Have We Given Away Our Own Inner Knowing?

Last week, I wrote about how to know what's true when you listen to spiritual teachers or AI videos or other sources of information who present their ideas with conviction. And I'm still thinking about that question. Stay with me and I'll tell you why.
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She Said, "You're not Really Helping People!"

Over the weekend, I attended the first 3-hour training of a free 3-day workshop that was offering a lengthy paid training that would teach everything in more detail. And the title of this part of my post is not an exact quote, but I felt like her basic message Friday night.

What I walked away with was this challenge, said over and over, in similar words to this - "so you've learned this technique or you've got this certification? Well, if this is the thing, why are you and your clients still triggered by your traumas?" And she told us, the healers, the coaches, the practitioners, what we needed to master for ourselves before ever working with future clients and offered her own training, which would focus on us first, and then show us how to finally help others.

Now, I will return to this experience in a future post, but I got me thinking about the authority we hand over to experts and gatekeepers who suggest that only they know what we really need.
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I've Been Doing this for Years

About 20 years ago, I read a wonderful book that had a quiz in it. I love quizzes! And it was about finding your primary element and then using that as a guide for decorating your home. 

And she had a training I couldn't afford that would give you the ability to help others decorate spiritually, using the elements. I mourned the loss of that possibility, used what I learned from the book in my own home and moved on.

At the time I had my own healing practice, working with clients at a distance, teaching them a self-healing technique that had changed my life and others. But I was forever trying other healing techniques just because they appealed to me.

So, she shrugs, I created my own elemental healing practice, just for myself, but occasionally would use it with clients, too, when they hired me to do distant healing.

But I would never have dared to market this healing technique. Why? Because I made it up. 

No one had trained me. I didn't have a certification.

So it didn't feel legitimate. There wasn't an expert telling me I was allowed to do it.

Recently, I learned about a new elemental system and immediately wanted to learn it! And she offers training for facilitators. But I can't afford it.

So twenty years later, here I am again, catching myself in the act.

​Not trusting what I learned on my own. Wishing I could afford a credential that would make me feel legitimate.
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Learning from someone deepens our knowing. But does it also teach us to distrust what we know until someone else validates it?

Here's What's Coming

​I want to look at the places where we hand over our own knowing.

To experts. Healers. Teachers. Spiritual leaders. Charts. Quizzes. Books. And yes, sometimes ChatGPT.

We ask them to tell us what’s happening in our bodies. What we need to heal. Which path to take. Which essential oil to use. What our symptoms mean. Who we are.

Over the next few weeks, I want to explore what can happen when we stop looking outside ourselves for every answer and begin to discover what we already know.

​Not sure where this is going yet. But I've been waiting twenty years to find out.

See you next time!

Love, Jeanine