Pressure BEFORE Transformation: The Strange Friend You Keep Mistaking for an Enemy

“That decision gutted me financially and stretched me nearly to the brink of no return spiritually. And for a while, I questioned if I’d lost my damn mind. I know some people in my life thought I had totally gone off the fucking deep end.”

- Amanda Empath Unfiltered

If healing were linear, we’d all be enlightened by now. But it’s not. It’s more like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle while blindfolded… in a windstorm… with your higher self shouting, “You’re doing great!” from the sidelines.

And just when you finally think you’ve made progress, pressure shows up…uninvited, unrelenting, and louder than a toddler with a kazoo. It presses on your chest when you’re trying to meditate. It hums in the background when you’re chasing your dreams.

It tightens around you right when you start to believe maybe, just maybe, you’re ready to level up.

Most people interpret that moment as a problem. I did too...

( "But something in me refused. So I burned that bitch to the ground." 👊 )

Years ago, my hypnosis and healing practice was booked solid. Waitlist full. Every session sold out. On paper, it was a success. But within myself, I could feel something shifting, a subtle restlessness that grew louder by the day.

The techniques I’d been using were incredibly powerful, but they weren’t enough anymore. My clients were healing… and then a couple months later circling back to the same patterns and triggers. And if I was being honest, I was circling too. I was circling with the possibility that I was failing my clients.

It would’ve been easy to double down on what was working and watch my bank account grow.

But something in me refused.
So I burned that bitch to the ground.

I stopped taking clients, walked away from consistent comfortable income, and dove headfirst into a rabbit hole of modalities and research — NLP, CBT coaching, EFT Tapping, different approaches to energy work, and anything I could sink my practitioner teeth into that would challenge how I approached healing and my ideas on spirituality and reality — anything that could help me understand why change sometimes sticks and sometimes slips through our fingers without us even realizing.

That decision gutted me financially and stretched me nearly to the brink of no return spiritually. And for a while, I questioned if I’d lost my damn mind. I know some people in my life thought I had totally gone off the fucking deep end.

But that pressure that felt like unfair punishment? The one that made me want to crawl out of my skin and wish I could go back to sleep and forget that I had ever awakened…turns out, It was an invitation to evolve.

Here’s what I’ve learned since:

Pressure shows up at the threshold of expansion.

It’s the nervous system scanning for safety before you step into the unknown.

It’s your psyche checking if the soil beneath you is stable enough to grow strong new roots.

It’s the soul preparing itself to hold a reality bigger than the one you’ve ever known.

The tricky part is that pressure feels identical to danger. The same stress hormones that flood your body when you’re being chased by a bear can also flood you when you’re chasing a dream. That’s why your mind tries to convince you something is “wrong”, because you’re leaving the territory of the familiar. And familiar, to the subconscious, has always meant safe.

Let me slip in a nerdy fact here (because I can’t help myself…and ADHD):

Bamboo spends up to FIVE YEARS growing roots before you ever see a single shoot above ground. Five years of nothing happening… at least from the surface view. But beneath the soil, an entire support system is being built to sustain up to eighty feet of growth that will happen in just one season. And that my friend, how pressure works. What appears to be wasted time, frustration, and stuckness is actually the unseen beneath the surface growing in strength that makes rapid growth possible when the perfect moment arrives.

And here’s something I really want you to hear:

If pressure is present, you’re already expanding.
What can feel like absence of growth is actually the signal that growth is underway.

So the next time everything feels heavier right before a spiritual or healing breakthrough, take a big pause before you label it as a setback.

Ask yourself: What might this weight be preparing me to carry? What energy do I need to hold?

I need to be incredibly clear and transparent here…every version of you that’s ever evolved was forged here — in the squeeze, in the tension, in the moments that felt too tight to possibly bear. This is where your capacity and capability is stretched. This is where deeper layers of you come to the surface. This is where the roots spread deep and wide so the rise can happen fast.

Pressure isn’t here to stop you.
It’s the universe asking if you’re ready to hold what you’ve been asking for.

Pressure exists to stretch you into the woman who can hold what’s next.

Every time you step into a bigger version of yourself, the shell of the old one loosens. It screams and resists and begs you for the love of God to climb back inside that smaller version of yourself and hide.

But if you keep going... even when it’s hard, even when it’s loud and you feel out of control... you grow beyond the limits of what used to contain you. The pressure is your friend.

And if you’re feeling it now? That is fabulous news!
It means something extraordinary is already in motion.

👉 Want to go deeper into this conversation? In this month’s newsletters, every week, I’m breaking pressure down even further than we discussed here - why it resurfaces at every new level of healing, how to recognize when it’s purposeful vs destructive, and how to move through it with more grace and less resistance.

Make sure you’re on the email list to join in on the conversation, subscribe here: https://highertimeline.com/home.

This is where transformation becomes a little easier… feels less lonely… and sometimes is even fun.

Yours Truly,

Amanda - The Empath Unfiltered