Back in January 2021 I was interviewed by Diana Lockett for the first episode of her series, and we spoke about something I care about a great deal: what happens when people try to live an awakened life without first dealing with their own trauma.
Awareness and unresolved patterns
I've known for a long time that there's a shift happening in how people want to live, love and connect. Many of us feel called toward a more conscious way of being, something closer to what more connected cultures might have lived by. But what I've noticed, working with people in groups for many years, is that there is a lot of trauma sitting underneath that impulse toward awakening, trauma that is personal, and trauma that gets passed down through families and generations. If we don't look at it, it doesn't just sit quietly out of the way. It tends to sabotage the very progress we're trying to make.
This is why I do almost all of my work in groups. When people come together, the parts of themselves they've left behind tend to surface and get mirrored back by others. Learning to read those group dynamics is one of the most useful tools I know for helping someone see their own patterns clearly. But understanding alone isn't enough. Alongside that awareness there needs to be an embodied practice, dropping into sensation, into the feeling body, rather than staying in an analytical, heady place. Doing that work in connection with others, rather than alone, has turned out to be essential.
Personal, relational and community practice
I think of the work in three parts: the personal work of self-awareness, the relational work of learning to communicate so that all of who you are can actually land with another person, and the community work, practising together in circles to build something closer to how we might once have lived in tribal or hunter-gatherer groups. Intentional communities are appearing in various places now, though this is still far from mainstream. What I've seen repeatedly is that people are drawn to the idea of community, and then all the unresolved material, around sexuality, old hurt, generational patterns, surfaces in an amplified way once they're actually living close to others.
The gap between belief and behaviour
In the conversation, Diana raised something she called the spiritual bypass, and there's a related idea a mentor once shared with me, the New Age bypass. It's the gap between believing in unity consciousness and actually behaving as though we're one. Nearly everyone on a spiritual path will say they believe we're all connected, yet our behaviour doesn't always match that belief, because we're not always emotionally mature enough to release the fear of abandonment or rejection sitting underneath. The first unity, I think, has to happen within, being able to hold all the different parts of ourselves, including the ones we'd rather not look at, in some kind of integration. That's close to the original meaning of the word healing: coming back to wholeness.
An ongoing process
I don't think that process ever finishes completely. You can make big movements early on, become genuinely functional and whole, and there will still be another layer to work with. I used the analogy of the speed of light in that conversation, you can get closer and closer, but matter never quite reaches it. Healing feels similar to me. I remain interested in our capacity to learn new responses as we get older, without treating change as a guaranteed outcome or a finished state.
Readiness and choice
We also talked about what actually pushes someone toward doing this kind of work. I don't think it's healthy when people seek help because they're being pushed into it by family or friends, that tends to create resistance rather than readiness. But when someone feels that internal impulse, a sense of "I need to look at this," I consider that a real turning point. Sometimes it takes what I called a soul slap, a loss, an illness, or a period like a lockdown where the usual busyness falls away, to bring someone into contact with what they've been putting off.
One thing I want to be clear about: I don't see Heart iQ as the only path toward this kind of healing or awakening. There is a great deal of good work happening in the world in many different forms. What I've tried to build is something that weaves the personal, relational and community layers together in one place, because in my experience it is the combination, more than any single element, that makes the deeper shifts possible.
Consciousness vs Embodiment in Healing Work
Consciousness
Increasing awareness of one's own patterns, often by seeing them mirrored back through others in a group setting.
Embodiment
Dropping into sensation and the feeling body rather than staying in analytical understanding alone.
