When You Let Go, They Can Rise! #237

What kind of role do you find yourself in in your family or your communities?  Are you the helper, fixer, go-to, dependable, get it done kind of alchemist?

The one who everyone leans on when something goes haywire? - so much so that you are feeling like you are spending a lot of your life responding rather than creating?

What if you could lean into co-creating with Spirit and make sure that you were allowing room for the magic of life to shine through - rather than spending so much energy responding and managing the chaos of others?

When you let go of the role of being the dependable, fixer, manager, responder - something beautiful will rise up.  

In this episode, we’re exploring what it really means to release the weight of responsibility and step out of the “Protector Pattern”—that familiar urge to fix, rescue, or over-function for others. If you’ve been carrying too much (even with the best of intentions), we'll help you recognize how you can shift back into a deeper level of trust with the universe.

We’ll talk about:
 – Why helping can sometimes hinder growth
 – How to trust that your loved ones are being guided, just like you are
 – What co-creation with Spirit actually looks like (especially when you're used to doing it all)
 – A grounding prayer and visualization to help you practice letting go with love so you can make space for something even greater than you.

If you've been carrying too much but find yourself not quite knowing how to stop without guilt or doubt crop up, this episode can bring you back from the brink

Christina Wooten helps you access the wisdom and support of the Spirit World to elevate your life.
She is a Certified Psychic Medium and Reiki Master Teacher.  Christina is the owner of Sedona Medium and co-host of Modern Life and Spirit podcast.

She offers Psychic Medium Readings, Soul Readings, Past Life Regressions, and teaches how you can start communicating and receiving messages from your Spirit Guides - through her program.
Learn more about her offerings here

Currently registering for Fall Reiki in-person classes in Sedona - beginners welcome!  Contact www.SedonaMedium.com Today!

Transcript

Unknown: 1:11

Music. Welcome to the Modern Life and Spirit Podcast where we explore spiritual topics relevant to today's world. Your hosts, certified psychic medium Christina Wooten and Reiki master teacher Robert Wooten, break down how to work with spirit to create more positive growth in your life. Consider this podcast your go to spiritual resource for navigating the modern world.

Christina Wooten: 1:39

Welcome to Modern Life and Spirit Podcast. I'm Christina Wooten, certified psychic medium at SedonaMedium.com Welcome to our episode today. I'm so glad that you are here. Since last week's episode. It's just been a powerful and beautiful week. I had interesting interaction with spirit, where I was in a meditation this week, and suddenly, very clearly, I was just transported to a very special retreat center that used to be here in Sedona. And it was just a little flash, maybe a minute long or so, and I saw myself in this moment, and I was leaving the dining hall of the retreat center in my vision. And when I glanced over, I saw this line of energetically charged waters that were there for everybody to enjoy at the center. And just as quickly as I saw this, I slipped out of that vision. But it really left me with that question of, well, that was interesting, like, what? What was that all about? What was the message I was supposed to get from that? And what I processed was it was a beautiful reminder for me of intentionality. And you know, this beautiful center their intentionality had such an impact on me and others. And as I was walking down that memory lane, it reminded me how quiet and slowness is what creates the space for intentionality in all things, even the water that we're drinking. And for me, this week, I've really been relishing space and just finding flow in a lot of quiet, a lot of nature, a lot of stillness, and it has been so nourishing to my soul, I did not realize how much I just needed, a lot of quiet, just what I've needed. And I hope that this week, whatever your experience has been, has brought you also some unexpected insights and blessings too. Over the last couple of weeks, we have been exploring energy blockages and self care, especially for empaths, sensitive people and healers who feel called to give deeply, but struggle at the same time to give that self care to themselves. So in episode 235 why self care feels like a luxury, even when you know better. We traced back the origin story of how early conditioning taught a lot of us that care is something that you give and not necessarily something that you receive. And then in episode 236, is your compassion quietly burning you out, we looked at the wound of over giving and how that instinct to care can slowly drain you, also if it's not rooted in balance. So we even talked about how to identify if you were giving from a wounded place or from the real spirit of service, and also some boundary phrases you can start implementing to shift that dynamic. And today we're going to take it to the next step, we're going a little bit deeper, and we're talking about something that comes up for a lot of impasse when they start to explore the idea of self care on a deeper level, is that they start to realize some of the areas in their life that are out of balance, or some of the dynamics that we've talked about over the last couple of episodes where they are sacrificing themselves, their life, their time, their journey, their energy in trying to help others keep everything together. And usually this is that feeling of getting stuck in a responsive mode with life, where, for whatever reason, the empath is that person that everyone calls when they're like, oh my gosh, this is happening. Can you help me? Can you take care of this? Can you step in and because you're a compassionate and loving and kind person, a lot of times you say yes to that giving and it ends up being something that becomes a deeply entrenched dynamic to the point where you start to think, you know, I'm holding all of these plates here that affect not just me, but all of these other. Special people in my life, and if I suddenly decide that I don't want to hold these plates anymore, that I don't want to keep just holding everyone together, that maybe they will fall apart, something bad will happen to those people that have been used to me being there where you've been the dependable person that they could always rely on and reach out to, and you know that they could use some help. And so you have been doing it this whole time, but now you're realizing, I don't think that this is in balance for me anymore, and it's not healthy for me to keep holding it, but I'm so afraid that I'm going to cause harm to someone by releasing the dynamic. And what we often don't see in that moment, that fear, moment of if I stop holding everything together, someone or people collective are going to fall apart, is that our holding on might actually be the thing that is stopping them from rising up. I see this a lot of times in readings and healing sessions. It's the mother who feels like the glue holding her family together, and she can't imagine what would happen if she stopped just filling in the gaps and responding for everyone, and bending and, you know, all of this responsiveness at the cost of her own well being. It can be the partner who anticipates everybody else's needs before they're even spoken they're afraid of. Well, what might unfold if they don't do that, if they're not the ones making sure somebody has a snack or making sure they packed their lunch or making sure they have the water that they need, it's the healer who gives a lot of energy away that there's sometimes a sense that they don't have anything left for their own growth And for their own connection, and they aren't giving themselves what they need to invest to get to that next level of their own development. So underneath the love, the kindness, the sacrifice in all of those cases is the fear of what might happen if we stop saving, if we stop fixing, if we stop managing and softening every edge for the people that we care about most. So in today's episode, we're talking about what it really means to let go, to trust that others have their own wisdom, that they have their own timing, their own sole guidance, to remember also that your sole purpose is not rooted in you being the safety net for others. You aren't being asked to do that by Spirit ever. You aren't just the glue that holds everything together. So today we're going to just reorient. We're gonna hand it back to spirit and let everyone, including you, elevate, rise up. You may not think of yourself as someone who steps in too much, even if you feel it in the sacrifices that you're making or the burnout that you're feeling. Most empaths see their actions as love and support or simply just doing what needs to get done. But there's a pattern that I often see in sensitive, caring people. And I like to call it the protector pattern. Okay, it shows up as being the emotional anchor, the Peacekeeper, the one who swoops in when things get messy, to soften the impact or to smooth out the rough edges for other people. And it's not because you're trying to take over. It comes from a place of true care, because you see what's coming. And sometimes that's you're seeing something from your logical mind. And sometimes you may intuitively feel like, Uh oh, this is going to lead to a bad place. And when you can feel that someone is spiraling, or maybe they're sinking, or they're just having a hard time. Everything in you really wants to help them, and you don't want people to suffer needlessly. And if you can do it, then you might be thinking, well, maybe I should. But here's the tricky part, over time, that loving instinct to protect can turn into a habit of fixing, of anticipating problems, preventing discomfort, trying to manage all the outcomes, and sometimes it's even before someone asks you to do that. And this ends up getting really tricky to manage, because you end up sometimes getting blamed, or being the convenient punching bag for someone, because they either expect you to do all the things or they blame you for the outcome instead of stepping fully into their responsibility, and that sets up a really no fun experience. Experience where you are giving, you're over giving, and instead of gratefulness, it can breed this pattern of blame too, which is super confusing, because you would love nothing more than for someone to jump in and anticipate your needs or to help more. So it's not a fun dynamic to be in, and you end up feeling overextended, misunderstood, and this dynamic, which really is rooted in care and compassion for others, can start to interfere with something significant, like growth, because when we constantly protect other people from the hard stuff, we sometimes end up unintentionally blocking them from the very lessons and the breakthroughs that their soul came here to experience, to grow spiritually personally, we need feedback. We need feedback from life, from our choices, from the full range of outcomes. So we're talking the good, the hard, even the messy stuff. And when we interrupt that process out of love, we unknowingly take the universe out of the conversation. So part of self care for sensitives and healers is learning to pause and to ask, Am I truly supporting or am I rescuing? Sometimes we rescue because we can't bear to watch someone struggle, especially someone that we love. And sometimes we rescue because it's hard to hold space for big, uncomfortable emotions without falling into a fix it type of dynamic and sometimes we rescue because we've always been the one who had to do it. But whatever is fueling that protector energy for you, when it goes unchecked, it places the entire burden on your shoulders, and it leaves no space for spirit, for the universe to really move, because you're always responding and feeling the gaps and adding glue and putting a band aid here. So it's important to really explore what happens when you stop holding it all, and what happens when you really hand things over to the divine. So let's talk about what trust really looks like, which is essential to getting out of the fixer mode, and what it means to believe that others can rise even without us carrying all the weight and the burden and the obligation and all of the emotions of that and I Know for so many of us that walk a spiritual path, the idea of being of service is sacred. We've been taught to give from the heart. We've been taught to show up with compassion, to extend ourselves in love, and truly, those values are at the core of who we are, but sometimes without meaning to that devotion to helping can become heavy. We take those beautiful intentions and accidentally slowly, sometimes quickly, over time, it turns into pressure. So see if you say some things to yourself, sometimes like I should say, Yes, I should make myself available, If I don't help maybe I'm functioning from the ego and not from the heart. It's such a sneaky little thing. From giving out of love to giving out of obligation, it can just kind of slip from one into another, and that can be hard to recognize, because on the surface the action is there. It still looks like compassion, but underneath it, we may be really acting from a fear place, a fear of what might happen if we don't step in, if we're not the one to support that person, like we know they need support. Here's the thing, though, sometimes real spiritual maturity is trusting the process, even when it's hard to watch. It's remembering that everyone is being guided, that the people in our lives, they have their own spirit guides. They have their own sacred timing. They came into this life with their own soul agreements. They're not here to be saved and to be kept from these things. They are here to grow, to experience and through that process, to evolve. So they came to earth, to be challenged and to grow, and when we rush in to make things easier all the time, to carry stuff that's not ours, we unintentionally place ourselves between them and their own divine learning we're getting between them and their soul agreements. Every soul needs feedback. Back from this life. That is how we learn. We get feedback from the hard stuff, from the stretch points, from uncomfortable things. That is how we grow, and that's how we remember our power we own, that we come into our own sense of responsibility and decision making and strength and the true meaning of service in a spiritually mature light, it doesn't mean saving you can hold space with an open heart and still let Spirit do what spirit does best. Sometimes the most loving thing that we can really do is to just take a step back and let someone face what they need to face. Sometimes we have to witness without interfering, and sometimes we just need to bless their journey, even if it doesn't look the way that we wish that it would we feel like it could the maybe it doesn't reflect what it is that we want for them, but when we truly believe in the soul's wisdom, there is an intrinsic knowledge that we don't have to control the timing, the path or the outcome, and that leads us into more trust. Now of course, this isn't saying that we need to go to another extreme and latch on to some narcissistic worldview. There are times where we're going to feel a knowing that we have an opportunity that may be a sacrifice that is for a greater good, and there are times when we will support and give and give from the heart space and not from some of those patterns that have gotten distorted, like we've talked about. But the key is learning to really start to recognize how fear manifests itself in some of the decisions that you're making, so you can be sure that you're giving from the heart, that you're really serving in a way that's genuinely loving and not in a way that ends up unintentionally being harmful to yourself and also to the person that you thought you were trying to help. Now, when you start beginning to shift this dynamic, and you may have tried this before, maybe you have become aware that you're in a little bit of an unhealthy flow. You're noticing that you're doing a whole lot of sacrificing, you're doing a whole lot of responding and feeling like you're not able to live your mission, that you're not having the time that you need to devote towards your growth, or the energy to devote towards your growth. So maybe you've tried to shift some of this before, but there's something that rises to the surface when we start to shift out of rescuing, and that is grief. It might surprise you, but when you stop caring what wasn't yours to begin with, when you stop stepping in as the fixer or the emotional caretaker or somebody's handler, you may feel this strange sense of loss. Maybe it's the loss of being needed, maybe it's the loss of a role that you have played really well for so long, or it can even be the heartache of realizing how much of yourself you gave in the hope that everything and everyone would just be okay. And that grief can kind of feel so uncomfortable that we fall back into those patterns, or we know we need to make a change and just kind of struggle with it, because that grief is there, but if you feel some grief pop up, just know that that is okay. It's part of the healing process, and it can be a good sign. It can mean that you're no longer trying to earn love, that you are letting go of proving your worth with all of this excessive over giving. So don't worry or be afraid of some of those feelings pop up. They are uncomfortable, but you'll move through that stage as it becomes less uncomfortable for you. So just for fun, let's talk about possible side effects of releasing the protector role. So Side effects may include, but are not limited to sudden bursts of energy, increased free time, unexplainable feelings of peace, the urge to lie down and not feel guilty about it, unexpected, elation, mild to moderate confusion about what to do with all the emotional space you just freed up and occasional waves of grief, which are totally okay and completely temporary. So yes, releasing the protector pattern definitely comes with its own little ripple effects, and some of them are really beautiful and something to look forward to. But when you start letting go of what was never yours to carry, this new question starts to rise up in its space, what now feels the space that was once occupied by all of the managing, all of the anticipating and all of the holding it together like. What are you going to do with all of this spaciousness now inside, from this space, is where trust begins to take root. When you have been in the habit of over giving, over functioning, giving from obligation, it can start to feel like everything depends on you, like if you don't hold it together. Nobody else is going to but it's that's really not the full story. It's important to remember that there is a greater support system that is at work in your life and other people's lives. Always, your spirit guides are walking with you. Your higher self is delivering guidance behind the scenes constantly. And the divine has timing and rhythm that may not match your own, but it's it's not random. So when you start to hand things back to spirit, where you're kind of resigning from this role of patching it all together, being the glue, being, being the safety net for everyone, something beautiful happens. You start to co create instead of manage. You start to respond, to really respond instead of rescue. And you begin to release all of this just energetic weight of what you've been carrying, and you might actually release literal weight. Because sometimes, as we release energetic weight, we actually release some literal weight too. So that's something fun to look forward to. And the people that you care about, they're not alone in their journey, and it's important for you to always hold that in your mind their own Higher Self is guiding them, and their spirit team is working with them, and it's important for you to let Spirit do what spirit does best, which is help them learn, help them grow. If you're struggling a lot with letting go, there are two things that I think can really help. One is a visualization that I want to recommend, that I think is is helpful and don't do this now, if you're driving, if you're out and about operating heavy machinery, what you're going to do is visualize, bring yourself to a relaxed state, and you'll bring to mind someone that you've been in this dynamic with, someone you've been trying to help, you've been carrying them, you've been the fixer, or you're trying to protect them. And as you bring them into your awareness, there's no judgment here against them or against yourself. So you want to try and release anything that might come up, any baggage that might come up with that, and just allow their image or energy to come into your awareness. And now you'll imagine that standing in front of you is a loving, a wise presence, so one that feels familiar to you. This may be a spirit guide, or it may be the spirit guide of your loved one that you are thinking about and as you're just connecting and allowing that presence to become more known to you. Maybe you're feeling it in your heart or in your energy field. Maybe you are sensing their presence in some other way. Maybe you're actually seeing them as you connect with that energy, you notice that it's just they're simply there, they're open, they're steady, they're capable, and in your mind's eye, I want you to just gently imagine placing the person that you have been thinking about that you've been in this rescue dynamic with placing them into the hands or the care of that presence. So just notice how it feels for you to trust that someone else or something else can take it from here, that they can hold them now in a more complete and more full way, that you can hold them from that rescue dynamic. And it may be a wonderful opportunity as you get more connected with this visualization, after you do it a few times, to really feel how loving and nurturing that being is that you are sharing, that you're placing this energy into. So I would recommend that really in the beginning part of trying to shift this energy that when you start to feel guilty, when you start to feel afraid of, oh my gosh, if I don't do it, this bad thing is going to happen, and this bad thing is going to happen, and how might that affect them in the long run, and oh my gosh, is to. Do this visualization several times so that you can start to develop this concept of this isn't about me. There is a whole team on the other side, loving, supporting, guiding and helping this person. And if this is, whatever it is, if it has come on their path, that's okay, it's for them, and then they will be okay that they are strong enough to endure, that they are strong enough to move through this challenge and to gain growth and experience from it that will somehow help them in their life or in their spiritual and soul development. So do that really, really regularly. The other thing that I think can be really helpful is prayer. Obviously, I believe strongly in the power of prayer. I think that it's something that's helpful for the person who is praying, and it's helpful also for the person who is the recipient of that beautiful energy. So the prayer that I recommend this is something I think you should say on a daily basis, and I will put it in the show notes for this episode. So if you want to not write it down while you're driving or while you're out walking or something like that, I will place it in the show notes, so just make sure that you go to my website so that you can find it. But the prayer is, I return what is not mine to hold. May they be blessed, may they be guided. May I trust in the unfolding. I return what is not mine to hold. May they be blessed, may they be guided. May I trust the unfolding and repeat and repeat and repeat. So as we come into closing for today, I'll remind you that the same loving force that is guiding you is also guiding your loved ones too, even when it doesn't look the way they hoped, even when it's a little bit messy or it's kind of slow or everything feels very uncertain, even then, you are completely supported. Your loved ones are as well. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode. I'm sending so much love, so much light, and let's say, a lot of extra strength to you this week as you start to become aware of where this dynamic, where that guilt energy might be holding you back from fully being able to invest energetically in your vibration, in your growth, in your development, so that you can turn things back over, you can allow spirit to do what spirit does best, which is guide someone and help them learn through the growth process. Thank you so much for being here. Many blessings the

Robert Wooten: 29:12

modern life and spirit podcast is for informational purposes only. The information provided is not intended to provide medical psychological legal or financial advice. Information provided is not to diagnose or treat any medical or psychological illness. To read the full disclaimer, see sedonamedia.com you