. That is overcompensation. That is purely gender based conditioning. Real power is integration. Real power is feminine and masculine. Real Power is ownership of the self, ugliness and all.