Caught Between Two Worlds
What happened when I stopped hiding my woo-woo side at work
It was another snowy day in Montreal. Too cold for a lunch walk, so I grabbed my food and ate at my desk like I always did during those heavy winters.
My coworker sitting beside me had a headache.
I’d been living a double life for a while by then. Corporate professional during the week, energy healer on Saturdays.
I’d found my own healing for headaches through this work, and I was quietly giving sessions outside of my “real” job.
That day, something shifted.
I asked if she wanted to try something that had helped me.
I briefly shared my story. She didn’t look convinced, but she said yes.
Less than ten minutes into the technique, the director of our department walked into our section.
When I saw her, my heart stopped beating.
I was already shaky offering this in that space. But when THE BOSS appeared, I froze.
“What’s happening here?” she asked.
I explained in a short sentence that I was trying to help with the headache.
“Ah, okay,” she said. And left.
I felt half dead, half alive. My heart went from not beating to racing at 100 miles an hour. And then, after my system processed what just happened... it felt like home.
Some of my closest friends knew what I was up to, but I was living two separate identities and it wasn’t fun.
I loved my corporate work, my team, the structure of it all. But I also loved this other part of me that was woo-woo and mystical, and almost no one there knew about it.
In my head, I had to hide that part… until I didn’t.
After this moment, after my heart stopped and then raced, something settled.
The boss saw a lot more of who I was. She didn't actually care at all about this other part of me. But I cared that I had been seen.
And that feeling? That feeling was home. It’s priceless.
This probably happened a year and a half before I quit my job. But in that moment, I knew I wouldn’t trade wholeness to fit in anymore.
One day, I would work on something that brought all of me forward. You want to talk business? Let’s talk business. You want to talk yoga, energy work, somatics, emotional intelligence? We can talk that too… I wouldn’t need to perform anymore.
Here’s what was funny: I was afraid of being seen in corporate as “the woo-woo person.” But in the woo-woo world, I didn’t think I was entitled to belong either.
When I was around more spiritual people, I felt like I had no authority to talk about the invisible world. I was a toddler crawling around old witches.
And I felt diminished because I had a corporate job.
The transition is hard. The space between identities is painful, unstable, ungrounding, confusing.
I believed I had to separate the two worlds, just like we thought science and spirituality couldn’t connect.
Here’s what I know now:
Wholeness doesn’t choose you. It talks to you. And you need to choose it.
You feel it in the chest tightness, in the wobbliness when you try to explain your spiritual side to a logical person. You feel it in the measuring of words, the performance, the exhaustion of code-switching between who you are at work and who you are everywhere else.
You feel a longing for something you can’t quite put words to.
And this doesn't just happen at work. It shows up in our closest relationships too.
All of that... those are symptoms of not choosing wholeness.
It didn’t happen overnight for me. I had to choose it. Again and again.
Wholeness isn’t a brand decision or a career pivot. It’s a somatic yes that makes performance unnecessary.
We think we want a different business. Or a new career. Or sometimes to stop working altogether.
But often, that’s just the mind trying to explain something much simpler.
What we want is freedom.
Freedom to be ourselves. Freedom to integrate what we were taught to keep separate.
And as we get older, the body becomes less willing to cooperate with fragmentation.
Yes, it will show up as an external shift. It might be a new business or a career change. But before you decide that, make sure you decide you want to feel whole and free and nothing less.
Because here’s what happens when you choose wholeness:
The outer world starts to match it.
Not because you forced it. Not because you strategized your way there. But because you stopped splitting yourself in half, and suddenly there’s space for life to meet you as you actually are.
You’ll find yourself in conversations where you don’t need to perform. In work that doesn’t require you to leave parts of yourself at the door. In relationships where your full self is not just tolerated but welcomed.
Once you feel home in yourself, you can’t unfeel it.
And the world around you? It reorganizes to let you experience more of that feeling.
Not overnight. But inevitably.
That’s the gift of choosing wholeness. It’s not just an internal shift.
It’s an invitation for everything external to finally align.
With Love,
Carolina
You don’t need to exclude the woo-woo from your brilliant strategic mind. You don’t need to exclude fun from making good money.
Business can be built from your wholeness and it can be profitable.
If you want to explore how we support our clients in this integration,
Beautiful post. There’s many out there that are stuck in between worlds of the old self and the True Self. Sounds like you came home and freedom welcomed you at the door. I just love the frequency of this word freedom. It carries such incredible meaning.
Thanks for sharing, Carolina! The concept of being caught between two worlds really resonated with me. For me, I’m caught between the past and the future. As Nikki said in the comments, between my old self and true self. I ran a training business that I closed down five years ago. Since then I’ve done a lot of inner work. Changed a lot, healed a lot, but still it feels there more I need to work on. Blocks I can feel. They make me uncomfortable but I know leaning into them is how I will grow through them. I know it’s not time for me to start a business again yet. There are core things I need to change. Traumas I’ve already identified and worked on that for some reason still control a part of me. Still silence me, still make me anxious and afraid and unsafe. It’s exhausting sometimes feeling “stuck” between the old and the new but I trust the process and I trust that God has a plan for me. My entire life I’ve had to perform for people - I learned that my value is based on what I give and sacrifice for others. Overgiving and overpleasing, feeling responsible for others’ emotions, needing to be the fixer and the healer and the one who carries the burdens so others don’t have to. My business was coaching teens in self-development. Many students of mine thank me until now, telling me how much I helped them grow, helped them become confident and strong and self aware and emotionally intelligent. I have done too much for others, starting with my mother. Now is a time to do for me. To know that my worth isn’t about what I give. And that’s why I don’t feel ready to start a business again (although I feel it probably will be in my future but in a different manner than it was). Because I don’t want to do for others. I’ve done that too much. It’s time to do for me. To sit with myself. To ask myself what I want for my life. And now that I’m a mother, it matters more than it ever did. I need to set the right example for my daughter.
I can keep going, but I wanted to share this here. I just tried taking the quiz to get a personal assessment map but I felt that I can’t quite take the test because I’m not “there” yet. It doesn’t make sense to answer it based on my old self who ran the business. And my new self who wants to run a business isn’t here yet. I don’t want it yet. I want to be myself first. Who am I underneath everything I learned to be?