By Sheila Marina, Planet of Peace Energy Healing
The most important session is almost always the one that nearly didn’t happen.
I know this because I have sat across from hundreds of people who, at some point in the first few minutes, say some version of the same thing:
“I almost didn’t come.”
They say it with relief. With a small shake of the head. With the quiet amazement of someone who is already beginning to feel something shift and is realizing how close they came to missing it.
This post is for the person who is where they were — standing at the door, uncertain, weighing whether to step through. You may see yourself in one of these stories. You may see yourself in all of them.
Each person came for a different reason. Each one hesitated in a different way. And each one, having arrived, discovered something their hesitation would never have allowed them to find.
She was a nurse working in long-term care. She found my website, booked a discovery call, and was enthusiastic — asking questions, engaging with the process, clearly drawn to the work.
Then two months passed before she booked a session.
The next day, she cancelled.
A full year went by. She booked again. She cancelled on the day of her appointment.
Another full year. She called. She booked. And this time — two years after that first enthusiastic discovery call — she walked through the door.
She sat down and explained something that every person reading this may recognize: she had been living with an ongoing melancholy, a heaviness she had been carrying quietly alongside a career spent caring for others. She had finally reached the moment where she was ready to advocate on her own behalf.
Using the Body Code, we identified a misalignment in her stomach that was holding trapped emotions of despair and helplessness. The stomach — the organ that processes what we take in from the world — had been carrying what she had absorbed across years of caregiving without ever turning that same care inward.
We had five more sessions together. Her confidence returned so fully that she was recently promoted at work — a recognition of the person she had always been, finally visible again because the weight she had been carrying was no longer dimming her.
She was ready two years before she arrived. Her body was simply waiting for her courage to catch up.
He was a firefighter with a young family. He had been experiencing the effects of what he had witnessed on the job — the accumulation of scenes and situations that the body absorbs and holds long after the shift ends.
He had heard that energy healing could help. And he hesitated. For months.
His hesitation was honest: he had very limited knowledge of this kind of work, and limited belief that something outside his existing framework could reach what he was carrying. He was a practical man in a practical profession. The language of energy and frequency and trapped emotions felt unfamiliar.
What brought him through the door was his children. They had begun to notice — and to comment — that he was changing. That he seemed different from the father they knew. The version of himself he was presenting at home had shifted enough that the people who loved him most were the first to name it.
Wanting to return to the version of himself his children recognized — his regulated, present, available self — he booked a session.
Across four sessions, we identified and released the trapped emotions that had accumulated through his career — the ones his training had taught him to compartmentalize and his body had faithfully stored. He was genuinely amazed at how much shifted. And his children — the ones whose observation brought him through the door — confirmed what the sessions had accomplished: the difference was noticeable. Their father was back.
She was 71. She had resigned herself to living with sadness and humiliation — emotions that had intensified after an incident at her granddaughter’s wedding two years earlier. She had accepted these feelings as permanent. She had decided, quietly and without telling anyone, that she was simply too old to be helped.
That belief — I am too old for this to work — is one of the most common reasons older adults delay seeking healing. And it is, in every case I have ever witnessed, completely unfounded.
In her session, we followed her body’s intelligence past the wedding — past the incident that had brought the emotions to the surface — to their actual origin. What we found was inherited trapped emotions of shame and humiliation originating eight generations ago, approximately 240 years, with an eleven-year-old girl.
That child — her ancestor — had carried shame and humiliation so significant that it imprinted on every generation that followed. The incident at the granddaughter’s wedding had not created the feelings. It had activated something that had been traveling through the family line for nearly two and a half centuries.
When the trapped emotions were released — from her, from all eight generations, and from the eleven-year-old ancestor — she reported feeling lighter and freer by the end of the session.
Then she said something that still moves me: she would be reaching out to her granddaughter later that day.
Two years of silence. One session. And the bridge was rebuilt — across generations in both directions.
She was 59 and in town on business. She had a practice of exploring various healing modalities in each city she visited for work — a curious, open-minded woman who had been on a healing journey since her mother died when she was 39.
She was unfamiliar with the Emotion Code, Body Code, and Belief Code. She walked in with curiosity rather than expectation — the way you might walk into a gallery in a city you are visiting, open to being moved and equally prepared to walk out unchanged.
She sat down and shared her journey — twenty years of processing grief, of seeking, of trying different approaches in different cities, each one offering a piece of something and none of them offering the whole picture.
We released trapped emotions of fear, sadness, overwhelm, and taken for granted — the emotional landscape of a woman who lost her mother and spent two decades carrying the weight of that absence through every city, every hotel room, every new modality that promised relief.
She was genuinely surprised at the accuracy of the Code Charts — at the precision with which her body identified exactly what it was holding and exactly when each emotion was installed.
Then we moved to the Belief Code. Her heart chakra, her solar plexus, and her throat chakra each delivered positive belief statements — personalized messages from her own subconscious mind, chosen with a specificity that can only come from the deepest part of a person’s own knowing.
When her heart chakra delivered the message that she is watched over and loved, she laughed out loud.
It was the laugh of someone who has been searching for twenty years and has just been found.
She was 20. A waitress. She was struggling at work — feeling isolated among co-workers whose views differed sharply from her own, unable to speak her thoughts and ideas, withdrawing further each week into a silence that felt safer than engagement.
Her parents, concerned, had taken her to a psychiatrist. The preliminary assessment suggested she might be presenting with signs of a serious mental health condition.
She came to me carrying the weight of that suggestion on top of everything else she was already holding.
When she told me everything — and she did, fully, in one sitting — she explained afterward that hearing herself tell her complete story, uninterrupted, in a single session was itself a revelation. She felt more clear about her situation simply from the act of being heard.
Using the Body Code, her subconscious mind guided us to a misalignment in the frontal lobe — the area of the brain responsible for reasoning, decision-making, social behaviour, and the ability to express oneself. The misalignment was held in place by trapped emotions of anger and horror, embedded at age 3. She confirmed: her father left when she was 3.
The isolation she was experiencing at work. The inability to speak. The withdrawal that looked, to a psychiatrist, like something clinical. The root was a three-year-old girl whose world broke apart and whose body held the fracture for seventeen years.
When those emotions were released and the frontal lobe misalignment was corrected, something settled.
Months later, she contacted me. She had been promoted to front of house manager — a role that requires exactly the qualities the trapped emotions had been suppressing: confidence in social settings, the ability to lead, the willingness to speak clearly and be seen.
She had always been capable. Her body had simply been protecting her from the age of three, in the only way it knew how.
Five people. Five entirely different lives. Five different reasons for hesitation.
The nurse waited because she had spent her career caring for others and needed two years to give herself permission to be cared for.
The firefighter waited because the work lived outside his existing framework and he needed his children to show him what they could see and he could not.
The grandmother waited because she had accepted that healing was for younger people and that her suffering was simply what remained.
The traveler almost missed it because she had tried so many modalities that her expectations had flattened into polite curiosity.
The young woman almost missed it because the people around her were looking at her symptoms rather than listening to her story.
Each one almost stayed home. Each one would have continued carrying what they were carrying — the despair, the accumulation of service, the inherited shame, the twenty-year search, the three-year-old’s anger — for however long their body could sustain it.
They came anyway. And what they found was waiting for them the entire time.
If you are reading this and recognizing yourself — in the nurse’s two-year delay, in the firefighter’s uncertainty, in the grandmother’s resignation, in the traveler’s lowered expectations, in the young woman’s silence — I want you to sit with one question.
Place your hand on your heart. Breathe slowly. And ask:
What is my hesitation protecting me from — and what might be waiting on the other side of it?
You do not need to answer today. You simply need to let the question live in your body. It will do its own work. And when the moment arrives — when your readiness overtakes your hesitation — you will know.
My article Why Emotional Patterns Repeat explores why the patterns we carry persist even when we understand them — and why willingness, more than understanding, is what creates the opening for genuine change.
Sessions are available in person in Bowmanville and Toronto, and worldwide via Zoom.
Every person in this post almost stayed home. Every one of them will tell you the same thing: the session they almost missed was the one that changed everything.
You are allowed to take two years. You are allowed to cancel twice. You are allowed to arrive uncertain, skeptical, resigned, curious, or simply tired of carrying what you have been carrying.
You are welcome here exactly as you are. And your body already knows what it has been waiting to say.
Sheila Marina is the founder of Planet of Peace Energy Healing and a certified Emotion Code, Body Code, and Belief Code Practitioner with over three decades of experience helping people understand what they carry — first in Children’s Services and now in energy healing. She sees clients in person in Bowmanville and Toronto, and worldwide via Zoom. planetofpeace.org
