Healing While Holding Space

Healing While Holding Space

If you’re thinking about entering the wellness or healing space - or if you’re already in it - the thought has probably crossed your mind at some point: Who am I to hold space for others when I’m still healing myself? Maybe it comes as a quiet doubt. Maybe it arrives as full blown imposter syndrome. You look at other practitioners and wonder if you’re somehow behind, not ready, not “whole” enough yet to guide anyone else.

I know that question intimately. I’ve asked it more times than I can count. There were moments early on where I genuinely wondered who would want to listen to me - someone still in process, still unraveling, still learning how to live inside a body reshaped by grief and loss. I didn’t feel polished. I didn’t feel finished. And I certainly didn’t feel like an “expert.” What I felt was called. Quietly, persistently, unmistakably called to show up anyway.

There’s a quiet myth woven through the spiritual world that healers must be fully healed before they’re allowed to help others - as if we need to reach some pristine, enlightened version of ourselves before we’re credible. But the truth is far more human, far more mystical, and infinitely more compassionate: healers are not people who have finished their healing. They are people who have learned how to navigate it. They are people who continue to walk themselves back home, again and again, even when their hands are shaking. Healing isn’t a destination you arrive at; it’s a frequency you embody. And the deeper you go into your own layers, the more finely tuned that frequency becomes.

What surprised me - and honestly humbled me - was realizing that simply showing up mattered more than I thought it would. I wasn’t trying to fix anyone. I wasn’t telling people what they should do. I was just sharing my lived experience honestly, speaking from the places I had actually been. And something began to happen. People started opening up. They felt seen. They felt understood. Not because I had the perfect words, but because my presence carried something familiar. Something real.

What I’ve learned is that the deeper I was willing to go into the depths of my own healing, the more my capacity to hold space for others expanded. When you face your own shadows - the grief, the abandonment, the heartbreak, the self-doubt, the unworthiness, the numbness you prayed would disappear - something inside you shifts. Not just psychologically, but energetically. You become someone who can hold another person’s fear without tightening. You can sit with their sadness without absorbing it. You can witness their rage without shrinking. You can hear their shame without flinching. Your body learns how to stay open inside discomfort, and that becomes part of the medicine you offer.

People often assume that what makes a healer powerful is their knowledge, their technique, their vocabulary, or their training. But the real potency comes from presence - and presence is something that’s forged through fire. Presence is what’s left after the ego crumbles. Presence is something you earn by surviving the dark places within yourself and choosing not to close. And presence cannot be taught. You can sit in a classroom for a year and never learn what one moment of true heartbreak teaches your nervous system.

This is why certifications, while helpful, will never replace lived experience. You can collect modalities like souvenirs, but if you haven’t done the internal work to integrate them, they’ll never land. They’ll sit on the surface. But when you’ve lived through your own unraveling - when you’ve met your own shadows in the dark and chosen to become intimate with them - the tools you use carry a different frequency. Your voice carries truth. Your hands carry steadiness. Your energy carries coherence. And coherence is what people feel. Coherence is what people trust.

Clients don’t return to you because you’re perfect. They return because your presence feels like a safe place for their truth. They return because they feel seen without being judged, held without being fixed, guided without being pushed. They return because on some level, your energy says: “I’ve been there too. You’re not alone.” That resonance cannot be faked. It only emerges through walking your own path with honesty and devotion.

Being a healer who is still healing is not a contradiction - it’s an initiation. Your wounds don’t make you unqualified; they make you relatable. Every layer you meet within yourself becomes a new chamber of your internal temple - a place where you can now guide others with confidence because you’ve lived the terrain. The parts of you that once felt broken become the bridges you help others cross.

And there’s something else we rarely talk about: the deeper you heal, the more sensitive you become. Not fragile - sensitive. Your intuition sharpens. Your body speaks more clearly. Your energy becomes more precise. You start noticing subtleties in others without trying - the tightening in their jaw, the shift in their breath, the tremor in their voice, the contraction in their chest. You begin reading people not with your mind, but with your entire nervous system. This sensitivity is not a weakness; it’s an instrument. It’s how spirit works through you.

The truth is, the world doesn’t need perfectly healed leaders. It needs leaders who are embodied. Leaders who are honest. Leaders who aren’t afraid to admit when they’re still learning. Leaders whose wisdom comes from the depths, not from the surface. Leaders who know the terrain of human emotion because they’ve walked every corner of it themselves.

Your healing is not a detour from your purpose - it IS your purpose. Your ongoing transformation is part of your medicine. Your willingness to keep going is what makes your work powerful. Your ability to walk yourself through your own shadows is what qualifies you to walk with others through theirs.

You don’t have to be finished to be impactful.
You don’t have to be perfect to be powerful.
You don’t have to have arrived to lead.

You just have to keep going, with intention, with integrity, and with an open heart.

Your healing doesn’t disqualify you as a healer.
It makes you one.

In devotion to your healing,

Jean