Are You Healing...or Trying to Earn Your Ascension?

Blog 12: Part of The Season of Subtle Return series - a reckoning with spiritual burnout, where healing becomes performance and devotion turns to collapse.

Last time, in When You Almost Miss The Thing That Would Have Saved You, I wrote about the quiet pressure to earn our way into presence - even joy. But I hadn’t yet uncovered the deeper story beneath that hesitation: the belief that I had to earn my healing. My wholeness. My right to ascend. This post is about what happened when I finally saw that striving for what I already was...was the very thing keeping me from ever arriving.

The Illusion of Healing

We don't like to admit it, but sometimes what begins as healing slowly transforms into something else entirely - a spiritual performance we don't even realize we're giving.

I know this transformation intimately. What started as genuine healing became something I never intended - a relentless climb to embrace a "higher self" I was never quite worthy enough to claim.

It didn't start that way. Energy healing was a godsend when I first started it - a lifeline that helped untangle the tentacles of complex trauma that had kept me in a state of constant pain, chronic fatigue, and emotional turmoil for years.

But somewhere along the line - so quietly I didn't even notice - it shifted. What began as healing my body, mind, and spirit morphed into performance mode. Each new course, healing modality, and transformational program became one more rung on the ladder I needed to climb to "earn" my ascension, to "save myself" from the lower vibrating 3D matrix, as we so dramatically called it.

The climb wasn’t holy. It was driven. And there was always more to do to “reach the top.”

The more I worked, the more I committed, the more I cleared, the closer I thought I was getting to that higher timeline, that future self that was always, always just out of reach. One more course. One more activation. One more shadow to clear. One more frequency to embody.

I Wasn’t Rising. I Was Evacuating

The body knows, though. It always knows when we're leaving it behind.

Mine spoke through persistent low-grade chest pressure - not the emergency kind, just the kind that never really left. Through brain fog that hovered like coastal mist, refusing to lift no matter how many "clarity protocols" I followed. Through that peculiar emotional flatness I dignified by calling it "neutrality" - as if numbness was somehow spiritual.

These weren't signs of ascension. They were distress signals from a body I was methodically leaving behind in my quest to rise above it all.

Last summer, when life came crashing down around me in a series of events that nearly broke me, my instinct was to dig deeper, to excavate, to unlock the shadows that clearly needed clearing - because surely they had contributed to this misfortune. And in my intense healing work, with each session, each activation, I ended up dissociating further from my physical self. The more I dug, the further away I floated.

Until one day, a truth hit me with such force it left me breathless:

I wasn't healing anymore. I was floating. I wasn't even in my body. I was performing.

The moment I realized I wasn’t rising - I was evacuating.

That realization unraveled everything. I had been trying to earn my way to ascension for so long that I'd started leaving my body behind in the process. All those healings stacked on top of healings weren't bringing me home…they were my way of proving to myself that I deserved “ascension.” See how hard I'm working? See how committed I am?

Meanwhile, my nervous system was quietly collapsing under the weight of all that spiritual striving. I didn’t know it then, but I was deep in spiritual burnout. Everything felt like devotion, but it was collapse.

The body doesn't lie. And mine was screaming a truth I didn't want to hear: that I was overriding my own system, overdoing it in the name of evolution. That somewhere along the way, healing had become another form of not-enoughness.

We spend so much time trying to ascend into our higher selves without ever being IN our present self.

I was furious when I finally saw it - furious with myself for falling into such an old, familiar pattern. The religious programming of my childhood had simply shape-shifted into spiritual clothing.

Back in my blog: The Illusion Unmasked, I wrote about how healing had begun to mirror the religious frameworks I thought I’d left behind, replacing sin with trauma, confession with shadow work. But I hadn’t yet realized how fully I was still living inside that structure myself.

Unworthiness that needed to be healed, karma that needed to be cleared, density that needed to be released.

Always something more to do before I could be whole.

I wrote more about this in….

The Cosmic Exit Plan

“When healing becomes your identity, you forget who you were before you needed healing.” But I hadn’t yet seen how fully I’d turned that identity into performance - a cycle of becoming that never let me just be.

When Healing Became Performance

What began as a path to wholeness quietly became a stage I didn’t know I was standing on.

This was my own mental belief system that perpetuated this - that I had to earn my way to ascension. The healing industry just made it real easy to plug into to escalate it. It offered me the perfect stage for my unconscious performance.

It wasn’t about the audience. It was about the belief that I had to perform to be worthy.

The business structure, marketing, content all would naturally land for someone who believes they have to work hard to achieve their "salvation." The way healing is marketed as a business was just the ideal thing that came along to perpetuate this - just in a different way.

There's a particular kind of grief that hits when you realize you've been leaving yourself in the name of healing. That every "breakthrough" was actually taking you further from home. That what felt like evolution was a slow evacuation.

I was sincere, more than sincere. I did my daily healing audios, worked through every protocol, was there for every upgrade. But somewhere along the way, healing had become another way to abandon myself in the name of becoming.

And when the crash came? When my body finally refused to cooperate with this endless ascension plan?

It didn't look like failure. It looked like integration.

And that’s the cruel irony - when even healing becomes a performance, stopping doesn’t feel like relief. It feels like failure. Until it doesn’t. Until everything stops... and something quiet begins.

A system quietly short-circuiting in the name of ascension.

Now I can see it so clearly - those moments when I pushed through exhaustion to attend another healing circle, another activation, another clearing. Those times I ignored my body's signals because surely they were just "resistance" or "old energy releasing." The way I kept chasing the next level, the next dimension, the next frequency.

It was healing, at first. But eventually, it became spiritual achievement that led to spiritual burnout - another level to unlock. And beneath it all, I was just overachieving.

This pattern isn't just my story. Look around and you'll see it….people exhausting themselves trying to earn spiritual worthiness. We've collectively repackaged the same old unworthiness in healing language, trading religious salvation for "ascension timelines" and "quantum leaps." The marketing shifts, but the trap remains identical.

Finding compassion for the part of me that believed she needed to climb her way to wholeness hasn't been easy. That version of me who thought if she just worked hard enough, cleared enough, rose high enough….she'd finally be worthy. I try to hold her more and more with grace rather than judgment.

The Landing

What I know in my bones after all this striving is that healing doesn't require transcending our humanity.

This is what healing looks like when you’re no longer trying to earn it.

It comes from finally inhabiting it fully.
It means healing has to happen in the body - not floating above it.
It means honoring our body's wisdom rather than constantly trying to override it with one more healing modality or activation.
We spend so much time chasing our higher selves that we miss what's already here.

This isn’t a call to do more. This is what happens when you finally stop.

The journey was never about trying to ascend beyond what we are.
It was about learning how to truly embody it.

Love,
Sherry

> > > Next: So what happens when we stop trying to earn our way out of being human? When we finally learn to regulate what's here instead of chasing what's beyond? Next in the series - Ever Tried Embodiment… in Public?
Explores what real embodiment looks like. Welcome to overstimulation, exposure, and the brutal honesty of trying to land while everyone’s watching.


For more on how healing mirrored religious frameworks, I wrote about it in

The Illusion Unmasked

Author’s Note: This piece wasn’t written to throw shade at healers, methods, or spiritual tools. It was written to name how even the most sincere healing path can become another performance when worth is still being earned underneath it. This is where it broke open - for me. And maybe for you too.


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About the Author

Sherry writes from the space between dimensions—where presence meets paradox, and mastery gives way to meaning. With a background in metaphysical work and energetic healing that spans decades, her voice carries the imprint of lived wisdom - not as doctrine, but as invitation.

Her blog, It Exists (For Now), moves fluidly across themes of transformation, embodiment, remembrance, and the quiet revelations of everyday life. This is not writing to teach, fix, or convert. It’s a space to feel, question, soften, and come home to what’s already here.

Whether she’s naming what’s unraveling beneath the surface or tracing the shimmer of wonder returning, her words are less about offering answers—and more about walking with you through the liminal.