Showing Up Whole

Why Our Brains Resists Change: Finding Flow, Alignment, and New Habits

• Christina Fletcher • Season 5 • Episode 9

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Have you ever noticed how just before a breakthrough, everything suddenly feels uncertain?
 That voice of doubt creeps in precisely when you’re edging towards the finish line, or when you feel like you've finally cracked through. 
This isn’t a sign you’re on the wrong path; it’s your brain’s natural resistance to change.

In this episode, Christina Fletcher shares her personal journey of writing and submitting a dream book proposal to Hay House this summer and the surprising resistance that showed up just before completion. She explores the neuroscience of homeostasis (your brain’s way of clinging to what feels familiar) and how to stay aligned even when self-doubt intensifies.

Discover how to:

  • Understand and recognize homeostasis and why your brain resists change, even positive change
  • Recognize the difference between warning signs vs. growth resistance
  • Reframe self-doubt as a sign you’re on the edge of transformation
  • Access your intuition as “future memories”; guidance from your future self
  • Use small, consistent alignment practices to build resilience during uncertain times
  • Harness seasonal energy (like September) to anchor in new alignment habits
  • Apply these tools in real-life examples, just like in Christina’s manifestation story of meeting her husband

Christina also invites you to join her 5-day In-Flow Challenge starting September 15th. With videos, resources, and community support to help you establish habits that keep you grounded, clear, and aligned with your highest self, she's supporting you in stepping into your aligned self into the busiest season of the year.

 Join the In-Flow Challenge for FREE here

 And if you’re deprived of sleep and need to rest, don’t forget to grab the free Spiritual Sleep Solution Bundle at spirituallyawareliving.com/alignedtosleep

Christina Fletcher is a Spiritual Alignment coach, energy worker, author, speaker and host of the podcast Showing Up Whole.
She specialises in practical spirituality and integrating inner work with outer living, so you can get self development off of the hobby shelf and integrated as a powerful fuel to your life.

Through mindset, spiritual connection, intuitive guidance, manifestation, and mindfulness techniques Christina helps her clients overcome overwhelm and shame to find a place of flow, ease, and deep heart-centered connection.
Christina has been a spiritual alignment coach, healer and spiritually aware parent coach for 7 years and trained in Therapeutic Touch 8 years ago. She is also a meditation teacher and speaker.
For more information please visit her website www.spirituallyawareliving.com

Want to uncover where you need the most energy alignment?
Take her new Energy Alignment Quiz to identify which of your energetic worlds (mind, body, heart or spirit) needs aligning the most!

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Speaker 1:

Hi and welcome back to Showing Up Whole, the place where we discuss alignment in mind, body, heart and spirit in every aspect of our lives Today. Well, we've been a little bit on break. It's been summer and now we are definitely feeling the effects of autumn coming upon us. We've just had the eclipse and there's a lot of energy to be navigating through and at the same time, we are leaning into a time of routines, of headed towards the end of the year and truly stepping in to showing up whole. Hi, today I actually want to talk to you about something, really something that I've actually been dealing quite a bit with over the last few months, and that is the wonderful thing of homeostasis, of a little bit of resistance, and I think it's important that we talk a little bit about that here. I've told this to a few clients, I've talked about this with a few clients over the last few weeks and I've had these reactions of surprise of people being like oh, it's actually such a relief to hear that you actually deal with this, christina, and so I thought you know what I'm going to talk about this here, because it seems like a really important thing to talk about at this point in time. Let's just kind of recap, shall we? So over the summer I closed a lot of different funnels of my energy and, mostly temporarily, I put my Facebook group on pause. You've noticed that there hasn't been many episodes here. There has been a few things that I just stopped doing. My sub stack didn't really get written very much and that was all very intentionally done because I was writing a book proposal, because I had an opportunity to submit to Hay House.

Speaker 1:

Writing for Hay House has always been a dream of mine. Of course, everyone in this field dreams about being published by Hay House and when the opportunity came up because I attended a workshop, the opportunity came up to submit to them. I immediately jumped on it. So what started off as a rough book idea soon unfolded into this book proposal that actually had a lot of various steps that I'd never approached before. So that took my main attention for the summer months and it was a wonderful, exciting, exhilarating, terrifying experience. It was this incredible, this incredible navigation of exploring what I wanted to express to you, to readers all over, what I wanted to share, how I wanted to take things step by step to help with choosing yourself, to choose your higher self, your alignment and making sure that you are staying true to who you really are. I wanted to make sure that this was a journey for the person reading the book as well as the person reading the proposal. It was exciting and, honestly, I will tell you, I enjoyed so much of the process of even just writing a book proposal. The book still has to be written, but the book proposal breaking it down as this. It was a discovery for myself.

Speaker 1:

The interesting thing came about a week before it was finished, because suddenly the journey that had been the creation came to an end and suddenly I was in the nitpicky part and I felt my brain interrupt me. Suddenly, self-doubt kicked in Suddenly. I was positive, I'd missed something. Suddenly I was sure something wasn't the way it was supposed to be. I would read through the manuscript, I would read it and reread it, and reread it and it was almost like the words faded on the page and I couldn't quite grasp it anymore. It was like I'd been writing the dream and writing the dream and writing the dream, visualizing the finished result, getting in that excited juicy, manifesting space, and then just at the finish line, it went up in a puff of smoke. I've had this happen before and I want to say it's actually such just a human condition.

Speaker 1:

Side note here this Friday is Fletcher Day and for any of you who have worked with me or followed my work for any long period of time, you know that Fletcher Day is the anniversary of me meeting my husband. We always celebrate the day we met because we always said, well, the minute we met we were married. But it also is a vitally important part to me and my story because, quite frankly, meeting my husband was this powerful manifestation that I didn't even know the word manifestation at the time, but I just knew that I was tapping in to a different life. I found the frequency and the vibration of who he is and we connected even before we met and I followed that essence, that feeling space. The funny thing about any manifestation and I have realized this over the years of manifesting is that often, just before you actually embark on that next chapter, it often feels like a puff of smoke. It often feels ungrounded or dreamlike. I remember the day before I met my husband. I literally was in a hotel room, crying, feeling incredibly lonely, feeling incredibly aimless and not knowing why I had traveled across the ocean to the UK.

Speaker 1:

It's a funny thing when all of a sudden your brain kicks in and says no, we like the way things are. All of a sudden, things are getting too close to a change. You're suddenly becoming too confident, you're becoming too in flow, you're becoming too connected to some magical space. We have our patterns. This is what brains do, and we often forget that brains just love to stick to the comfort zone. If you have been in one habitual space for a long period of time, then your brain sees that as the safe space. It's the comfort zone, it's where it belongs. And the brain is part of your physical being and as part of your physical being, it has its own set of homeostasis, that space of homeostasis where it will always move whatever way it can, back into balance, basically meaning back into your practiced state. And so when suddenly you're working on something that excites you, exhilarates you, feels like it's moving you forward, feels like it's fulfilling a dream, feels just like a right slot into place, then your brain will give you maybe a few weeks, maybe a few months. It will push it as far as it can and then all of a sudden it goes oh my God, she's serious. And the minute it does that, it starts to throw in the self-doubt. And it happens to all of us, because we are always moving forward, we are always wanting to grow, we are always wanting to try new things and within that space, it means that we always are pushing our brains to the next comfort space.

Speaker 1:

You know you might have heard me talk about this before, but it's important to remember our brain patterns are literally like a massive wheat field or corn field that has these little paths carved into them and our neural pathways are those paths. They've been practiced over and over and over again. They're safe. You know that path goes from one end of the field to the other and you've walked it numerous times. And then suddenly you get a dream or an idea of how you want to live or how you want to do something differently. It doesn't even need to be a dream, it can be as simple as a habit, as simple as I want to change my morning routine, and your brain will allow you to kind of navigate or explore the area. It will say, okay, I'll check out that area of the field. But then when you actually start making the decision to chart that path, actually start making the decision to chart that path it actually will start. It will just throw in the self-doubt and go well, why would you do that? We have a perfectly good path over here. Why would you actually choose to make a new path when that's so complicated and we don't even know what's in that area of the field? Who knows what you will bump into in all that wheat? Know what's in that area of the field. Who knows what you will bump into in all that wheat?

Speaker 1:

So within all of this, it's so important to be deeply patient with yourself, to take really good care of yourself and to acknowledge that your brain is trying to keep you safe. You have to anchor in to what you really want and even deeper than what you really want, what feels in the deepest alignment with who you really are, what feels lightest, what feels the most bubbly, what feels the most juicy, what feels like it's calling you forward. And then you have to find the ways to make sure that you are anchoring into that truth every day. You can't force any habit without the knowing, without the belief, without the motivation of knowing that you want. What's on the other side of that it's funny speaking about, like the Hay House book. I don't know if it's going to be picked up by Hay House. Let's be honest. But at the same time, all I know are the experiences that I had.

Speaker 1:

I went to the Hay House workshop. It lit me up. I was so excited. I felt butterflies in my stomach. I loved every single moment of being there. Then, when I came back, I started planning out the book. It thrilled me, it excited me, and not only that, I was curious. It felt like I was being guided, I was being led, and to me, when I'm being led by the universe, when my team is actually working with me and pulling me forward to new discoveries, you can't keep me away. It makes me feel so alive. I just tingle from my fingertips all the way down to my toes, and I watched as every single day.

Speaker 1:

When I go to my computer and I'm still writing the book, so I go to my computer and I'm still writing the book, so I go to my computer as soon as I sit down to it, I just feel like nothing can distract me. There is nothing else calling me past that moment. To me, all of those are indicators that I am right in flow. I am in deep alignment to what I'm supposed to be doing. And just that knowing is even more exciting, because that is what we're here to do. That is, living on purpose.

Speaker 1:

So you have to be consciously aware of how things make you feel when you're approaching them, and in so many ways, just knowing that something is in alignment with yourself is enough to actually move you forward to creating that new path, even if your brain tells you why are we doing this? There's another path that's so much easier. New path, even if your brain tells you why are we doing this? There's another path that's so much easier. You have to have the deeper understanding of what you're working on. Sometimes it also helps by knowing what will happen if you actually don't do it, and that, too, is a really important thing. Don't do it, and that, too, is a really important thing. It's really important to acknowledge what you might either suffer from or be pushing against, for instance.

Speaker 1:

For instance, as someone who is currently dealing with perimenopause, I will tell you that I discovered that sugar definitely makes me feel well out of balance. So, as someone who was a deep sugar fiend, who loved my chocolate and who was a regular consumer of sugary things and sweet things, I will tell you here and now that over the last few months another thing that happened to my summer I literally eliminated pretty much anything that had sugar in it, except for some raw honey, and that was a strange thing for me, and I realized that it was actually easier and easier and easier, because I told myself that I literally couldn't afford it. Mentally, emotionally, spiritually. It was interrupting my flow Personally. For me, anything that interrupts my flow becomes the non-negotiable. It means that that is where I draw the line and that is where I will chart any new path, because flow is what leads us to magic. It was the flow that I felt and found that led me onto a plane to meet my husband 24 years ago. It was flow that led me to my work. It's flow that has always made sure that I could feel secure and grounded, even in unstable times. It's making sure that I'm tapping into that version of myself that I know as my inner truth, and when you find that groove, then suddenly you deal with things slightly differently.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I want to talk a little bit more about being in flow and how that really affects these times, because we're in really complicated energetic times. So I'm just going to grab a drink of water, take a little break and then let's be back just in a sec. I know how. There's nothing worse than your mind chattering away, feeling like it's out of control. It seems like the more you try to get it quiet, the louder it manages to get. It's even worse when you're trying to sleep. It's like the most stressful thoughts kick up a fuss just before you climb into bed.

Speaker 1:

Energy alignment affects every aspect of yourself. Your spiritual connection actually can affect your sleep and if your head is chattering, chances are you are in need of an energetic shift, especially if you want a restful night. I have the perfect remedy for you and, best of all, right now it's free. The Spiritual Sleep Solution Bundle shares powerful steps for energy alignment with you to get you aligned to sleep, from the physical practice of clearing your energy from the day and a meditation along with an energy healing to soothe you off to slumber. This bundle has you covered no more restless sleeps, no more tossing and turning rather simply, spiritually connected slumber. You also get a PDF guide to a few ways to clear energy from your home and some tips to support your bedtime all for free. Download it now at spirituallyawarelivingcom aligned to sleep or at the link in the show notes below and sweet dreams.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so we're talking about how you have to find the ways of getting your brain wrapped around the idea of changing. And when you change you will hit bumps in the road, but the idea is that your change will always be something that's moving you forward into deeper alignment to yourself. When you're in deeper alignment of self, then you have a deeper sense of flow. So what is this mysterious flow? You know, my father used to always say go with the flow, and he kind of took it really lightly. But in my mind there's no more important advice than that, because flow is when you are in true alignment with yourself, when you're on purpose and, more so, you're working with the universe. Flow is when you are in such deep alignment with your whole self that you watch things unfold, you feel the nudges. You feel the nudges, you feel the guidance, you feel called forward, and then you listen to them and a ripple effect happens because you listen to that guidance. So you get more of the same and everything just feels the right fit. Oh, other side note, I heard the coolest thing the other day. I'm telling everyone I work with Did you know that scientists have shown that your intuition is actually future memories.

Speaker 1:

That is when you're in flow. Your intuition is so strong. You know what's coming because you tap in to the frequency of your future self and so, therefore, then you remember. You remember what's coming because time is secular, it is not linear, and within that, it means that you have this deep knowing of who you are and who you are becoming, and in that alignment of who you are becoming, then you start to feel this enriched, fulfilling, on-purpose path that can't be rattled by all of the noise that's around us all the time, can't be rattled by all of the noise that's around us all the time. We are living in a very noisy, precarious, unstable world. It seems like every time you turn around, something is rattling the chain, the jars. It is a continual shaking of the foundations and as someone who works with people from all over the world, I will tell you that there are a number of very, very scared people, and this is not something that I am telling them just to focus on love and light about. I acknowledge the fear that they are in and if you, listening to this, are in a state of fear and uncertainty, I acknowledge that is definitely a reality that is happening Now.

Speaker 1:

What comes with that is that there's a deeper responsibility to find flow. There's a deeper urgency to connect and plug in to your deepest alignment, because the deeper we find ourselves in fear or uncertainty, the more uncertainty perpetuates, it spirals, it builds. Momentum is there and one of the most challenging things as humans to do is to actually find the capacity to be experiencing one thing and resonate with another, to resonate with love in the presence of fear, to resonate with the feeling of light when things feel heavy, to resonate and without denying what's here and instead choosing to resonate from a heart-centered space, from a different frequency. However, this is one of the most important things we can do as humans, because we tip the balance when we do that. Now, how does that relate to homeostasis and habits and creating movement forward, kind of everything? And creating movement forward Kind of everything? Because the thing is is that if you aren't working on your alignment and moving forward and creating habits, that's actually going to help you get more in flow and more in alignment. If you're not creating and anchoring into that next up-level version of yourself, then you find yourself in a vulnerable position of being sucked in and feeling the heaviness and the fear even more. You have to find your anchor and then you can be the help, the lighthouse, the support, the love flow. You find yourself able to be the helper, the supporter, the lover, because you're resonating with something different, and that takes putting the right steps in place for your own personal alignment.

Speaker 1:

Again, you know it's September. I'm passionate about September, maybe more than any other time. There's certain seasons that I just get so excited about, and September is one of them, because the summer busyness is over and I always laugh because I go well, it wasn't summer supposed to be relaxing and for some reason, we all end summer totally exhausted. So you have the summer and suddenly then you find yourself headed into this magical time of autumn. And again, if you are in the Southern Hemisphere, I apologize for these flips around, but still, september is close to the end of the year. It's a time where you can actually start leaning into going. What was my intentions for December? What was my intention for 2025? What was my intentions of who I wanted to be and how I wanted to grow? And then you look at the next four months and you say this is it. This is when I step in, this is when I put this in place. And then you consider holiday season, by end of November, and you start going okay, so those four months have actually shrank down to eight weeks, and so here we go.

Speaker 1:

What do you need to do to be in alignment with who you have become? Small steps, the smallest of steps and the strongest of habits Habits of checking in with yourself, daily habits of observing yourself and going oh yeah, that's my brain actually trying to keep safe. Habits of tapping into your spiritual source, of checking in with your team, of checking in with your heart. And sometimes that's as simple as sitting down with a cup of tea for two minutes. Sometimes that's a question of grounding your feet on the earth for 30 seconds. Sometimes that's a question of a simple meditation in the car. It's the smallest moments, but it's this decision to take them. So here's what I'm doing heads up, get your pen ready if you go to uh, oh, I actually got a bitly code. It's like B-I-T, bitly backslash inflowchallenge. If you go there, I am doing an inflowchallenge.

Speaker 1:

Next week, september 15th, we are starting. It is going to be all about creating an inflowchallenge, an inflowhabitcom that will carry you through. The idea is that we take the challenge for five days. By the end of five days you'll like your habit and you'll want to keep it, because you'll see that it makes everything different. Usually when you do habit challenges, I'm like what habit do you want? Any habit goes and some people will do everything, from stopping screens to waking up at different times to going to bed earlier, all kinds of things.

Speaker 1:

This time instead, when you sign up for the Inflow Challenge and again the link will be down in the show notes when you sign up for the Inflow Challenge, what happens is you get a list of different inflow activities that you can try out right away and you can kind of feel around what one works for you. Then, starting next Monday, september 15th, you're going to start getting little tiny videos from me in your inbox and those videos are going to help you understand what your brain is doing and why you need the motivation, the soul motivation, the deeper motivation to create that new path in your field. Then, over in the Facebook group, I'm doing an accountability post. There's going to be a prize for if you comment on it every day, there's going to be or for like one person who you got entered. If you comment every day, then there's going to be support and we're going to make sure that everyone feels held in this space of creating habit to step into alignment with yourself.

Speaker 1:

This is important. It's so important that we claim ourselves, that we claim our focus, our energy, our soul, self and show up as that version of us. Because this is the time, this is when it matters. It's so important to be in alignment with who you are, because then you're going to feel that intuition, you're going to feel that call, that movement forward that your life is going to be calling you to the greatest version of that life the most hopeful, the most loving, the most blissful, the most content, the most juicy, the most exhilarating, the most vibrant, the most loving, the most exhilarating, the most vibrant, the most loving. But you do that by making a choice for every day to be tapping in to something greater than you, and that's flow, the flow of love. So really hope you'll join me because this one's big and we're going to be doing it together with loads of support, and I really would love to have you on board If, of course, you don't know how to make that work and it feels a little too big for you, if it feels like even that is a little overwhelming, just drop me a message.

Speaker 1:

You can always email me at christ at SpirituallyWearLivingcom, and let's check in. Let me see if I can support you in any other way, because we're living in very strange, unprecedented times. How often have we used that phrase over the last little while? But we are. But they come for a reason, and the reason they come is that we get to know how to stand up for who we are. They come for a reason, and the reason they come is that we get to know how to stand up for who we are. And that doesn't come by practicing the same habits that you always have practiced. Rather, it comes by choosing to be a deeper version of you and making that choice every day. So let me know how I can support you.

Speaker 1:

I hope you've joined me on the challenge, because I'm ever so excited to be offering it. It's nice to have my Facebook group back open again and, yeah, let's create a phenomenal last bit of this year and raise it to the roof that we're flowing in love. It's nice to be back with you again. I'm sending all my love and light. Look forward to doing more episodes. I've got some great interviews coming up, so make sure that you subscribe, make sure that you like the video and, if you ever feel like leaving a review for the podcast, I'd deeply appreciate it. Sending all my love and light. Have a wonderful week, everyone, and take care.