Hello friends! Today's interview is with Master Energy Healer and Intuitive Guidance Counselor Christie Inge. Christie helps women transform their worst habits into empowering actions, unshakeable self-confidence, and radical self-acceptance. Yes! Enjoy:
Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your business.
I'm Christie Inge, and I'm a writer, artist, and intuitive healer.
My business is in a huge state of transition right now. The heart of what I do isn't changing but what it looks like on the outside is. I don't know what it all looks like yet because I've opened to transforming it beyond recognition and that is a messy process!
That said, the core of the work is about radical self-love and self-acceptance.
What that looks like going into the roots of who we really are and meeting the messy, unacceptable, and shameful bits with unconditional love and compassion. It's about healing from the bonds of Tribal Shame and the lie of enoughness. In my experience, that is the only way to experience the wholeness, love, and belonging that we all so deeply crave.
And more importantly, it's the only way we'll be able to pass down a legacy of self-love and self-acceptance to the generations who will come after us.
One of your titles is Master Energy Healer. How would you explain this to someone who is a tad bit skeptical?
I love this question because, for the most part, the women who resonate with my work are what I call "woo-curious." They are intrigued by the energy work part but feel a bit apprehensive to jump in with both feet.
So, when I have this conversation with folks, I like to start by talking about what energy healing actually is.
At the most basic level, everything is energy. As human beings, we are made up of five energetic "layers."
❖ physical
❖ mental
❖ emotional
❖ spiritual
❖ observational
When you combine all of those things, you get your "energy body" or your unique expression here on Earth.
As you move through life, things happen that create "distortions" in the different layers of the energy body. Those distortions affect the way you perceive (think, feel, relate) the world.
It's kind of like a garden of flowers. Your energy body is the garden, and the distortions are the weeds.
When the garden is full of weeds, the vibrant beauty of the flowers becomes harder to see.
To heal the distortions, we have to do three things:
- Create the awareness that the weeds are distorting our view.
- Make the conscious choice to pull the weeds by the roots, instead of just trimming them down.
- Commit to keeping the garden weeded.
As you can see, healing is a very active (and creative!) process, and you don't "need" energy healing to make it happen. You just need your own devotion.
But, energy work makes the process smoother, easier, and infinitely more gentle because it goes directly to the distortion, rather than circling around it for years.
Without energy work, it can be like heading out to the garden with just your bare hands and a determined will. It's totally possible to get the weeds pulled that way but, it is so much easier when you have gardening gloves, tools, and proper padding under your knees.
How do you help creative women?
I have an artist friend who makes the distinction between creative with a lower case c and a capital c. I'll probably butcher the way she talks about but, in essence, creative with a lower case c is being "artistic." But, being Creative with a capital C is really about our ability to express our connection with the Divine.
So, I'd say that my work isn't about helping creative women, it's about helping women be Creative.
Our feelings of self-loathing, unworthiness, and not-enoughness are directly correlated with, if not caused by, who we believe ourselves to be in relationship to the Divine. When we commit to a practice of radical self-love and self-acceptance, we are healing that relationship.
And in doing so, we are more easily able to be Creative.
What does a typical day for you look like?
A typical day looks like waking up in right timing with my body. As someone with chronic illness, sometimes I need a lot of sleep and other times, not as much. So, I don't force myself to get up at a specific time.
I'm also not attached to doing anything specific in the morning and have never found rigid morning routines to be helpful. Instead, I much prefer to tune into what I need on any given day and do that.
Once I feel "complete" with my morning, I check my email and get to work on my business. Each day is a little different, but it's usually a combination of writing, helping people work through their "stuff" on the forums on any of my programs, doing healing work, and having one to one client sessions or group calls.
In the evenings, I make dinner for my husband and I and afterward, we play games or cards, watch tv, or work on our individual creative projects. I have recently discovered that sketching faces at night is very relaxing for me.
Sometime between 8:30 and 10, I go to bed and read for a bit before going to sleep.
What do you like to do for fun? Do you have any hobbies or creative outlets?
My husband and I love to travel, hike, and hunt for finds in the antique shops. I also love to cook and bake; I find them both incredibly meditative assuming I'm not in a rush to get food on the table.
In your classes, you talk about play as a universal need. I think this is something that a lot of professional artists really struggle with. Once creativity and livelihood become tied together, things can get complicated. Do you have any suggestions for reconnecting with a sense of play in one’s creative work?
So, remember when I said that I am in a huge transition in my business? Well, this question really gets to the heart of what that is about for me.
I've been running an online business for about ten years and what I know for sure is that something happens when you go from just creating because you have to express your Creative energy vs. when you are creating to make money.
I honestly have more questions than answers about that. But, I will say that play is one of our most primitive needs. At its essence, play is not about "having fun." Play is about embodying the essence of our spirit; it's an attitude of curiosity, wonder, and delight and connecting with who we really are.
I feel like somewhere along the way in my work, I lost touch with my sense of play and I really want to reconnect with it. So, for now, I am paying attention to the times when I feel connected to my essential spirit and the things that invoke my natural sense of curiosity and wonder and seeing what happens.
You use Alchemy as a metaphor for personal transformation. Could you please describe what this means to you?
Alchemy, which is the process of transforming lead into gold, really speaks to the heart of what it takes to heal our deepest wounds and loving ourselves through the process.
When the alchemist wants to get gold out of the lead, they must throw it into a blazing fire, which begins the process of changing its energetic structure. At the end of the alchemical process, the lead is no longer lead, nor is it fools gold. It's 24k gold.
Our process for transformation is just like that. It's a trial by fire, and it can be easy to forget that the fire is part of the deal.
So, I use the metaphor of alchemy to help people anchor people into the courage and tenacity it takes to keep going when the shit hits the fan.
On your Patreon page, you wrote “The lie of enoughness isn't personal. It's a cultural issue.” Yikes! How do think we got to this point and perhaps more importantly, how do we snap out of it?
That goes back to our connection with the Divine.
At the beginning of our evolution as humans, our relationship with the Divine was one of wonder, awe, and harmony with the Earth. It was a partnership, rather than a dictatorship.
But, as agriculture became a thing, and humans started settling down, the way we related to the Divine (what some people call God), started to shift from one of harmony to one of proving in response to THE WEATHER.
If it rained, the crops grew. If it didn't rain, the plants didn't grow.
Our ancestors assumed that the rain was a reward from God for being "good." Rituals of "proving" our goodness to this God began to form (aka religion) and we, as a society, passed both the assumption and the rituals down.
The assumption that we have anything to prove is what I call the lie of enoughness, and it's likely impacted you, even if you have zero religious or spiritual inclinations because it is deeply embedded in our culture.
When women show up in my world, they are usually at a point where they have already recognized the negative impact that trying to prove their worthiness has had on their lives.
A lot of times, they are attempting to "get rid" of the feelings of unworthiness by using positive thinking or looking to their "good" qualities as evidence of how "enough" they are.
Unfortunately, though, the "positive thinking" approach doesn't work in the long run because it doesn't address the root of the issue. By trying to convince yourself that you are worthy, you are still buying into the lie of enoughness.
The root of the issue is that you aren't worthy or unworthy. You aren't enough or not enough. You aren't deserving or undeserving. You just ARE, period.
And so, any attempts to prove worthiness, on either side of the coin, will be futile.
So, instead of trying to convince ourselves that we are enough, we have to step off the hamster wheel altogether and step into something way more powerful:
Choice.
And you do that by tapping into your inner wisdom, discerning what is yours and what isn't, and choosing to act in integrity, EVEN WHEN your mind is yammering on with its enoughness bullshit.
Being able to do that is the first step in radical self-love and self-acceptance and it’s what we need to do in order to change the culture.
Thank you so much, Christie! To learn more about Christie Inge, please visit her website her Patreon page or follow her on Instagram.
Do you have any questions or comments for Christie? Add them to the comments below!