Author: Biru Panda
There’s a higher version of us that comes out in certain situations – the deepest and wisest part of ourselves. But here’s the problem: When life becomes overwhelming or painful, you develop protective numbness in certain areas – a survival strategy that creates “blockages” in how energy/emotion/awareness flows through you.
When I talk about the “higher version of us,” I’m not talking about some distant, divine being watching from above. Your higher self appears when energy (awareness, aliveness, clarity) flows through every part of you. When energy flows freely throughout your entire being. That’s it. It’s like light hitting all parts of you – nothing hidden and everything illuminated – that’s when the higher self emerges.
But that’s not what usually happens. There are parts of you that you don’t visit anymore. Rooms in your house you’ve locked and avoid walking past. And here’s the thing about light – that light doesn’t skip over anything. When your higher self tries to emerge, when that wisdom tries to reach you, the light HAS to hit everything before it can guide you.
Which means it has to shine on the things you’ve avoided. The things you never wanted to confront. The painful corners you’ve deliberately kept in darkness.
To access your wisdom and wholeness, you have to unfeel the numbness – which means suddenly confronting all the things you blocked in the first place. The guidance comes at the cost of re-experiencing what you protected yourself from.
Sometimes your higher self does emerge naturally – and in those moments, you notice you’re suddenly feeling things you’d been numb to.
What Numbing Actually Means
When we “numb,” we don’t remove pain — we only cut off response. That numbness becomes an energetic blind spot. You may not feel it daily, but it still blocks the channels through which intuition, clarity, and wisdom travel. And so, to activate your highest self, you must also: re-feel what was avoided (pain, fear, loss) + re-open what was shut + respond where you once went still.
You know what’s interesting? Numbing is a natural human response when we face identity-threatening situations. It’s how we survive overwhelming moments. But the modern world? It’s perfected this mechanism. Instead of helping us understand our underlying blockages and baggage, we’ve normalized using this survival response in everyday life.
We don’t heal emotional pain anymore. We’ve just learned to numb the signals—shut people out, distract ourselves, avoid conflict, overwork, binge, scroll.
Look at medicine for a second. Most pain medication doesn’t actually remove pain – it interrupts your body’s response to pain. And those are two very different things.
You take a painkiller and feel better in an hour. Did it heal your injury in that hour? Did it repair torn tissue or fix inflammation? Of course not. What it did was block the signaling mechanisms (prostaglandins, nerve receptors) so your brain stops registering the pain as urgently.
The injury is still there. The problem hasn’t gone anywhere. You’ve just stopped being able to hear the alarm bell ringing.
And here’s what most people don’t realize: healing doesn’t come from the pill — it comes from the body. Physically, real healing happens through your body’s own repair systems like the good kind of inflammation, new cell growth, immune activity. Rest, nourishment, and time are what make that process work.
Now, pain relief has its place (sometimes you need it to function) and it can give your body time to actually heal. But here’s what bothers me: we’ve taken this same logic and applied it everywhere else. We’ve built an entire world around suppressing signals instead of addressing problems.
At least with physical injury, your body can heal while the pain is muted. But what heals when we numb emotional pain? What gets resolved when we avoid difficult conversations? What improves when we distract ourselves from loneliness or anxiety?
Nothing. The blockage just sits there. We’ve just gotten better at not noticing it.
So, Reverse Engineering This
But here’s where it gets interesting if you reverse the logic.
If your higher self can only emerge when energy flows through the blocked channels (and flowing through blocked channels means feeling what you’ve avoided) then what does it mean when life suddenly forces you to feel those things?
When you’re going through a hard time. When something you’ve been avoiding finally catches up to you. When the pain you’ve been numbing suddenly breaks through and demands your attention.
What if that’s not life punishing you? What if that’s your higher self trying to reach you?
Think about it: You can’t access wisdom without unblocking the channels. The channels can’t unblock without feeling what’s been suppressed. So when the suppressed stuff surfaces (when life puts you in situations that force you to feel what you’ve been avoiding) maybe that’s not you falling apart?
That’s the light finally reaching those dark corners. That’s energy trying to flow again. That’s your higher self knocking, saying “we need to deal with this now.”
You’ve probably heard people say “when life gets hard, it means something better is coming.” And maybe you’ve thought, “That’s bullshit. My life is falling apart. How is this better?”
Here’s the answer: When life gets hard and when you’re suddenly facing your triggers, confronting what you couldn’t before – it means you’re being forced to unblock the channels. And if we reverse-engineer everything we just talked about, that means your higher version is trying to reach you. Because when your higher version reaches out to you it means energy flows through every channel and some are still blocked with baggages and they get surfaced.
The challenges aren’t random. They’re the pressure points on exactly what you’ve been avoiding. Life isn’t getting worse, no – it’s getting real. And getting real is the only way through to the other side.
The hard times aren’t obstacles to your growth. They’re the mechanism of it.