Hi I’m Joanne Cary. Welcome back to the Embodied Soul podcast.
I want to speak today to something I’ve been noticing — not just in my own lived experience, but in the people I work with, in my community, and in the collective field more broadly.
It’s something subtle, and if we don’t name it carefully, it can sound like people are “going backwards” — but that’s not actually what I’m seeing.
What I’m noticing is that many people who have genuinely shifted…
people who are less reactive, more spacious, more aware, more grounded than they used to be…
are suddenly finding themselves asking questions again.
And questions that feel almost familiar — like needing reassurance, or wanting answers, or wanting to understand why something is happening.
And it can feel confusing, because there’s often a sense of:
“I thought I had moved past this.”
And I’ve felt this too.
Even in me — there have been moments recently where doubt has surfaced.
Where parts of me want clarity now. Like in this moment
Where patience that I’ve lived inside of for a long time suddenly tightens and says:
“Okay… but can the path just be shown to me now?”
And I want to say this right at the beginning:
nothing has gone wrong.
This isn’t regression.
This isn’t losing trust.
And it isn’t a sign that you’re out of alignment.
What I’m sensing is something more like a different layer of living the shift.
A deeper one.
So if you want to join me, pull up a comfy chair, invite in your Soul and be open to receive exactly what you need to live, be and thrive as the embodied soul you are.
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We often talk about spiritual development as expansion — awakening, alignment, higher perspective — and those things are real. They matter.
But what we don’t always talk about is what happens after a real expansion occurs.
Because after expansion, life doesn’t always give us more clarity, like we might think.
Often, it gives us more contact.
More contact with uncertainty.
More contact with not-knowing.
More contact with the parts of us that learned safety through certainty, reassurance, and understanding.
And when the collective field is loud — when there is a lot of instability, intensity, noise, and unpredictability in the world — that contact - that uncertainty, that not-knowing gets amplified.
So what might look like people “going backward” is often actually what I would call integration under load.
When the nervous system is asked to hold more uncertainty while staying present, it naturally begins to inquire — not to solve, but to orient.
This phase isn’t really about answers.
Even if it feels like it is.
It’s about whether awareness and trust can be lived, rather than understood.
Lived, rather than understood.
And that inquiry often sounds like:
Can this awareness live here too?
Can this trust stay intact without guarantees?
You can feel this in the collective right now.
There’s a lot of background concern about large systems — financial systems, governments, healthcare, education.
Not always as conscious panic,
but as a low-level sense of instability.
For many of us, nothing immediate is happening in our daily lives.
And yet the body feels it — that uncertainty.
That’s integration under load.
Awareness isn’t responding to a single event.
It’s responding to atmosphere; to what we’re living within.
And in those moments, the nervous system doesn’t ask abstract spiritual questions —or at least not the kind we may be used to exploring.
It asks very practical ones.
Can I stay present here?
Can I trust myself if things change?
Can I remain grounded without knowing how this resolves?
It really is a kind of straddling —
between two worlds,
or two dimensions,
or two octaves, if that language resonates.
And the questions that arise aren’t a sign that something’s gone wrong.
They’re a sign that awareness is learning how to stay present inside uncertainty,
rather than escaping it.
This is big.
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Something else I’ve been noticing is a shift in the kinds of questions people are asking.
Earlier in our journey, the question is often:
“Why is this happening to me?”
Then, through spiritual development, many of us move into:
“Everything happens for me.”
And that’s a real shift. It moves us out of victimhood and into meaning.
But there’s a very subtle edge here — and this is where I see people getting a bit tangled.
Because “everything happens for me” can quietly turn into:
“How is this happening for me?”
“What lesson am I missing?”
“What do I need to fix, change, or do differently?”
And finally, “I must be doing something wrong.”
And suddenly, without realizing it, we’re back in self-surveillance.
Not from a lack of consciousness — but from a deep desire to stay safe, aligned, and okay.
The nervous system hears that question as:
“There is a right answer and I should know it already.”
Let me repeat that - the nervous system hears those questions as:
“There is a right answer and I should know it already.”
And that creates contraction. Which isn’t what any of us need right now.
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So this brings me to something I think is really important to name in this moment.
For most of human history — and for most of our lives — fear has not been felt consciously.
It’s been running as an unconscious program.
And when fear operates this way, it often shows up as:
reactivity,
control,
urgency,
certainty-seeking,
spiritual explanations that close rather than open,
a need to know what’s going to happen in order to feel okay.
And judgment often comes online here too —
not as criticism,
but as automatic meaning-making.
A fast way of organizing experience so the system can feel safe again.
The cost of that kind of meaning-making is that it tends to collapse complexity.
And we’ve talked about this in another episode.
It pulls us toward linear explanations.
Single causes.
Definitive answers.
Which can feel stabilizing —
but often narrows what’s actually possible.
Fear running in the background.
Unseen.
Yet shaping behavior without being named.
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Now what feels different now is that many of us can actually feel that impulse as it’s happening.
The urge to understand quickly.
To name what this is.
To explain why it’s happening.
And instead of automatically following that impulse all the way to closure,
there’s sometimes a pause. And we get to notice that pause.
A moment where we can stay with the sensation.
Stay with the not-knowing.
To let meaning arrive more slowly —
or not arrive at all.
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This is where fear starts to come into awareness.
Not to be fixed.
Not to be eliminated.
But to be felt — often quietly, often without a story — inside a more conscious system.
People aren’t necessarily organizing their behavior around it in the same ways.
They’re feeling it.
Questioning it.
Speaking it out loud.
That can look like doubt.
Or tenderness.
Or wanting reassurance.
And that doesn’t mean fear is running the system.
It means fear is being experienced consciously.
It means fear is being experienced consciously.
And when fear is experienced consciously, it no longer has to organize behavior from underneath awareness.
It can move through the body.
Be met.
Soften.
Not because it disappears —
but because i no longer is unseen.
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This is why this moment in time feels different for us.
There has always been collective instability.
There has always been uncertainty.
But now, the volume is high enough that what used to stay in the background is touching our lived experience.
And being affected doesn’t mean you’re unembodied.
It may actually mean you’re finally here.
Present.
Honest.
In contact.
This is part of our call to embodiment — not rising above the moment, but staying with ourselves inside it.
This is part of our call to embodiment — not rising above the moment, but staying with ourselves inside it.
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So, if the old questions aren’t helping —
If questions like - “Why is this happening?”, “How is this happening for me?” or “What do I need to fix?” just tighten the system —
what does help then?
For me, it’s been a shift away from questions that are trying to resolve uncertainty,
and toward questions that are willing to stay in relationship with it.
Questions that aren’t trying to figure out what’s going to happen
or make something feel safe by arriving at an answer.
But questions that don’t assume something is wrong.
Questions like:
What is being asked to be felt rather than understood right now?
What part of me is activated — and what does it need to feel a little bit safer?
If nothing here is wrong here, how would I be with this moment?
Is this a moment for action… or for accompaniment? For just being with it.
These questions don’t demand answers or close experience down.
They bring us back into the body.
And they create space for the nervous system to stay present
without needing certainty first.
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And I want to say this clearly, because I think many people need to hear it:
Not everything that arises is asking to be fixed.
Not everything that arises is asking to be fixed.
Some experiences arise because the system is now safe enough to feel them.
Doubt doesn’t mean misalignment.
Questioning doesn’t mean failure.
Wanting reassurance doesn’t erase the shifts you’ve lived.
It may simply mean trust is being reworked at a deeper level —
no longer as certainty, but as presence.
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At this stage, trust doesn’t mean knowing what comes next.
It means staying with yourself even when you don’t.
It means not abandoning your body in the search for answers.
It means letting life meet you where you actually are.
And that is no small thing.
So if you find yourself in this place — asking new questions, feeling softer edges, noticing fear without being overtaken by it — nothing has gone wrong.
You may simply be learning how to live in the shift.
Not thinking your way through it.
But inhabiting it.
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So I invite you…
Take what resonates.
Leave what doesn’t.
And trust that your body knows how to move with this — even when your mind wants a map.
Thank you for being here with me.
Thank you for learning to walk and live within this Shift alongside me.
And If you’ve loved this episode of Embodied Soul. Please follow, share and leave me a 5-star review, it really does help get the messages out to those who they’ll support. I look forward to being with you again next week on Embodied Soul.
