If you think you’ve accepted the call but you can’t seem to take any real action, then this episode is going to break down what is likely going on and what you need to do to mobilize yourself.
You’ve heard the call. You’ve recognized the patterns. You’ve even decided you’re ready to make a change. But now you’re standing at the edge of the dark forest, and you can’t seem to take that first step forward. Your feet feel glued to the ground. Weeks turn into months, and you’re still saying you’re going to do the thing, but there’s no evidence that you actually are.
What’s really going on here isn’t laziness or lack of willpower. It’s something far more complex, far more subconscious, and once you understand it, you can finally mobilize yourself and cross that first crucial threshold.
🎧 Listen to Episode 3
To hear the deep dive on the Dark Forest and how to mobilize your inner resources, hit play below.
The Cliff’s Notes
Core Themes:
- The dark forest represents our ego’s fears coming up to try and convince us to turn back
- Your evolution sphere (in Gene Keys) reveals the shadow patterns that keep you from sharing your light
- Internal resistance often stems from protector parts trying to keep you safe from past pain
- Parts work (Internal Family Systems) helps us understand why we sabotage our own progress
- Mobilizing yourself requires understanding, compassion, and patience—not willpower or self-punishment
Key Takeaways:
- Understand the dark forest dynamic: Your evolution sphere shadow feeds directly into the shadow of your life’s work, creating a pattern that keeps you stuck in loops.
- Recognize protector parts: If you consistently can’t take action despite wanting to, there’s likely a protector part that developed during a past painful experience and is still trying to keep you safe.
- Stop using willpower alone: Being mean to yourself, pushing harder, or “just doing it” doesn’t work when internal parts are polarized and working against each other.
- Practice parts work: Learn to identify, acknowledge, and dialogue with the parts of you that are creating resistance. They have positive intent—they’re trying to protect you.
- Reassign your protector parts: These parts have gifts and skills. Once you understand them, you can redirect their energy toward supporting your goals instead of blocking them.
Want a personalized Mythic Map of your own hero’s journey? That’s why I created Mythic Journey.
Your Gene Keys profile reimagined as a literal map that will reveal your most challenging internal obstacles to overcome, protective patterns to disrupt, and the gifts that are waiting for you on the other side. Over the course of 75+ minutes (in a pre-recorded video you can watch over and over again), I’ll operate as your very own guide as we weave the new narrative for what you’re being called to and how to step into your full potential.
Intrigued and want to know more? Click here for all the deets!
Welcome to the Dark Forest
On the mythic journey map given to clients, the second destination is the dark forest. The journey starts at the very top with the call—just hearing that you’re being called to something. And as the last couple of episodes have covered, that’s a challenge in itself. It’s not always easy to hear or accept the call.
But what can be the most challenging is what happens when you have accepted the call and then start to embark on this journey into the unknown. You are met with the dark forest.
When you get to the dark forest, suddenly what was clear before is now not at all clear. You can go through a period—and this can happen multiple times—where you’re thinking, “Hold on, I made all this progress. Why am I in the dark forest again?” That can be very frustrating.
But here’s what the dark forest represents: our ego’s fears coming up to try and convince us to turn back.
It can show up in so many different forms. When doing the mythic journey for clients, they’re actually given clues as to what will likely be showing up for them.
The Gene Keys Framework: Life’s Work and Evolution
If you look at your Gene Keys profile (which you can do for free), you’ll see your life’s work sphere, which really represents your greatest calling. It’s the light you are here to share with the world. So much of your story plays out just in that one position in your gene profile.
But the next sphere in the activation sequence is your evolution sphere, which is like the great tug of war. For whatever you’re trying to lift toward, wherever you’re trying to expand, often the evolution sphere is the thing that’s trying to pull you back and keep you grounded and keep you small.
It’s where our greatest fears and really the greatest lies that we believe about ourselves can be hidden.
A Personal Example: Authority and Inadequacy
Here’s a personal example that might make this clearer. The life’s work sphere has the gift of authority and the shadow of control. The evolution sphere—what’s called the dark forest on the map—has the gift of resourcefulness, but the shadow of inadequacy.
And of course, this particular configuration exists. In the Gene Keys, they say that inadequacy is one of the darkest shadows in all of the Gene Keys, because it’s basically this belief that we are inherently broken and not good enough. Nothing we ever do will matter because as human beings, we are just already inherently not enough.
That fear and that belief is the thing that, when looking back over life, reveals a pattern: every misaligned decision ever made had an undertone of believing in inadequacy. It was what used to motivate spending basically everything earned—all revenue every year after basic expenses—pouring it back into more courses and more coaching and all of those things. All because of still feeling like never being enough. This unquenchable thirst for needing to believe that the brokenness wasn’t real.
That distortion—if believing that you’re just inherently unworthy and broken—warps your view of the world. Think about how every single interaction with every potential client, every potential collaborator, and every potential decision gets filtered through that belief.
Can you imagine how differently decisions get made if operating from the belief of inadequacy versus the belief of being enough? Think about the ripple effect.
But here’s the thing: this was built into the blueprint because deep, intimate understanding of this particular wound is what equips the ability to empathize with everyone worked with. Yes, it’s in a really prominent position in the chart, but the belief is that every single human being has this show up in some way for them.
Anyone who believes there’s something wrong with them that can’t be fixed. Anyone who believes they’re that special that they’re the only person who doesn’t really know how to run a business. Anytime you’re in comparison mode and think you’re the one who’s just failing because you’re stupid or not enough—we have all had this show up in some way, shape, or form.
How Shadows Justify Themselves
This can be a really sneaky shadow because so often—and this is how most shadows work—these core wounds get run through our logical, rational mind, and it presents a case to us as to why this is true, and then gives us all of these reasons of why we should then take a certain action to fix it.
The logical mind would come up with a really good case for justifying why that next course was needed, even though one hundred different courses had already been taken. The justifications could have filled a fifty-page PowerPoint as to why this was the course that was going to change everything.
Now, having done shadow work over the last couple of years, having really faced those wounds—and just so you know, facing those wounds is not about getting rid of them. Shadow work isn’t about scaring away the shadows. They are a part of us. We really love ourselves back into wholeness.
There’s a soft spot developed for this little fear that kicks in every now and then. But now there’s recognition of it, and knowing that it’s not going to be solved by showing up and buying another course and continuing that fear. Because what that does is perpetuate the belief.
Instead of going out and taking action that then proves resourcefulness—remember, the gift is resourcefulness—staying in the shadow meant that lesson would never be learned. The pattern was just kept going for the next course.
The Feedback Loop: Evolution Shadow Feeds Life’s Work Shadow
The other side to this example that needs to be shared: the sphere of evolution, or this dark forest, feeds directly back into the shadow of the life’s work.
The shadow of the life’s work, as mentioned, is control. So it’s basically wanting to control everything. If feeling inadequate, if in that shame story of “I’m not enough, I’m not enough,” then trying to control absolutely everything follows.
One really simple example: “I am not going to show up on social media until I’ve overhauled my entire strategy, until I have all the perfect templates, and I can then create this curated view of myself for the world, so that they do not see how broken I am.”
Leaning into controlling the image so that people don’t find out the “truth”—that there’s not being good enough.
For every single person, these Gene Keys come in pairs. So it’s always the same pairing. There’s the twenty-one and the forty-eight. They go together. And you will have a pairing as well.
When you look at your two spheres—your life’s work and your evolution sphere—have a look at what happens when you’re in the shadow of your evolution sphere. How does that potentially play out in then keeping you in the shadow of your life’s work?
The evolution sphere shadow is the thing that’s going to stop you from sharing your light with the world. And that’s a big deal. This is a problem that needs to be solved.
That is exactly why these mythic journeys exist—to help people see once and for all that this is a pattern that’s playing out. Your mind is so good at convincing you. It’s got its fifty-page PowerPoint to convince you of why this pattern you’re playing out is the logical, rational, strategic, safe thing to do. And so often what it’s really masking is fear.
This is just one way that we can get caught. We’re just stepping out. We’ve tried to accept the call. And then there is this dark forest that comes and presents itself and has us going, “Hang on, wait a second. No, I’m not ready to do this thing.” For all of these really logical reasons, maybe there’s going back to sign up for a degree because once that degree is there, then…
And we loop back to the same kind of patterns talked about in the previous episode.
The Second Type of Resistance: Protector Parts
There is a second type of shadow or resistance that very often kicks in at this part of the journey too.
This has been seen playing out with a lot of clients, as well as some in the closest inner circle, where they’ve said, “No, I’m ready to do this thing. I need to do this thing.” And then six months later, they’re still saying it. Eighteen months later, they’re still saying it. And there’s no evidence that they actually want to do it.
What is going on here is that there is some form of internal resistance.
The thing that has unlocked the ability to understand this in a new way is by looking at it through the lens of parts work, also known as Internal Family Systems or IFS.
Understanding Parts Work
The idea here is that we are actually a lot of different parts, a lot of moving parts. Our mind is kind of made up of all these different parts that work differently. And no, this doesn’t mean you’re “nuts.” This is just naturally how we function.
We have different voices and different guides that are leading the way at different points in our life. Often these different parts of us represent us at different ages as well. We might have some more childlike parts. We might have some parts that were really developed when we went through something quite upsetting—it could be traumatic, but not necessarily big-T trauma. A time you were rejected as a kid, or a part of you was rejected, or you were shamed for being who you were.
That often leaves such an impact on us that we kind of lock away that part of us that’s most vulnerable. And then what we do is we develop a protector part that comes in and says, “Okay, we can never go through that again. That was too upsetting. So what I’m going to do now is help you avoid any situation where this could happen in future.”
And let’s say that happened when you were seven years old. You could be thirty-seven today. And that same protector part is kicking in to help you avoid those situations.
An Example: The Voice That Was Shamed
Here’s an example from someone worked with. Let’s say that when you were around that age or younger, you were in a situation where you were singing out loud, in a choir situation or something, and you were putting on a silly voice. You were actually just being silly, being a kid as you would. And then someone teased you for it, or a bunch of kids laughed at you and told you that you have a terrible voice.
Now, you’re really young in that moment. You’re not going through the rational thinking process of going, “Oh, well, I was putting on a silly voice, so of course it’s silly. They’re just calling me out for my silly behavior.”
No. You take that to heart and you go, “Oh my God, I have a silly voice. I shouldn’t be sharing my voice anymore with the world.”
We take it very seriously.
Then think about how many times we might be wanting to share our voice with the world in future as an adult. That’s not going to just be a choir situation. That’s going to be any sort of public speaking. It could be you at a networking event. It could be you getting on camera and creating a social media video. It could be you speaking at a friend’s funeral. There are so many life and professional situations where we are called to use our voice.
And obviously, we are human beings, so we need our voice. Our voice is how we express ourselves.
But if we have developed a protector part who believes it is dangerous to use your voice because you are going to be vulnerable to criticism that hurts really bad, then you are going to find it difficult. You won’t necessarily know why, but you are going to struggle to take that action.
How Protector Parts Show Up
That can look like a couple of things:
- You could say yes to these events, but then you have a huge amount of anxiety before you do them
- You could be doing over-preparation and getting into your head about what you’re doing, making it really stressful for yourself
- While you’re doing the talk, you find yourself choking and feeling this tension in your throat, because there’s literally a part of you trying to hold you back
But then the other thing that can happen is it just doesn’t allow you to take action anyway. And this is where it can show up in so many sneaky ways. It will not always be obvious to you.
It could look like:
- Getting sick and losing your voice before you have to do that speaking opportunity
- Having a really urgent appointment come up that you have to prioritize over that thing
- Disaster striking before you actually get there—running late or whatever happened
- Coming up with this seemingly rational, logical explanation as to why you won’t be able to do that thing
- Just freezing—saying you want to create social media videos, and then month upon month, you just never do it because life always gets in the way
But you’re letting life get in the way. And again, this isn’t calling out your true self. Your protector part is ensuring that life always gets in the way. It keeps weaving this story about how there are all these other things that are far more important for you to do than record the video, because it doesn’t want you publishing the video.
This is one example, and it’s one used because, again, working with so many aspiring thought leaders, people who want to be in the public eye, creatives—the voice, the throat chakra—this is something that so many people come with blocks around.
But the same thing can happen in other formats. It could be that you say, “I really want to be self-employed. I’m sick of being an employee and feeling like I have no control over things. I’m sick of not being valued. It’s time. I need to go out on my own.”
And then you just keep not doing it. Life keeps getting busy. There’s always another project at work that’s really intense and you’re like, “I just don’t have the capacity. I’ll wait until the Christmas break.”
The Problem with “Just Do It” Coaching
This really needs to be called out: There are too many coaches or anyone in the professional industry that just say, “You just need to get over yourself, stop making excuses and just take action. It’s actually really simple to take action.”
No, it isn’t.
It can be once we’ve worked through what’s actually getting in the way. But the stance here is to assume positive intent. Assuming that someone is doing their absolute best. Working with high performers, not lazy people. So just saying they need to stop making excuses and do the thing doesn’t hold water.
There is a reason if they’re not taking action. Because when you look at human beings, often when there is something that we really, really want to do and there is no protector part getting in the way, like there’s no complication—good luck stopping anyone.
Look at children. Look at how willful children are. Most of us were brought into this world where it was really difficult to tell us not to do something. We all have different levels of conditioning, and we all respond to authority in different ways. But for the most part, we are far more willful as children.
So if there is an adult who is a high performer, who’s highly intelligent, who’s actually accomplished a lot of things in their past, and they are finding that they just cannot take action, the response is not going to be to just call them lazy and say that they’re making excuses.
What is known to be true from working with so many clients over the years is that there is an internal mechanism that is kicking in to stop them from taking that action, because one part of them at least does not feel safe taking that action.
Going back to the example: this person wants to launch something, to go out on their own. But what gets learned when working together is they have tried to do this in the past. They had a couple of attempts to launch something that didn’t go the way they wanted, and they were crushed. They were really disappointed and it hurt so much. It was frustrating. It maybe was humiliating. It set them back. Their spirit was crushed in that moment.
Their protective part has been developed because it doesn’t want them to hurt like that again. And so every time they say, “Okay, I’m gonna do the thing. Yeah, I want to do the thing,” and genuinely, one part of them wants to do the thing, the protector part is going, “Yeah, but if you do that, you’re going to be humiliated. It’s not going to work and you’re going to be crushed again. So let’s not go there.”
But this conversation, until we become aware of it, is happening unconsciously.
How to Work With Your Protector Parts
The beautiful thing about parts work as a modality is that it allows us, it gives us this framework to bring this stuff to the forefront, to bring it into our conscious awareness. We can get to know these different parts and we can start to converse with them, find out what their motivation is, what they’re really trying to protect us from.
And then we can go through a process of educating them.
Because the thing is, that part often thinks you’re still seven years old or fifteen years old. It doesn’t realize you’re in your twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, or beyond. You have so many more resources available to you today. You’re more experienced, you’re more skilled, you’re more courageous.
And it also isn’t aware that you staying in place right now is causing you far more pain than you risking that potential humiliation, rejection, whatever it thinks it’s protecting you from. Just being in this situation year after year is so much more painful.
The Process of Parts Work
Once we start to have conversations with these parts and get to understand them:
First, we can start to ease their stance. “Hang on, hang on. Firstly, I love you and I appreciate you. Thank you.”
Because again, this is a second form of positive intent. Just like assuming if a client is unable to do something, they genuinely are trying and there’s just something going on that’s not working, the same goes for positive intent when we think about our parts.
What we are assuming is that part just wants to protect us. It wants what it thinks is best for us. Which is why it’s taking these actions. And that’s beautiful. And it was probably necessary for a certain period in your life, because for a certain period in your life, you were still that vulnerable. And having another thing like that happen again probably would have crushed you and could have done more damage.
So we want to thank the part for what it’s done. We want to be grateful and acknowledge it. Because the other thing that we tend to do with these parts is we get so annoyed with them. We get angry and we kind of abuse them. “Why can’t it just get out of the way?”
So the part could also feel a little offended that despite working its butt off most of your life to try and help you, you’re here just being ungrateful.
Reassigning Your Parts
Here’s the real key: that part represents a part of you, a specific trait or skill or strength of yours.
It’s fun to nerd out and look at Gene Keys profiles and see how all the different placements relate to different parts. But essentially, just like with shadow work, each part when it’s in its shadow form is just protecting you from taking any sort of action. But it’s got skills, it’s got gifts. It’s meant to actually give you this unique edge. It’s meant to be a part of the whole, because you are this whole operating system.
You are meant to have all these facets to you available.
What is really happening when we’re in that state of not being able to move forward is what they call polarized parts. It’s where one part wants one thing and another part wants another thing. But you’re meant to work as a team.
Once we can get that part on board with what the real goal is—”Hey, it’s a different time now, it’s a different place. I’m a different person. I don’t actually need you to pour that skill set that you’ve got of protecting me into this form of protection. What would you like to be doing instead?”—we start to reassign these parts to do something that’s actually going to be helpful, that’s going to be supportive of this overall goal.
And then we start to have all of our parts moving together, working towards a common goal. And life gets a lot easier.
The Timeline
Obviously, this concept has been explained in fifteen minutes or less, and it’s not that it just happens instantly and overnight. But parts work works beautifully solo as well as with a professional. Sometimes clients are guided through some parts work. But often what happens is, once it’s been identified what’s going on, where the resistance is, and there are some potential polarized parts identified, some exercises are given to do on their own.
You can guide yourself through this. It’s actually a simple process once you’ve sort of got the hang of it.
Just know that yes, it’s not an overnight thing. It can take time to really identify your parts and get to know them and get to this place where they’re willing to listen to you, because again, we’ve been ignoring them and potentially abusing them for a really long time. So you have to let them know that you’re here to stay, and that you actually want to be in collaboration with them and not just against them moving forward.
But once you do that, we start to mobilize our inner resources in this beautiful way and realize we’re no longer working against ourselves.
This is kind of related to the warrior archetype mentioned before. Sometimes the battle is happening internally. It’s us against us, which is such a waste of energy.
What we want to do is make sure that all of our internal parts are activated and ready for battle—and it doesn’t have to sound like this heavy, intense thing—but they’re all working towards this common cause. And then that energy is all moving forward. It’s all moving in the right direction. And we’re not wasting energy fighting ourselves.
Your Contemplation
To wrap this episode up and leave you with this contemplation: if you feel like you have accepted the call, but you’re not actually making progress, like you feel a little frozen in place and you’re standing at the edge of the dark forest and can’t seem to take another step, know this:
Firstly, it’s very unlikely that it’s just a pure lack of willingness. It’s never as simple as there’s just something wrong with you or you’re not trying hard enough. It’s often more complex. It’s often a subconscious thing.
And this is where sometimes we do need to spend a little bit of time getting to know what’s actually the real hold up, so that we can mobilize those parts of ourselves and not just try and strong-arm our way through the forest. That just doesn’t work.
Being mean to yourself is not a solution.
Did you hear that? Being mean to yourself is not a solution.
It’s been tried. Clients have tried it. We can report back. Yelling at yourself, pushing yourself, punishing yourself, berating yourself—none of that moves us forward. It only gets us more stuck in the mud.
What we need now is understanding, compassion, and patience. Those ingredients are what are going to mobilize us and allow us to start moving forward.
And then we can get to the real monsters in the forest. Because let’s be honest, this isn’t going to be the only time that you’re feeling a little freaked out and struggling to move forward. But this is often the main threshold. This is really the first threshold that we need to cross: are we actually taking action?
Because if you’re not taking action, you haven’t crossed the threshold.
Then once we’ve crossed the threshold, we can talk about what lies in the forest. And you don’t need to be scared of it. Yes, they might look like monsters and they might try and scare you, but there is a way to beat all of them. And that is what’s going to be unfolded over the next episodes—about five of them. We’re going to talk about the five most common monsters found in the dark forest, and how we beat them at their own games.
Want a personalized Mythic Map of your own hero’s journey? That’s why I created Mythic Journey.
Your Gene Keys profile reimagined as a literal map that will reveal your most challenging internal obstacles to overcome, protective patterns to disrupt, and the gifts that are waiting for you on the other side. Over the course of 75+ minutes (in a pre-recorded video you can watch over and over again), I’ll operate as your very own guide as we weave the new narrative for what you’re being called to and how to step into your full potential.
One of the places the most time is spent is on that life’s work and evolution—your calling and your dark forest and how they play together. Because this is the primary pattern that can keep us in a loop, going in circles. And once we really understand these, not only do we unlock the ability to move forward, we mobilize ourselves, we also start to shine a lot more light on the world. We really unlock our ability to step into our full potential because that life’s work, your calling, is where it’s all at. This is where we learn so much about your gifts and the impact that you’re here to make on the world.
Intrigued and want to know more? Click here for all the deets!
