What's Keeping You From Rising?

Look at this image for a moment.

A woman in white. Surrounded by deep water. Rising toward the light above her.

And tied to her ankles, rocks. Heavy, dense, pulling downward.

She isn't struggling. She isn't forcing her way up. She is simply rising, as naturally as she was always meant to.

But the rocks are still there.

And this, more than anything I could put into words, is what I see in the people I work with every day.

The weight we carry without realising

Most capable, driven people aren't stuck because they lack ability.

They aren't stuck because they haven't tried hard enough.

They're stuck because something underneath is quietly pulling them back down.

Old beliefs about what they deserve. Patterns formed in earlier chapters of their life that made sense then, but no longer serve them now.

Emotional residue from experiences they haven't fully processed or released. Subconscious limits around success, visibility, love, money, worthiness.

These are the rocks.

And the thing about rocks is, you don't always know they're there.

You just notice that no matter how much effort you apply, you keep returning to the same level. The same ceiling. The same point where things stall.

Not because you're failing. Because something is still anchoring you.

The rainbow isn't a metaphor, it's a map

Notice the colours in the image.

Red at the base. Moving through orange, yellow, green, blue, all the way up to violet and white light at the top.

This reflects something real.

Dr David Hawkins spent decades mapping emotional states to measurable frequencies, from the lowest vibrations of shame and guilt at the bottom, all the way up to love, peace and enlightenment at the top.

And what his research showed is that the emotional frequency you operate from most of the time shapes everything.

How you make decisions. What you believe is possible for you. How you show up in your relationships and your work. What you unconsciously allow and what you unconsciously push away.

Low frequency states; fear, guilt, shame, apathy, feel like the rocks in this image. They are heavy. Contracting. They make the surface feel very far away.

Higher frequency states, courage, willingness, love, clarity, feel like the light above. Expansive. Open. Possible.

The shift from one to the other isn't about trying harder.

It's about releasing what's pulling you down.

Rising isn't about force

This is the part that most approaches miss.

When we feel stuck, the natural instinct is to push harder. Add more discipline. Find a better strategy. Try again with more effort.

But you cannot force your way out of a frequency.

You can't willpower your way past a deeply held belief that you don't deserve what you're reaching for.

You can't out-strategise a nervous system that doesn't feel safe to move forward.

You can't think your way out of an emotional pattern that has been running for years underneath the surface.

The woman in this image isn't straining upward.

She is simply, rising.

Because something has shifted underneath. The weight hasn't disappeared yet. But she is no longer anchored by it in the same way.

That is what release looks like.

Not dramatic. Not forced.

Just a quiet, almost natural movement toward where she was always meant to go.

What alignment actually feels like

When the blocks are released and the frequency shifts, people describe it in similar ways.

"The resistance just isn't there anymore."

"I'm doing the same things but they feel completely different."

"I don't know exactly what changed, but something has."

Decisions feel clearer. Actions feel easier. The ceiling that felt so solid starts to look like it was never really there.

Because in many ways, it wasn't.

It was a frequency. A pattern. A weight tied to the ankle of someone who was always capable of rising.

The question worth sitting with

Look at the image one more time.

The light is there. It has always been there.

The question isn't whether you're capable of reaching it.

The question is:

What are the rocks and are you ready to release them?

*image courtesy of illustrator, Marcus Silversides