Your Wound Is Not Your Medicine (Yet)

Your wound is your medicine…

Unless it’s still choosing for you.

In this deeply personal episode of Mystic in Training, Melissa Amos explores the hidden difference between wounds that have become wisdom - and wounds that are still unconsciously driving our behaviour.

Blending psychotherapy, spiritual intelligence, Akashic wisdom and identity work, Melissa shares the uncomfortable but transformative realisation that understanding your pain is not the same thing as being free from it.

This episode dives into:

• Hidden agreements and unconscious identity patterns
• Why spiritually intelligent people often intellectualise their feelings
• Overthinking, overprocessing and overachieving as protection mechanisms
• The wound underneath ambition and perfectionism
• How trauma can shape gifts, intuition and purpose
• The difference between survival mode and embodied healing
• What it really means for your wound to become your medicine

Melissa vulnerably shares how her own need to be “exceptional” became both her gift and her protection strategy - and how her healing journey is no longer about becoming less deep, less ambitious or less sensitive, but becoming safe enough to stop hiding inside those identities.

If you’ve ever:

• understood your patterns but still felt stuck
• hidden behind intelligence, spirituality or achievement
• struggled to feel truly seen
• felt driven to prove yourself
• used growth and healing as identity
• sensed there’s another layer underneath your success

…this episode is for you.

This is one of the deepest and most revealing episodes of Mystic in Training so far.

PS - in my world, we don’t just have the awareness. We move from it. 

Join the Decision Activator, we start on Monday: https://melissa-amos.com/decision-activator/

Memoirs of a Mystic In Training, by Melissa Amos is available on Amazon

Learn more about Melissa by visiting her website melissa-amos.com and download a free hypnotherapeutic series, Intuition Rewired. 

Follow her @themelissaamos across the platforms 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Mystic in Training podcast with me, your host, Melissa Amos. Your wound is your medicine. True, unless it is still a wound. And if it's still a wound, then it becomes something entirely different. So stick with me because I have been on a deep dive these last few weeks and the revelations have been uh enormous. And I realize that this is one of the biggest misunderstandings when it comes to healing, when it comes to the spiritual space. Because if you're anything like me, and I see this time and again, somewhere along the way, we have got very good at articulating our pain, at understanding that we have these woundings and we can intellectualize them, we can therapise it, we can spiritualize it, we can turn it into frameworks and wisdom, and we can do all of that. But until we realize that the wound is doing the choosing for us and begin to choose again, then it's still going to have the hold on us that we've been trying to break through. I've been moving through what I call my success codes, getting really honest about what has actually been driving me, what actually has been going on underneath the surface for really for my whole life. So, what I mean by that is these inner codings that are driving me, my patterns, my behaviors, my coping strategies, things like how I can sometimes appear one way, but the depth that sits underneath it. Um, even my ambition and the wound that sits underneath it, I've been looking at all of it and what they're really trying to teach me. And uh I learnt a lot. I learn a lot. I definitely, having been through my psychotherapy training and the epic amounts of inner inquiry, summits, workshops, therapies, modalities, and all of these things, um, I definitely had the impression that my healing came in my depth, my my ability to understand it. This ability to be able to process things, to articulate them, that I would understand the patterns and the inner woundings, and I would bring it to my brain because this is my safe place, and be like, yeah, I get it now. I know why I behave like I do. And I was kind of using my intellect and my understanding that I had moved beyond the wound, but actually, it a lot of it wasn't. Actually, a lot of it was protection. I think a lot of it was me understanding that I could turn my feelings into frameworks, that I could turn it into understandings, that I could turn it into my work. Because if I'm really truthful, a lot of it was safer to understand than to actually feel it. And that, my friends, was a hard lesson to learn. I say that it was a big lesson to learn. What I realized was that there's a big difference between actually holding wisdom and still operating from that level but dressing it up as wisdom. I was a really deep kid, and I was also very clever. I would find patterns in everything, and I had this ability really to see the depth that sat underneath the surface. But as I was growing up, I I didn't really have anybody outside of me mirror that to me. I didn't know from you know my five-year-old, seven-year-old, ten-year-old brain, I didn't understand that, first of all, that this was something that was unique to me. We go through our childhood believing that everybody sees the same the world the same way as us. From my point of view, where I would see the underlying wounds, like I would, I would literally, people would tell me things, and I would somehow be able to understand what was going on underneath the surface, the wound that was driving them, the potential that wasn't reached that yet, the feelings that were operating underneath what it was that they were actually saying to me. Whether the person or the group that I was speaking to understood that too, I didn't know. But what I learned very quickly was oh, we only show the outer one or two layers. That's where we operate from. That is what is safe, that is what is going to be seen. And what I saw mirrored back to me was it was only what was on the outside that was taken on board. The amount of times my teachers would say, you know, she she does really well, but she'd be even more exceptional if she didn't just sit there and daydream. Like, and and even this thing of like, I'm not sure how much she really cares about this thing. She's very quiet, she is quite insular, she's got an active imagination. That did come out. Actually, inside I wasn't quiet. Inside, I was really loud. It might have looked like I was daydreaming, but inside I was processing everything, I was taking it on. I was I was listening to the level beneath the words, I was listening to the emotion and the energy and the frequency that all sat underneath it. And that was what was going on. So, of course, on the outside, I looked like I was just quiet and good and easy and well, because I didn't know what to do with all of this depth that was going on inside. As I'm looking at this now, I'm realizing that whilst none of this was wrong and none of this, spoiler alert, means that I'm broken. You can understand, or I was beginning to understand, how my wounds were becoming my identities. How the pain that I felt behind it of nobody really sees me became my personality because what I started to do was, okay, well, I've got all of these layers, which one do I want to show up today? I use my intelligence as a protection mechanism so that I didn't have to feel all of this. And so the my intellect became my prized possession and the understanding that I would feel for other people and the and the what I would mirror back to them, and and how people would say to me all of the time, Melissa, I really feel like you see me. Melissa, I really feel like you understand me. Like, how did you know that? If I'm truthful, like that was the thing that I was craving. That was what I wanted to feel, that somebody could appreciate me, not just for what's going on on the outside, but through all of the layers that are happening underneath. And looking back, I do realize how yes, my wound is my medicine for other people. How I began to cope create these strategies, which then actually made me very good at my work, pattern recognition, being able to see the soul underneath the identity, understanding what's going on and the future paths that are create that are being created, being able to process not just the words, but the emotion and the frequency and the energetics that are sitting underneath it. These are all part of my power, these are all part of who I am. This is all part of why I've managed to build the business and have the depth of knowledge that I have now. And when I understand that because I was never seen, I therefore need to be exceptional. That was that was what child me said. Because I'm not really seen, I need to be exceptional. And because nobody sees it, I need to not care if anybody sees it. And so I detach. And so I became from the outside looking like, well, she doesn't care, she's good, she's independent, she's got it, she's easy. That was only a small part of my story. I realized this recently, and it was quite a shocker, that I've built a lot of my life around the need to be exceptional. Like this is completely unconscious. And of course, right, it's worked in in many ways. It's helped me, it's served me in many ways of wanting to, you know, really know everything about the subject that I'm studying, to really kind of do the homework and do more research than I need to, to take the tools and to interlink it with everything else, so that in my training courses and my classes and motherhood, I'm doing the best that I can, right? So it helped. But I realized this that somewhere in there, there was this belief that if I am not exceptional, then I disappear. If I'm not exceptional, then I don't exist. Like, what's the point? If I can't be the best at what I'm doing, and not the best necessarily out of everybody else, because I definitely don't feel like I'm better than everybody else, as maybe also part of the the wound and the medicine. But this, what's the point if I can't bring it all with me? It was a bit of a shock to the system. But when I sat with it and processed it and spoke to it and wrote to it, I realized that a lot of what I do and how I cope and the strategies that I've put in place are turned into like overthinking, dare I say it, overprocessing, overlearning has been a pattern throughout my life until really quite recently, overachieving. You know, I look back and people are like, Melissa, I don't understand how you do it all. Like you've got all of this, and I'm like, Yeah, you know. And I don't see it as a big deal because I was being driven by this one agreement that I filed under evolution. I'm like, well, this is my evolution path. I'm tired evolved. But it wasn't really that I want to grow. That might have been layer one and two, but when I really go down into the seven layers deep, it was this. I need to be extraordinary in order to feel safe being seen. I will only let you see me in my extraordinary ways, in my wonder, in my with that mask on of well, yeah, I know it. And I'm gonna hide that under humility and pretend that I don't really care. None of this was happening happening consciously, all of this was happening underneath the surface, and I think about how much energy has been put into that. I appreciate it, nothing's broken. We are perfectly made, and I can see very clearly how my wound has created my gift, how not being met or seen at that level helped me develop the ability to see myself at that level and then see other people at that level. I see how wanting to understand it beforehand has allowed me, for example, to create a Kashik Reiki where I literally pulled everything apart, went into my psychotherapy, went into my energy work, went seven layers deep, managed to um pull apart the things that work and that don't, and that was superfluous and all of these things, and then bring them back together into something that was streamlined and that comes in. In fact, the whole of Akashic Reiki is based on what I'm speaking about, the levels of depth, the coming into the truth and the soul, which I realize now I've spent my life really wanting to be witnessed in, but most of the world just sees the overlays. And how this has driven me into well, if more people could see the truth of who we are rather than just the wounds, how much more evolved we would become. But you might see this in yourself, where your wound, if you were abandoned, for example, it creates this incredible attunement. How, if we've been rejected or we feel like we're not seen it creates this performance, it you know, it can put us out there. Look to showbiz, and you will see that time and time again. How feeling like you've not been met in your intellect or in your talent can then create this overachievement. But the wound might have shaped the gift, but while it's always driving the behavior, whilst I am growing in, well, I need to be extraordinary in order to be safe, to be seen, it's not really the medicine, not yet. We're running from survival, and that's exhausting because we're running from a false self, we're running from a construct that sits above the well of infinite energy that's that sits in your soul. And whilst this got me to hear, and I am so grateful, really, what I'm understanding now is I come into these continual next layers of extraordinariness, right? Of growth, of true growth. I realize that the this thing that's been protecting me for so long actually can't come along into my next stage through my next door. Because overthinking can begin to become paralysis. Like, well, if I need to hit eight steps ahead and before I can make a decision, then actually I'm not listening to the truth that my soul is showing me. That if I'm turning everything into wisdom, yes, it's great, and I share it with my clients, and I become, but if I'm not turning it back on myself and actually using it to reconnect with my soul or my heart, then there's always going to be this barrier of what I allow myself to see in you and what you allow yourself to see in me. The wound has been my greatest gift, but to make it an even greater gift, we understand that whilst I've spent my life protecting me from something that I didn't even know I needed to protect, whilst I created these strategies and these adaptations in order to find myself safe or belonging, maybe in the world, it's realizing that that was just a part of me, maybe a dominant part of me, but a part of me. And the real invitation now is if it's fully, when it's fully integrated, it brings us into this next level of identity when it's no longer running as a survival pattern, which comes out right in people pleasing, which comes out in hesitation, which comes out in being like less ambitious or too ambitious, or in my case, I would I realized I was different, and I was like, Well, okay, well, I'm what level of different can I show the world now? And so I'm con I'm intellectualizing it and consciously choosing it rather than truly letting that my inner freak be really seen. And I have to say, I have got better at that over the years. I've I've been doing this work for a long time, and this was the as I've been working with my codings, as I've been working with the okay, what does it actually mean? When I've been really diving deep, and if you've been listening to my podcast, you've been hearing me speaking again and again and again about these hidden agreements, what's going on under the surface? And as I got really honest, this next level came up. The healing isn't about turning down the things that you don't accept about yourself, like the ambition, the sensitivity, the depth, the intelligence, the curiosity, the you know whatever it is. The healing really is how do I become safe enough to stop hiding inside them? How do I become safe enough to let them be fully seen without them being the main driver of my behavior? Understanding that the wound is the medicine when it's integrated, not just by default. Understanding that the wound is your medicine, yes, for your clients and your friends and your family and the people around you for sure. I've been holding that for a long time, but it's also the medicine to self. My uniqueness is as much as my gift as it is my saboteur. My depth is as much as my gift as it is my protection mechanism. My intellect, turning these things into frameworks, is as much as my gift as my mechanism to stop people really seeing what's going on inside me. And if I've spent my life really wanting to be seen, how is how is anyone ever going to really see me if I'm still working from that I need to be extraordinary? It's not gonna happen. And that is what it means to be a mystic in training. Not somebody who's intellectualized all of their wounds, not somebody who never gets wounded, but when we're willing to notice that the wound is still choosing from us, to stop just sitting in awareness of it and actually doing the thing to become more of ourselves rather than protect those parts of us. Doing this work, I realized that this thing that I've been unconsciously and consciously trying to heal my whole life wasn't the problem in the first place. It was the gift. And when I follow the golden thread back into me, I realize that it contained my medicine all along. That it contained my next level of growth, identity, understanding, which contain the path towards the thing that I've been craving my whole life to be fully seen for who I am, truly who I am, which is the gift that I show the world. And so now it's a case to step through that door and understanding that this is all this, that this is part of me, and I have this, I accept this, I love this, I bring this all into what I do, and I'm safe enough to feel it and to express it and to be seen. That is the next level of my growth. That is the next level of my success. That is the next level of my becoming, and so dear mystic, that's your invitation not to chastise yourself, not to be even more aware of the wound, but to begin to notice where is the wound still driving my behaviour? Where am I using it for protection? Where am I m using it to deflect? And how do I bring it back to me so that I can really truly bring all of my gifts into the world? I will see you next time.