When Healing Drains the Healer
There is a paradox I continue to meet in my own life: the tension between a mission that feels larger than myself and the cost that living into that mission can exact on my body, my marriage, my parenting, social life and my wellbeing.
Recently, I read a piece from the Centre for Healing that spoke of how easily healers and space-holders can give at the expense of themselves. Every sentence landed. It was not an abstract idea - it was me.
Even on my recent holiday, I woke in the early hours - two, sometimes three - to work before the house stirred. Those quiet hours felt productive, but they were also costly. I told myself it was necessary, that the mission was too important to pause. Yet in doing so, I carried tension in my hips and possibly compromised and even sacrificed presence.
Candle running out
On the outside, it’s easy to appear composed. To look like the one who has it all together. But inside, my body tells the truth. The urgency. The depletion. The whisper that says: “this isn’t sustainable.”
I also notice how quickly I slip into over-functioning - taking on too much, assuming responsibility before it’s asked of me, carrying weight that was never mine to carry. On the surface, it looks like dedication. But when I pause and ask what drives this, I hear echoes of old conditioning: that to be valuable is to be useful, that to be loved is to keep giving, that rest is something earned, not something innate.
I tell myself I want to prevent this pattern from repeating in my children — to protect them from the exhaustion and striving I have carried — but I know that words alone are not enough. I can talk about balance all I want, yet unless I model it in how I live, the message is hollow.
So I ask myself:
Where did I first learn that my worth is tied to how much I can do?
What beliefs still convince me that slowing down means falling behind?
What might it feel like to trust that I am enough, even when I am not producing?
And yet, I know why I do it. My mission - to bring breath, healing and awakening into spaces of leadership and life… runs deep. It is born from what I have lived, what I continue to learn and what I see change in others.
But here is the truth: service doesn’t need to mean sacrifice. The mission isn’t calling me to burn out. It is asking me to shift. To release the old patterns of proving my worth through overworking, and instead to give from a place of overflow.
Healing others is not meant to cost us our own health. If it does, something in the foundation needs to be rebalanced.
The practice, then, is this: to keep the mission alive, while remembering that I, too, matter.
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