I wanted to give everyone an update in this episode about my current journey within the Soul’d Trajectory. Especially since I’m moving through this, documenting the process along the way, so that those who choose to take this approach to essence-led expansion have an idea of what to expect and tools to move through it.
Last week I talked about The Holding Pattern and specifically about the pressure that builds the capacity. I’m living this in real time. It’s pressure that is almost unbearable, but I believe it’s doing something more than building capacity; I believe it’s squeezing you into greatness.
Because the antidote to pressure isn’t constantly checking external reality to see if it’s catching up yet. The antidote is staying open and available to what unfolds. It’s a form of active stillness (or even active containment), and it’s where the external reality that reflected the old you is still present, your ego is still screaming at you to go back, but you’re oriented toward what’s true. You know who you are, what you stand for, and you’ve built the structure and capacity to live how you want to live. And you’re doing it. You’re not negotiating with external forces – people, situations, circumstances. You’re not abandoning yourself to make others feel better about what you’re doing. You’re holding the line. And take it from me, it’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do.
The interesting part is that once you’ve built enough capacity to hold the line, the challenge is no longer external. The final battle becomes internal. It becomes a battle over whether you’ll protect the coherence you’ve built… or abandon it the moment the pressure becomes unbearable.
Part 1: The Sneaky Games Your Ego Will Play
As a way of introducing the idea of restraint as capacity, I want to talk about the sneaky games your ego will play as you come closer to convergence. I want to look at two major ways the ego gets tricky with you.
The first way: “You need to manufacture action in order for something to happen.”
One of the questions that is coming up is where the old paradigm approach to building momentum and moving forward sneak in. Perhaps someone projects their panic onto you. Or perhaps you scroll through motivational quotes that demand that you try harder and do something. This is the biggest trigger I find myself facing at the moment.
For me, there’s nothing more than I’d love to do than make a move. But I’m at a point in this approach where I can’t move unless it’s true. It sounds crazy to most, but it’s a form of signal-responsive restraint that I’m learning. I don’t know how to do this, because I’ve been taught to react, to panic, to scramble, to survive. When I look at the restraint through the lens of my conditioning, if I were to start rapidly making moves out of fear, I’d be returning to an identity that requires productivity and the feeling of control to feel comfortable. I’d be letting my external conditions move me because I’d be so afraid to stay where I am. The movements wouldn’t be true; they’d be manufactured and forced out of urgency.
When you are in this deep, the ego’s favorite weapon is second-guessing. It weaponizes your own self-awareness against you. It whispers, “Are you being patient, or are you just lazy? Are you waiting for a true hit, or are you just hiding from failure?” It creates a hall of mirrors specifically designed to make you panic and force a move. Let’s dismantle the trickiness.
What is the anatomy of “manufactured” actions?
- They are designed to relieve the immediate discomfort of sitting still.
- They would force you to deviate from the foundation and structures you’ve built.
- They would require a big pivot or a backtrack toward control.
An action that requires you to backtrack toward control or abandon your built foundation is almost never an authentic hit. That is a textbook “panic action.” When the ego cannot control the outcome, it will settle for controlling the scenery. It would rather you smash your own structure and start a new fire just so it has something to do, rather than make it sit quietly.
And for me specifically, I would often feel the pain of wanting to act, but I’d choose to hold steady anyway because I recognize those actions as false. That is the signal. A hiding ego wouldn’t feel the painful tension of wanting to act; a hiding ego would feel a secret, comfortable relief in being stuck.
Then there’s the illusion of “leaving it to chance.” “Why am I doing nothing when I could be doing all the things?” The fear that you are leaving too much up to chance is a classic ego-rebellion. Your ego thinks that if you aren’t sweating, micromanaging, or forcing a door open, then “nothing is happening.”
But holding steady isn’t passive. Holding steady when every nerve ending is screaming at you to run back to your old coping mechanisms of control is the most active, high-capacity discipline a person can practice. You aren’t leaving your life up to chance; you are protecting the integrity of the signal you built. You are refusing to dilute it with a manufactured action just to make yourself feel less anxious for an afternoon.
And now let’s look at the second way: “Otherwise, you’re just hiding and waiting for something to happen.”
And then on the flipside, I can easily ask myself, “but if I’m not moving, then is this my ego hiding and waiting?” To me personally, this is less of a possibility, because I naturally want to move, but to many, I can see how the posture of “waiting” can easily start to manifest. The ego is entirely capable of wearing a mask of spiritual patience or “surrender” as a defense mechanism to avoid the terrifying risk of actually stepping out into the unknown.
So how do you tell the difference between the signal accepting the pressure and a distorted ego hiding in a tactical freeze?
It all comes down to the quality of the internal climate. Here’s what I’m looking at:
- The Tone of the “Everything is Okay”
- The Hiding Ego: The acceptance feels heavy, resentful, or subtly conditional. It sounds like: “I will endure this pressure, but only because it means I’m going to get my reward at the end of this framework timeline.” It treats the waiting like a transaction or a hidden bargain with reality. There is an undercurrent of martyrdom – a feeling of being trapped or victimized by the timeline, even if you’re putting a brave face on it. The hiding ego has not taken ownership of what’s true for them.
- The Signal: The acceptance of the gap feels clean, simple, and flat. You know you’re in a holding pattern and that moving toward what is true requires different movements; and sometimes that is restraint. You trust yourself to rise to the occasion when you get the hit to do so. It sounds like: “It’s just my ego screaming. It’s okay.” It just acknowledges the reality of the pain or exhaustion without needing to spin a story around it. It is the peace of admitting, “I’ve done what’s true; I cannot force this to move faster.”
- The Relationship to Certainty
- The Hiding Ego: It is obsessed with the mechanics of the transition. It keeps checking the clock, tracking the phases, and looking for reassurance that convergence is still on its way. It uses the concept of “the holding pattern” as a fortress to protect itself from the fear of failure. As long as it is “waiting for convergence,” it doesn’t have to risk taking action and being rejected. The hiding ego is still externally oriented.
- The Signal: It is completely detached from the need to know the exact day or hour. The signal accepts the pressure because it recognizes that the root of the pressure is uncertainty. You know what the sensation of truth feels like in your body and you trust yourself to move from that sensation alone. The certainty on the other side of the move doesn’t matter. You’re not outcome-certain. You’re signal-certain. You look within.
- What Happens to the “Right Now”
- The Hiding Ego: It bypasses the present moment. It cannot tolerate being in the now. It uses the structure of the established daily rhythms as a way to get through the present so that it can avoid the pressure of it. It is always living five minutes, five days, or five months in the future. The hiding ego is still reactive.
- The Signal: It brings you directly into your body. It lives in the now. What is happening right now, right this moment is all that matters because it’s all that you are attuned to. There’s no sense of anxious urgency; only peace with what you know to be true.
The hiding ego is a mental choice to stay small because you are afraid of your own power or afraid of the next step. If you were hiding, you would feel a clear, undeniable “hit” to send a specific email, launch a specific thing, or make a specific move, but you would be actively making excuses to avoid doing it.
This is the point where you know and trust your internal signal. You know that when the alignment hits, you won’t hesitate – you will execute with absolute precision.
Both panic and hiding have something in common. They distort the signal. One moves too soon. One refuses to move at all. Neither is coherent. Which raises an interesting possibility… perhaps restraint isn’t simply surviving the Holding Pattern. Perhaps restraint is what allows convergence to happen in the first place.
If reality is reorganizing around a stable signal, then every false “yes” introduces noise into that signal. Restraint protects the clarity that reality is responding to. In that sense, restraint isn’t delaying convergence. It’s preserving the very thing convergence depends on.
The final capacity built in the Holding Pattern is restraint. Not the restraint born from fear, but the restraint born from coherence. When your signal is clear enough, you no longer move to relieve pressure. You move only when reality presents what is true.
Part 2: How To Feel Empowered During This Phase
To feel empowered when the pressure is high stakes and the ego is second-guessing everything, you have to shift your definition of power.
Right now, your ego thinks power means momentum – taking action, making moves, and controlling the outer landscape. When you don’t act, it feels like powerlessness. But in the final stretch before convergence, true empowerment is sovereignty over your internal state. It is the active, fierce refusal to let external pressure dictate your timing.
Here is how you anchor yourself and reclaim your power while sitting in the high-stakes waiting room:
- Shift from “Passive Waiting” to “Active Containment”
Waiting feels like you are a victim of time. Containing feels like you are a fortress holding a highly potent charge. Instead of telling yourself, “I am stuck here waiting for something to happen,” reframe it actively: “I am intentionally containing my energy. I am refusing to leak my power into manufactured actions just because the world is loud.”
Holding steady when the stakes are high is not passive; it is an act of immense warrior energy. It takes ten times more power to stand still in a storm than it does to run away in a random direction.
- Run the “Scream vs. Hit” Discernment Filter
When a second-guess hits you (“Am I hiding? Should I just pivot?”), put it through a strict operational filter to strip away its emotional power. True alignment and ego panics speak entirely different languages:
The Ego’s Scream:
- Urgent & Frantic: “We have to do something now to fix this feeling!”
- Escapist: Designed to relieve the discomfort of the present room.
- Complicated: Requires complex mental gymnastics or backtracking to justify.
The Authentic Hit:
- Quiet & Grounded: “This is the step. It’s time.” (Even if it’s scary, it lacks panic).
- Generative: Moves you toward something new, building on the foundation you made.
- Simple: It usually looks like a singular, obvious next step.
If the impulse doesn’t pass the “Hit” criteria, label it immediately: “That is a stress response, not a directional signal.” Giving it a name takes away its authority.
- Draw a Hard Boundary Around Your Rebuilt Structure
Look back at what you’ve achieved as you built your new structure. If you’re moving through The Soul’d Approach, you’ve spent the last several weeks and months establishing your Expression and your Containment. That wasn’t work done for nothing. That’s your essence-led foundation.
Empowerment right now looks like being a fierce guardian of that work. Treat any impulse to backtrack or take a chaotic pivot as an intruder. Tell yourself: “I spent [insert amount of time] building this standard. I am too self-sovereign to cheapen it now just because the waiting room is hot.”
- Create “Micro-Movements” of Sovereignty
When the stakes are high, the brain panics because it feels a total loss of agency. You can restore your sense of power by taking absolute, micro-level control over your immediate physical reality.
For me, I prioritized grounding, rest and clean consumption.
- I performed a 3-week cut that introduced a small deficit on top of very little deviation from my current nutrition rhythm and intake.
- I took radical, aggressive rest. This part of the trajectory feels absolutely exhausting, and in the middle of it, I honored my body and took a quite weekend to rest. I spent most of it horizontal and watching true crime on Netflix. Not to escape reality, but to give my brain a breath of something that I enjoy doing but haven’t quite had the time to do.
- I also got very strict about my media intake – particularly on Instagram, where I love to scroll. I created specific gaps of time for this, rather than let it be available all day whenever I wanted it.
Again, these aren’t “manufactured actions” to escape the void; they are choices that protect your peace while you are inside it. They remind your nervous system: “I am still the boss of me. External reality does not own my peace.”
You are not leaving your life up to chance. You are holding the line. The pressure is high because the structure you are about to launch is massive, and it requires a perfectly stable launchpad.
Part 3: The Somatic Sensation Present Through All of This
During this part of the process, I felt a very new sensation in the center of my chest. I can explain it as the feeling of having too much caffeine but only in my chest.
It feels like containment. Imagine drawing a bow. The string is pulled back. There is tremendous stored energy. But the arrow hasn’t been released. That tension isn’t panic. It’s potential being held.
It feels like my body has been standing at the edge of something I cannot yet name, doing its best to stay open instead of armored.
I often talk about signal as though it’s something you perceive, but that it also has density and it’s structural. Imagine sunlight through a magnifying glass. The light isn’t stronger. It’s more concentrated. Maybe my chest is where I experience concentration. Not because my heart is anxious, but because your entire system is gathering itself.
This could be the physical sensation of potential energy. It’s exactly what it feels like when a system is fully charged, plugged into a massive current, but the switch hasn’t been flipped to “discharge” yet.
When you don’t give that voltage a messy, manufactured exit route (like a frantic pivot or a rushed action), the energy stays contained. It feels intense – it vibrates, it hums, it makes your chest feel tight or electric – but without the ego spinning it into a crisis, it’s just pure power waiting for its precise coordinates.
I still don’t know what reality is building. But I know what I’m building. I’m building the capacity to meet it without abandoning myself. And perhaps that’s what the Holding Pattern was creating all along.
And as an added personal note, the title for this episode today was earned. Not because restraint is the end goal. But because restraint is the moment where my coherence became independent of my environment. Once this happens, whatever comes next isn’t built on reaction anymore. It’s built on me.
Just remember: Sometimes the truthful movement is restraint. Sometimes it’s immediate execution. The virtue isn’t restraint itself. The virtue is fidelity to what’s true.
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