By Sheila Marina, Planet of Peace Energy Healing
He could see it happening. Every time.
The promotion would be within reach — and something in him would pull back. The relationship would deepen — and he would create a conflict that halted the momentum. The business opportunity would arrive — and he would hesitate just long enough for it to pass.
He was 44. Successful by most measures, and yet haunted by a pattern so consistent it had become predictable: he would get close to something he wanted, and then — through a choice he could not fully explain, through a behaviour that surprised even him — he would watch it collapse.
He described himself as someone who needed to be tough and impenetrable. In the boardroom. In his personal life. In every space where vulnerability might be required. Toughness was his identity. Impenetrability was his strategy. And both were, he was beginning to suspect, the very things preventing him from receiving what he was working so hard to build.
Using the Belief Code, we followed his body’s intelligence to the root chakra — the energy centre of safety, stability, survival, and the most fundamental sense of belonging in the world.
Within the root chakra, under the heading of Sabotage, his subconscious mind identified the pattern by name. The body was not confused about what was happening. It knew exactly what it was doing — and it was doing it deliberately, from the deepest energetic foundation available.
The trapped emotions driving the sabotage were precise:
Stubbornness — Age 10. A ten-year-old boy who learned that flexibility was dangerous. That yielding meant losing. That the only safe posture in a world that felt unpredictable was rigid, unyielding, immovable. The stubbornness that served him at 10 became the inflexibility that prevented him at 44 from allowing good things to land — because receiving requires opening, and opening requires the very softness that stubbornness was designed to prevent.
Rejection — Age 17. A seventeen-year-old who experienced rejection at the precise age when identity is most fragile. The body recorded a simple instruction: what you offer will be refused. What you reach for will be withdrawn. The safest course is to withdraw first — before the rejection arrives.
Together, these two emotions created a self-sabotage loop: stubbornness prevented the flexibility needed to receive, and rejection ensured that anything approaching closeness activated a preemptive withdrawal. The conscious mind wanted the promotion, the relationship, the opportunity. The root chakra — operating from the instructions of a 10-year-old and a 17-year-old — ensured they never fully arrived.
When both emotions were released, the Belief Code delivered the positive replacement statement from the root chakra:
“I am comfortable in my power and ability.”
This statement landed in the foundation of his energy system — the very place where the sabotage had been operating. It replaced the old instruction (withdraw before you are rejected) with a new one (you are safe to stand in your strength and allow what is coming to arrive).
The conventional understanding of self-sabotage frames it as a character flaw — a weakness of will, a failure of discipline, a frustrating tendency that should be overcome through greater effort and accountability.
This framing misses the mechanism entirely.
Self-sabotage is the nervous system protecting you from an outcome it believes will be dangerous. The protection was installed during an original experience — rejection, loss, humiliation, punishment for success — and it has been operating faithfully ever since. The body is preventing you from reaching the thing you want because the last time you reached for something — at 10, at 17, at whatever age the original wound was installed — reaching led to pain.
The sabotage is the body’s way of saying: I remember what happened last time. I will keep you safe by ensuring it cannot happen again.
This is why willpower alone rarely resolves self-sabotage. You are asking the conscious mind to override a protective programme running in the root chakra — the body’s most fundamental energy centre, the one responsible for survival itself. The conscious mind wants the goal. The root chakra wants safety. And when those two impulses collide, the root chakra wins every time — because survival always outranks ambition in the body’s hierarchy of priorities.
The last-minute withdrawal. Everything is in place. The opportunity is clear. And at the final moment — the interview, the commitment, the launch — something causes you to hesitate, delay, or decline. The conscious explanation is usually practical: the timing wasn’t right. The energetic truth is that the body activated a protective withdrawal at the threshold of receiving.
The conflict that arrives right on schedule. The relationship deepens. Intimacy increases. And suddenly — almost predictably — a fight erupts over something minor. The conflict is the body creating distance at the precise moment closeness becomes threatening. The fight is real. The cause is older than the relationship.
The imposter pattern. Success arrives, and rather than receiving it, the body generates an overwhelming sense of fraudulence — the feeling that the success is undeserved, that discovery is imminent, that the real self is inadequate to hold what has been given. This pattern keeps the person perpetually on the edge of their own achievement, never fully inhabiting what they have built.
Physical illness at critical moments. The body falls ill before the big presentation, the important trip, the significant milestone. The illness is genuine — the immune system is truly compromised. And the timing is the body’s way of preventing the self from arriving at a moment the nervous system has flagged as dangerous.
Choosing what is familiar over what is desired. The opportunity for change is present — a new career, a new city, a new relationship that is healthier than anything before it. And the person chooses the familiar option, the safe option, the option that maintains the known pain over the unknown possibility. The nervous system prefers the devil it knows — because at least that danger has been survived before.
This practice is for anyone who recognizes the pattern — the reaching and the pulling back, the wanting and the preventing, the exhaustion of fighting yourself at every threshold.
Sit quietly. Place both hands on the base of your spine or on your lower abdomen — the area of the root chakra.
Close your eyes. Breathe slowly. And speak to the part of you that has been running the sabotage programme — with gratitude rather than frustration:
I see what you have been doing.
I understand that you were protecting me.
The danger you remember is from another time.
I am safe now to receive what is coming.
I am comfortable in my power and ability.
That final sentence — the one his root chakra offered him — is available to you as well. Speak it slowly. Let it land in the base of your body, in the foundation of your energy system, in the place where safety and survival are determined.
Each repetition tells the root chakra: the old programme is no longer needed. A new instruction has arrived. And it is safe — finally, genuinely safe — to allow something good to land.
If self-sabotage has been your pattern — if you can see it clearly yet cannot seem to stop it, if every approach you have tried has addressed the behaviour without reaching the root — the programme may be running in a layer that willpower and insight cannot access.
My article From Exhausted to Empowered — Breaking Free from Burnout explores how deeply embedded patterns drain the body’s resources and what becomes possible when the root is addressed directly.
When you are ready to discover what your body has been protecting you from — and to release the programme that has been keeping you from what you have been working so hard to reach — sessions are available in person in Bowmanville and Toronto, and worldwide via Zoom.
You have been fighting yourself at every threshold. The body was doing its job — protecting a wound that was installed long before the current opportunity arrived. When the wound is released, the threshold becomes a doorway.
And what is waiting on the other side has been waiting for you all along.
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
