Awareness Hell: When Healing Becomes a Holding Pattern

For years, I thought clarity was my ticket out.

I chased insight as if it held the secret code to freedom, as if naming my wounds and mapping my traumas would somehow erase them from my body. If I understood myself deeply enough, I thought, maybe I could finally become the perfect version of myself.

I filled notebooks with reflections and epiphanies.

I tracked patterns like a detective, decoding emotional cycles as meticulously as others decode recipes or investment portfolios.

I learned about attachment styles, trauma responses, and the phases of the moon.

My nervous system became a familiar landscape, mapped out with colored pens and Post-it notes stuck to bathroom mirrors.

But after all that “work,” and after all that self-knowledge, I still found myself circling back to familiar loops.

Burnt out from trying.
Overfunctioning in love and at work.
Playing therapist in relationships.
Knowing exactly what I was doing, seeing it in slow motion and hearing the subtitles like an afterschool special. I was doing it anyway.

This is what I’ve come to call awareness hell.
That place where you’re no longer asleep, but not yet free.

You know too much to play dumb, but you don’t yet feel safe enough to choose differently.

Awareness hell is a crowded and vibrant place.
You can feel it humming in the aisles of Erewhon, where green juice meets existential dread.
And the people here are brilliant and beautiful.
They’ve read the books, taken the trainings, sat in therapy and medicine circles.
They speak the languages of healing: astrology, IFS, attachment, human design, the Enneagram. You name it, we’ve tried it.

They are incredibly self-aware and sometimes painfully self-obsessed.
But they are not liberated.

They are trapped in a cycle of endlessly “working on themselves.”

I know this because I lived there for much of my LA chapter.
And I also know it because I work with others who are trying to claw their way out.

These men and women can see it all unfolding in real-time: the pull toward the person who jangles their nervous system, and the moment the old scarcity wound kicks up in work or money or love, but feel inextricably drawn to the flame and despite their awareness, exclaim that they can’t stop it from playing out.

This is the fine print of the spiritual path that no one warns you about.

Insight alone doesn’t translate to change.

And consciousness, without embodiment, can become a cage.

There’s a line in the recovery world that has stayed with me:
“Self-knowledge availed us nothing.”
It doesn’t mean insight is useless. It means there’s a threshold where knowing becomes a trap.

And we see it everywhere in the modern wellness and self-development space:
The never-ending pursuit of healing.
The spiritualized perfectionism.
The belief that once you clear this one last pattern, then you’ll finally be ready to live, to love, to rest.

These spaces aren’t designed to set you free.

They are designed to keep you growing just enough to stay invested,
but not so much that you graduate.

They keep you coming back for the next layer and the next level.

It's a veil of freedom, sold in subscription form.

I say this as someone who is deeply devoted to growth and the teachers and wisdom that has come before me.
But I also believe we’ve made an idol out of self-awareness.
And in doing so, we’ve forgotten how to live life and how to love one another.

Because through my own journey, and through the people I walk alongside, I’ve learned that the real work is not another breakthrough or “aha.”

It’s softening.

Softening is learning how to let yourself rest.
How to let the ache be held instead of solved.
How to meet the part of you that’s still scared, still angry, and still yearning with love instead of strategy.

The softening is living,
without needing to earn it:

To stop trying to prove your worth through your effort.
To stop treating your life like a self-improvement project.
To remember that healing is not about becoming someone new,
but about remembering who you were before you believed you needed to be fixed.

And beyond that, there’s a deeper invitation: To stop making your own healing the center of your universe, and to get out of the self-referential feedback loop and actually be of service. This means attuning to others and showing up for them with presence and real listening. Because softening doesn’t isolate you in your own process, or give you a sense of smug superiority to those who don’t speak “spirituality.”

Softening expands your capacity to hold others in theirs.

There was a moment almost ten years ago that changed me.
I was doing polarity practice with a teacher trained in energetic relational work.
He was grounded, unpretentious, and quietly powerful.
We were sitting face to face, only communicating through breath and eyes.
And I was trying so hard to be “in my feminine.”
Trying to feel into softness, to perform what I thought radiance should look like.

He kept repeating: “More. Go deeper. I still don’t feel you.”
And I kept trying. Softer gaze. Slower breath. Fuller belly. All the “right” moves.

It was awful and awkward.
I finally cracked and shrieked: “This sucks! I fucking hate this!”
And then, I began to laugh, and a snort emerged.
His eyes lit up: “That! That’s it.”
That was the moment he finally felt me.

Like the Velveteen Rabbit, the fur of my performance wore thin, the stitching of my self-knowledge began to fray, and I finally became real.

Healing isn’t meant to make you follow someone else’s path or follow someone’s 10 step guide to abundance.
It’s meant to reveal your real.
It’s meant to bring you home.
It’s meant to allow you to enjoy being human.

The way out of awareness hell isn’t more insight.
It’s rest.
It’s breath.
It’s the space between topics with a friend.
It’s being willing to walk outside without a plan.
It’s snorting when you’re trying to be sexy.
It’s letting your heart show up before your story is perfectly edited.

It’s remembering that your stinky, sweaty, weirdo humanity is what magnetizes the people and things that are meant for you.

You are not a performance.
You are not a pattern.
You are not a project.

You are a person.
A living, breathing, complex, soft-hearted person.

You are allowed to be done fixing.
You are allowed to stop trying.
You are allowed to be loved exactly as you are,
not just for who you’re becoming.

And, you are invited to joy.
To let it just be fun.
To live wildly alive.

Soften there.