When we met again the next morning, the unraveling deepened quickly. The first session had exposed how Maria’s worth and money stories were tangled together, revealing the parts that kept her playing small. But what emerged in this second session went even deeper-opening the doorway to living freedom.
After our first call, Maria had been sitting with her insights. She shared how she’d always felt a strong pull to protect her freedoms—the freedom of choice, the freedom to walk away, the freedom to lean in only when it felt right. Commitment often felt threatening, as though it might strip those freedoms away.
That awareness revealed an important distinction: internal freedom and external freedom were not the same. External freedom was about resources such as time, money, and opportunity. Internal freedom was about personal choice—the ability to step forward or step back, to commit or not commit.
The Two Faces of Living Freedom
Maria had always understood freedom as something internal—her ability to choose, to walk away, to lean in only when it felt right. So when our conversation pointed to money symbolizing freedom in the external sense—doors opening, opportunities expanding, restrictions dissolving—it challenged her belief system in an unexpected way.
As she sat with it, she described how the idea itself created an opening: “It was like a big unwinding in my mind, a whole new level of what life could be like. Just imagining what would happen if I poured my energy into one or two things instead of scattering it everywhere—it opened portals I didn’t even realize were blocked.”
That opening also brought her face-to-face with a deeper fear: losing freedom. She realized that her resistance to certain commitments—whether long-term contracts or opportunities—wasn’t about the commitments themselves. It was about the fear that once she gave her word, she would lose the freedom to change her mind.
Both external and internal freedom is real. Both mattered, but because Maria hadn’t separated them, she felt constantly torn between craving freedom and fearing its loss. That fear of losing freedom was one of the hidden threads holding her back from the life she truly desired.
Meeting the Family Within
As survival-energy Maria softened, other hidden voices began to emerge. She realized her inner world wasn’t being run by a single part—but by a whole family unit working behind the scenes.
- The small player, the part tugging her back down whenever she reached for more, whispering that staying small was safer.
- The keeper of freedom, the one who had decided long ago that freedom must be hoarded in a tiny box, never expanded, never risked—because expansion meant exposure, and exposure meant danger.
These parts had been working tirelessly to keep Maria safe, often in ways that no longer served her. When she introduced them to freedom—not as a concept but as a felt experience—they, too, softened. And for the first time, Maria saw that freedom wasn’t just something her core self could claim; it was something her entire inner family had to learn to experience together.
Charity: The Survivalist at the Helm
For most of Maria’s life, Charity was in charge. She was the survivalist, running Maria’s money story 60–70% of the time. On the surface, Charity’s strategies looked like safety—staying busy, overcommitting, scattering energy, doing too much for too little. But underneath, it was struggle disguised as security. Her motto was simple: keep moving, keep producing, and we can probably stay afloat.
The truth was, Charity didn’t know another way. She had no framework for freedom or financial flow—only for survival. Whenever talk of money came up, Charity dug her heels in and held Maria in a cycle of “safe” activity that only led to short-term gains.
But everything began to shift when Maria introduced Charity to the felt experience of freedom. Not as an idea, but as a body-level sensation of ease, movement, and expansion. For the first time, Charity realized freedom wasn’t reckless—it was stabilizing, and it was safe. In Maria’s leadership, Charity softened into wanting to experience more of that feeling, because it was something she had never known, but always wanted.
And it was in that space that another truth came out: Charity wasn’t working alone. She had been protecting two of her closest allies by hiding them in the shadows, Chasity and Kofy.
Chasity and Kofy Step Forward
When Charity finally felt safe in Maria’s leadership—anchored by the experience of freedom—she revealed her two trusted companions that had been hiding all along.
Chasity, the one who plays small, was always tugging Maria back into safety by shrinking her visibility and minimizing her worth. Kofy, The Keeper of Freedom, held tight to the belief that freedom could only be preserved by hoarding it—keeping commitments light, and avoiding anything that might risk exposure.
Together, these three formed a family unit inside Maria’s inner world. Charity led the charge, keeping Maria locked in survival mode. Chasity and Kofy reinforced the pattern, ensuring that even when opportunities appeared, Maria would either downplay herself or retreat to avoid losing freedom. What felt like caution was really limitation, and what looked like safety was really a cycle of scarcity.
The breakthrough was this: once Maria shared the embodied experience of freedom with Charity, all three of them softened. For the first time, they felt the steadiness of Maria’s core self leading. Freedom was no longer an idea to defend or avoid—it was something they could all experience together, and in that shift, the old survival program began to loosen their grip.
Embarrassment as a Doorway
One of the deepest threads running through Maria’s discoveries was embarrassment.
She remembered moments of public humiliation—slipping and falling and being laughed at, and carrying unwanted attention at the hands of someone else’s behavior. The common denominator in the memories that surfaced was the feeling of being engulfed by the wrong kind of attention.
This is where The Keeper of Freedom had stepped in, years ago: “Never again. We’ll stay small. We’ll stay quiet. We’ll never risk that kind of exposure again.”
That’s when it became clear to Maria: embarrassment was no longer feeling to avoid, but an invitation to get curious. With reflection and honest self-inquiry, she saw it as a doorway into a deeper fear—the fear of losing her internal freedom, of being trapped in unwanted attention.
Alignment, Sharing, and the Myth of Selling
The next question that surfaced in Maria’s overnight reflection was this: “Do I just sit back and let life unfold, and if I do, how do I know what the right move is? Or do I lean in and share my vision, and if I do share, does that cross the line into selling?”
It was easy to hear how her wires were crossed. She had been holding surrender and action as two ends of a spectrum: surrender meant passivity, while sharing meant manipulation.
But alignment reframed the equation.
Both surrender and sharing flow from the same source: the energy you bring to them. When you’re aligned with who you really are and what you’re creating in the world, surrender isn’t passivity—it’s trust.
Surrender is the trust that you will recognize what truly belongs to you and take action when it does. Not everything that crosses your path deserves your attention. Not every opportunity aligns with who you are or what you’re here to create. Surrender means you don’t waste energy chasing noise or forcing outcomes. You stay open, grounded, and ready to move when alignment shows itself.
And sharing isn’t selling—it’s inviting others into what’s true for you. Maria said it perfectly, “Sometimes people don’t know what’s possible until you embody it, name it, and model it for them.” Sharing from alignment isn’t about convincing; it’s about allowing others to witness your clarity. Selling reaches outward in an effort to get. Sharing radiates outward as an act of service. One drains and repels. The other attracts.
Maria realized this was the piece she’d been missing. Her fear wasn’t about “selling” at all—it was about confusing surrender with passivity and mistaking sharing for manipulation. Once she saw that surrender meant trusting herself to act only on what truly aligned, and sharing meant letting her alignment be visible, the weight lifted. She didn’t need to hide, and she didn’t need to chase. She could surrender and share in the same breath—because both flowed from the same source: her inner alignment.
Core Alignment vs. Fragmentation
The deeper Maria went, the clearer the pattern became that she was working with a larger framework: the difference between her aligned core self and her unaligned expressions.
- The aligned self leads with clarity, choice, and grounded freedom.
- The unaligned self scrambles, shrinks, or hoards freedom in boxes.
Both were still part of Maria’s personality. Both were still anchored in her core. But only one carried her toward expansion and the life she truly desires.
Alignment isn’t static, it’s fluid and alive. The core-self expresses itself differently across every area of life—how it does finances, how it supports its well-being, how it shows up in the various relationships; ie: being a mother is different than being a spouse. Sometimes the expression is aligned; sometimes it isn’t. The work isn’t to erase the unaligned, but to bring it into coherence that is rooted in intentional design, rather than in inherited beliefs and old ways of being.
Now, every time Maria chooses alignment, she reclaims a little more freedom as a lived embodiment. Her nervous system is beginning to settle into the discovery that freedom provides real safety. In turn, her nervous system is starting to no longer react to life, it is starting to own its co-creating power in how Maria and her internal family experiences life.
An Invitation
Maria’s story is a mirror for so many leaders and entrepreneurs—brilliant on the outside, yet carrying hidden parts, old programs, and survival strategies that keep freedom just out of reach. True alignment isn’t about chasing money, avoiding money, or proving your value—it’s about bringing your whole inner family into coherence so freedom becomes embodied as a way of being through life.
If you’ve been resonating with Maria’s journey, maybe it’s time to begin your own. I invite you to schedule a Discovery Call with me. Together, we’ll uncover the parts of your story that are still running the show, and open the doorway to the freedom and clarity you’ve been craving.