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Have you ever noticed that once you decide you really want something and are finally ready to have it - that thing becomes more elusive than ever?
Maybe, you decide you are ready for a partner, growth in your business, more income or a new health milestone and life seems to slap you on the wrist in one way or another.
Well, this is essay is what I think it going on for you and as always, more importantly, how to fix it.
While we collectively use the internet to double down on our weakness and fears like: dating sucks, men are bad, women are self centered, the economy is oppressive, relationships are so hard, community is dead. However when we look around our real life we can see lots of people actualizing success in ways that we might be only grasping at.
This weekend, I heard Kasia Urbaniak say she thinks the core problem on the planet right now is this: we don’t realize how good we have it.
We’re sitting at a banquet table and yet we are all starving.
When I look at the resources we have collectively, the tools, the knowledge, the ability to heal — I agree.
Our problem is distribution, not availability.
The right people aren’t holding the right power.
So much of my work as a somatic coach is about clearing the emotions, the control, the victimization, and the old roles that keep people who want to be agents of change in their communities or just in their own lives from accessing what’s already available to them.
I’ve caught myself doing it, too. Picking crumbs off the floor of a life I’ve outgrown. Seemingly crawling under the banquet table of my own life like it didn’t belong to me. Trying to make things that never really worked feel super meaningful. Missing what was right in front of me — not because it wasn’t there, but because I wasn’t in the energy to receive it or honestly to even see it as a match for me.
But then once I finally sat up, started taking this ticking time machine seriously and ignoring the social noise that wants everyone to be stuck and angry - guess what? My table felt empty.
It felt like the things I wanted were available to other people, just not to me. Even when I was working harder to attain them.
Let’s open this problem up with the question I’ve been sitting with all week in a sticky area of my own personal life:
Am I wanting something in a way that actually makes it harder to get?
Have you ever felt like the more you loved someone, the more they pulled away? Or the harder you tried for something — a relationship, a goal, a version of your life — the more it slipped through your hands?
What is that about?
It’s about energy.
It’s about how your wanting feels to other people. Everything we want or need - money, community, power, support, a place to add value - comes through other people.
Sometimes, we get it right.
We’re clear. We’re calm. Our desire isn’t laced with fear or control. We’re not trying to force outcomes or micromanage what’s meant to unfold.
In that space, people feel good around us. They feel free.
They’re drawn in by the energy, not trapped by the demand. There’s agency in the invitation. There’s breathing room. There’s space for mutual choice.
But when desire is fused with anxiety, scarcity, or a quiet sense of panic — it pushes people away. Even when what we want is beautiful and in alignment. Even when we’re asking “nicely.”
Here’s what it can sound like under the surface:
If I don’t get this, something will break.
If you don’t give me this, I’ll make it mean something about me.
If I don’t suffer through this, I won’t have earned it.
If you don’t match the exact picture I had in mind of my plan, I won’t even see you.
That kind of energy repels connection. It feels heavy. People can’t say yes to you without feeling like they’re losing something.
We all point fingers at each other accusing everyone we know of being narcissist but rarely do we survey ourselves for that energy. Deciding what you want and looking for people to fill the roles you’ve already created is highly narcissistic, yet every green flag list in America supports these habits as healthy.
We are being conditioned to pick and choose each other like a bin of old fruit - digging through life looking for the one or two good enough apples - and yet no one wants to be treated like that themselves.
Sorting energy, as I call it, will lead to an internal no for anyone that values themselves.
Think about it.
You are looking for people that will invest in you, support you and roles that let you shine but you are leveraging giving back value based on if you decide something is good enough for you. That is shitty energy. It will only attract the actually rotten apples - which there aren’t that many of by the way.
Most people are fundamentally good and can give you their worst or best depending on what you co-create with them.
Nothing valuable is going to commit to you if you aren’t showing up full of value and freedom. You have to start echoing the energy you want to receive.
I bet you can sometimes nail this energetic. The one where you are focusing on mostly what you can offer other people and expecting that things will only continue forward when you are fully met in an equal and opposite way.
I can assume if you can follow this writing at all you do occasionally hit that sweet spot where you recognize that other people value very different things than you do and stepping into the eco-system of reciprocity is done through putting most of your attention on adding value. As opposed to taking it or controlling everything like other people are an inventory you manage (side-eye).
Do you want to know why you can’t hold a clean energy for very long?
Because, your energy isn’t anchored into your daily living and speaking. It’s not flowing through the rhythm of how you speak to your kids, people you date, your partner, your co-workers, your friends.
It’s not grounded in habits, in your tone of voice or in reality.
Because even though emotional embodiment and energetics are the core of everything I teach, they mean nothing if they don’t show up in how you live and what you say.
Nothing.
The person that comes to me and says they are “working on” something but aren’t taking any daily consistent actions that would align to having it has what I call a dislocation. Everyone around you can feel the dislocation between what you claim to desire and the real like evidence that you actually have almost no intention of actualizing it. Again standing at the fruit bin of life waiting for another person that you deem as good enough to plop into the role you have invented through therapy or coaching before get started isn’t going to be appealing.
If you do tons of inner work without ever addressing your physical life and actions, you’ll see your desires clearly — but you won’t be able to hold them. Just as in reverse: when someone makes tons of external changes — great health, great finances, says all the right things — but inside, they’re harboring old, sick emotions and still enmeshed with everyone around them, they aren’t very attractive.
Your inner and outer worlds need to match. Every place they do not is a door to yourself. My core offer as a coach is teaching people to get curious, instead of judgmental about that.
I teach lots of skills classes along with my more esoteric work. This month the membership class is called “actually better sex”. Because the way you move energy through your body in the bedroom has to align with your awareness of the three internal ways a woman can achieve orgasm — if you want to have a new physical experience with your partner. We need emotional surrender to meet body based skills if we want better intimacy experiences. That pattern works in every area of your life.
Here’s the thing: most people talk about the life they want — but their body, their habits, their environment, and their relationships don’t reflect it. They spend their life largely planning out a future that never comes to fruition.
It’s the client telling me they want growth in their business and in their love life while they rack up low level work choices and stay connected to a bunch of people romantically that are making them worse.
No one can recognize them as a match. There is too much clutter. They only attract "fixing each other" scenarios.
What they want would never look at their life and their connections think “that’s just right for me”. If you think people can’t feel energy and you are only accountable for what you tell people about yourself - then you are fooling yourself.
The green flag list means nothing when…
It’s not in how they move on a random Wednesday.
It’s not in the boundaries they keep.
It’s not in the way they treat themselves or the people around them right now.
Let me show you what I mean:
*A woman clinging to a relationship, doing “the work” for both people. She’s knee-deep in his healing, trying to partner and parent at the same time. The attraction is dying under the weight of her labor. She’s out here telling everyone about the relationship she wants to actualize — while doing everything possible in her physical life to prevent any real possibility of it ever happening.*
*A man leaves a retreat lit up with clarity and purpose. By Thursday, he’s numbing out, texting someone he doesn’t even like just to feel something. He’s reactive. He can’t hold the energy for more than a few days. There’s no structure or commitment to his inner life outside the moments he’s with a coach or inside a retreat. He’s never built daily practices of his own. He hasn’t even begun to mentor his inner boy — he’s just outsourcing temporary pleasure through endless “growth” experiences.*
These aren’t failures of character. They’re nervous system patterns and bad habits supported by limiting beliefs.
And they don’t shift through wishful thinking, positive affirmations, breath work or vision boards. That’s just spiritual bypassing.
They change when your micro-habits change.
They change when you commit to living differently.
To embodying a different energetic baseline.
To taking an insane amount of self-responsibility.
That’s what we do — in these essays, in the workshops, in the memberships, in my coaching regardless of if a client is working on career, relationships or intuitive mentorship. We match up inner and outer worlds.
We work on emotional and energetic integrity in a way that’s visible in your actual life.
Because your life is the mirror of your inner world.
Not the other way around.
If your relationships, your money, and your self-respect are sitting in chaos while you cling to a fantasy feeling of what you “deserve,” something’s off. You need help.
This month’s co-ed workshop is about sex skills, yes — but also about the alignment of purpose, desire and actions. Just like every single thing I teach is.
This is where things begin to shift.
When someone can look at every part of your life and the way you talk about yourself and say - yeah that’s it.
That’s what I want.
I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com
I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.