The Inner Work is Not a Luxury
Yesterday I sat in contemplation. A year, almost to the day, since I was brought to my knees. Not figuratively. Literally on the floor. For three days I could only sit with it.
The story is not mine to tell. The collapse was. It was total. My clever queen, whose name is Silent Suffering, had no moves left. She had spent a lifetime swallowing pain and rising anyway. This time, nothing. My dark queen, whose name is Defeat, was finally fully there, no longer hiding. And my true queen, whose name is Magic of Life, sat down beside me in the wreckage and kept me company.
For the first time in my life, during those three days, I decided I was not available for anyone outside of me. I pushed people away to find their own bearings. I stayed with myself. I surrendered, maybe for the first time. My dark queen had been inviting me to surrender for years. I had been elegantly avoiding it.
This is the lens we work with at Lead True. Three queens, three archetypes, three energy fields living inside us. The dark queen and the true queen are two sides of the same coin. Our deepest fear and our deepest knowing. The clever queen is the strategist who tries to manage the polarity from outside it, controlling what she cannot yet hold. The inner work is learning to stop managing and start owning. To meet all of it instead of pushing any of it away. That is when we begin to actually live.
A year on, I have been thinking about what that time gave me, and what it cost. And about something else. Something I noticed recently in myself that I want to tell you honestly, because it taught me what the inner work is actually for.
I have been watching someone I care for face something unbearable. This person has refused the inner work for years. Even now, in crisis, this person is refusing it. The consequence of years of refusal had finally arrived at the door. They were utterly alone in it. Not because no one loved them. Because they had never sat down with themselves.
What surprised me, watching this, was that I felt no compassion. No pull to intervene. No contraction in the body, no rushing in to soothe. I was not moved.
Briefly, this shocked me. I have spent a life as someone who feels people’s pain quickly and deeply. The absence of that familiar movement was strange. Then I understood.
What I was feeling was not coldness. It was the clear, hard knowing that I cannot do this work for someone else. No one can. The years I have spent meeting my own dark queen have done something I did not expect. They have made it possible to see another person’s refusal without flinching. To let it be what it is. To not need the situation to be different.
I think this is what the inner work is actually for. Not to make us better. Not to optimize the self. To make us capable of staying present to what is, without managing it. Including in others. Especially in others.
This is what wholeness looks like, in the rough texture of an ordinary life. It is not being untouchable, and it is not being endlessly compassionate. It is the mature state where life can rip off the masks and you still find your bearings within yourself. Where you can witness someone else’s collapse without rushing in to perform care that would only protect you from the discomfort of seeing them clearly.
The inner work is not self-improvement. It is the difference between meeting your life and being crushed by it.
When that moment comes, you discover what you have or have not built inside yourself. There is no faking it. The masks come off whether we are ready or not.
This is why I do the inner work deliberately. Not as preparation for crisis. As a way of living. So that when life comes knocking, I have somewhere to stand. So that I can meet what arrives instead of being crushed by it. So that when someone I love is in their own dark night, I can be a presence rather than a stranger.
The refusal of the inner work is not a private matter. It costs us our own life, eventually. And it costs the people around us the gift of who we could have been to them.
A year ago I learned that I could be brought all the way down and still find Magic of Life sitting beside me. Yesterday I learned what that work has done to my capacity to witness. They are the same lesson, in different costumes. The work does not protect you from being broken. It changes who you are when you are.
This is what I keep being invited into. It is what I keep inviting my clients into. It is, I suspect, what life keeps inviting all of us into, whether we are listening yet or not.
About the Author
Lead True Global Leader Andrea Henning’s vision is that when people discover their authenticity and dare to follow their bliss they are happier and more successful in their lives while serving as an inspiration to their communities.
Read more from Andrea Henning below.
