The Golden Shell
- Astra Soulfeather
- 15 hours ago
- 14 min read
It began with receiving an email from a marketing coach.
“Hey lovely Astra,
I’m writing this from bed on day four of having absolutely no voice. And I’ll admit, today I’ve felt a bit sorry for myself. Not speaking is VERY foreign to me, I mean communication is literally what I do.
I've been journalling on the metaphysical reason for laryngitis and it's reminded me that sometimes we don’t give voice to what really needs to be said. And that’s when the body steps in to make sure we pay attention . Ok I am listening (don't have much option but too - haha).
But here’s the thing… while I’ve been quiet, my business has been anything but. In the last few days alone, I’ve brought in over $13,000 AUD cash (closer to $20k in sales).
And two years ago? That would have felt impossible.”
I coughed, and blew my nose. I was also unwell – not anything as extreme as laryngitis, but sick enough to merit a week in bed and the frustration that comes with flopping about, thinking fast but acting slow, tired after anything more strenuous than making toast yet desperate to do something to stem the boredom.
During that week I did not bring in $13,000 AUD cash in my business. It was not closer to $20k cash; it was close to $0. In fact, it was $0. Hmph.
Another email arrived, this time from a British coach:
“I came back from summer expecting to feel fresh and energised… and instead found myself apathetic and recovering from illness.
I pushed through and promoted my workshop series in a very “I-still-feel-crappy” kind of way.
The ads I’ve run for four years straight underperformed. That was humbling ... So sign ups were lower than usual (400 instead of usual 600/700).
Then, just as I was getting back on my feet, I got ill again. Which meant making the tough call to postpone the workshop series I’d planned for this week …
The good news is I hit my minimum 20K income goal for September before it even began so that was nice. Took the pressure off making any money this month and meant I just spent a few days in bed not doing much at all.”
That is nice, isn’t it? To have hit that goal? And what an extraordinary goal it is: for the minimum income of that month to be only a little lower than what a newly-qualified nurse might earn in a year. And all while ill and lacking in energy and recovering.
While I had been ill and lacking in energy and recovering, I had not made sales. I did not have sign ups. Instead, I had unsubscribes and lost followers and realised I wouldn’t be able to pay off my credit card bill this month.
And there is nothing like a week of feeling unwell to churn over the shoreline and make it ready to be pecked at.
Listening to The Feelings
To say these emails touched a nerve is an understatement. My first reaction was bafflement: Am I reading this right? Are these coaches, who promote living in alignment and creating businesses built around ease, actually doing the opposite? That despite illness, they are pushing through? Despite seeing the value in learning the “metaphysical reason” for their sickness, they are carrying on?
And surely they’re not telling us about this in a marketing email? Surely they’re not bemoaning their ill health then doubling down on their commercial ‘success’ in the next breath without connecting the dots?
Surely that can’t be right?
Next was doubt. Am I reading too much into this? Am I seeing something that isn’t there? Is this the fever talking? Doubt is a powerful medicine when given in the right quantities, but toxic in the wrong circumstances. I know myself enough that when I get some sand in my cognitive shoe – when I feel a rough tingle that tells me there is something in this, some lesson to draw out through the lens of doubt – I’m not misreading the synthesis that is forming in my awareness.
There is some insight here, and it is my work to keep going even as I feel my emotions rise violently. I feel frustration, which blooms into anger at their foolishness. How could they, with all their training and awareness and their vocal promotion of alignment, not see what’s happening here?
How are they so oblivious as to not see the connection between the two experiences they are sharing?
How ignorant are they that they’re willing to promote such an unhealthy way of relating to work, money and success?
How unenlightened must they be – and how dare they be rewarded materially for their lack of awareness?
Even in the midst of my irritation, I remember that anger is a boundary-setting emotion. In feeling anger towards their experiences, I recognise I am setting a boundary around something; something so painful and wounded I do not want to see it or allow it to be true. This is the part I turn to, hidden deep in the well of my frustration.
This wounded part asks: And how come I don’t get that?
How come when I am sick, everything stops? I do not make more money, I do not gather more interest. When I am sick in heart and soul and body, and the world seems to be crushing me from every angle, why is it that I can’t override that feeling? Why can’t I push through, and in pushing through push away my body and its wisdom?
Why does my stomach churn and my digestion slow when I have dark emotions to process?
Why does the skin on my shins flare and itch when I head towards a thought pattern that makes me unhappy?
Why does my eye twitch when I am seeing the world in a way that is unhealthy and unreal?
Why does my body tell me unequivocally what is really going on, and why do I listen so intently?
Why am I willing to listen when it is so frustrating to do so?
The wounded part is embarrassed, upset. I don’t want to do that, it says. I don’t want to listen to the pain.
I don’t want to do that if it means I fail.
If actioning this body’s disruptive memos means I don’t get to bring in sales like those other people do, then I don’t want to do it.
If listening to what my body needs means losing out on making thousands every month, then I don’t want to hear it.
The wounded part says: I want the money more than the health. I want the success more than the wisdom.
I want to win more than I want to heal.
Shaming the Suffering
In this realisation, the wounded part turns fierce. It wants to win, and now it isn’t powered by anger but greed – grasping, clawing, envious and avaricious. It will do anything to win at the game others have laid out, the game where money and fame and numbers is all that counts.
The fierceness becomes frantic action, doing whatever it can in the external world to offer more, be more creative, be loud, be visible, be somebody. Agitated, it stops looking inwards for wisdom and begins to seek solutions from the guru outside of the soul, the ‘winning’ others who are wealthier and well-known and successful – who are all so much better than the suffering self.
Internally, the ferocity turns to shaming the part that is ill, sick, fallible, and human. The greater the desire to win, the greater the shame that is piled upon the tender suffering. And if the body or mind are too sick in that moment to take action in the outside world, the brutal, frantic part ratchets up the shame. It replaces external ‘doing’ with internal shaming, reviling the suffering self, because this is all it can do. It is the only power it has, and it wields it like an open palm.
You’re always getting sick. You’re always ill.
You’re so slow. You need to work harder.
Smack.
No-one reads your writing. No-one wants to work with you. People don’t want to hear about your stupid ideas about suffering and compassion and God.
Smack.
(And in this moment the shame is strong enough to become a lens through which to see the world. Each lost sale, each unfollow, each unsubscribe is interpreted by the fierce, frantic part as proof that the shame is warranted.)
Look! Look – I told you so. No-one is interested.
No-one cares.
You need to stop what you’re doing and start thinking about how to make some money.
Smack.
It’s pointless, a total waste of time. You’re a fucking idiot for believing in that stuff.
Smack.
You’re an embarrassment. A failure.
Smack.
Disgusting.
It takes all my mental strength and the safe love of my partner not to do what I did for so many years: take this stream of verbal self-abuse and bring it outside myself, make the physical reality match the mental pain, and hit myself. I clench my fists, refusing to form the palm that would slap my face, or the side of my head, would pull my hair or bang my temples. My nails dig into the soft flesh of my thumb, and it hurts, but that’s not the point of it.
The point is that I am no longer someone who hurts themselves when they are hurting. I am no longer someone who allows the most violent part of me to abuse the tenderest, most vulnerable part of me.
I am no longer someone who kicks themselves when they are down.
We Are Not Alone In This
I would like to tell you that this is what the trauma response looks like, and intellectualise the whole experience through a clear and unequivocal medical model. Perhaps I’d like to confidently label it as a neurodivergent experience; a bad case of rejection sensitivity disorder, maybe, causing this rapid downward spiral.
I could pretend to be an expert, and to tell you this is inevitably what happens in a perfect storm of mental stress and physical recovery. I could logically argue this is what happens in the end months of a year spent contemplating devotion and what one is truly devoted to.
I could pin it all on the widespread, lazy, para-social storytelling that plagues the self-help industry. I could blame my jealousy, my arrogance, or other people’s ignorance.
Maybe it’s all of those things, and none of them, and something else entirely.
All I know is this:
I am not the only one who feels this way.
Every day millions of people wake up and wonder if they will be able to pay their bills. Will they have to make a tough choice between food and warmth? Will their rent be late, again?
Millions of others wonder whether they will still have their job by the end of the week, or whether this dead-end job is all they can hope for from their career.
Artists and writers across the world sit and stare at their latest creation, second-guessing if it is any good, if anyone cares, if there is any point to what they are doing. Creative people offer their gifts to the world and the world meets them with silence.
Chronically ill people, neurodivergent people, people with mental ill-health spend days tormented by their own minds and bodies. They struggle, and suffer, and try their best, and get frustrated, and get worse, and can’t seem to get out from under it.
Our bodies – all our bodies – are exhausted. They are tired from trying to tell us that what we think, or say, or who we spend time with, or the structure of our lives, is hurting us. They are tired from fighting the violence within us, the part that shames and blames when we are unwell, or tired, or simply need a break. Our bodies send us signal after signal telling us to listen, to pay attention to the suffering rather than the shame, and they are running out of rashes, twitches, aches, and pains.
Yet we do not listen. We do not act.
Because we want to win more than we want to heal.
Protecting Our Wound with Glamour
The instinctive part of us that wants to win is deeply protective. It wants us to survive at all costs, and each day ‘survival’ becomes bigger and shinier and more glamorous. Survival becomes success, and success means winning.
This part that wants to protect us has gotten bored with the baseline; as our species has evolved, and our simplest needs catered for, our survival instinct has become monstrously over-committed. It has forgotten that to survive we need nourishment and shelter and heat – not six-figures-a-month or a million followers or a TED Talk. It has conflated the lack of the latter with a lack of the former, when the truth is that someone like me – white, British, middle class, well-educated – is surrounded by more safety nets than a tightrope walker, and has wanted for very little in the material sphere.
It is the trauma of the past that convinces me that if I lack the required TV show, billion-dollar business, and worldwide fame, I will simultaneously lack nourishment, shelter and heat. It’s the traumatic events of my childhood, both ‘small’ and ‘large’, that do not allow me to rest in the reality of my current experience where there is food in the fridge, and hot water in the boiler, and the luxury of a couple of hours for me to sit and write this piece.
The trauma is what has done a number on me, convincing me that I need more and more to feel that I have enough; to feel that I am finally safe. Because despite having material safety for much of my life, I did not receive the emotional nourishment, shelter or warmth I desperately needed. The trauma tells me that without outrageous success, these are also what I will miss out on; I will not only starve to death, but I will be alone and unloved at the same time.
The trauma is the wound which causes me to pityingly and unthinkingly wail: “How come I don’t get that? How come this way is my path? How come it’s so unfair?”
The trauma is the wound which causes part of me to throw away my original method of being in the world and instead take on the fierce, frantic persona that needs to do more, more, more – always. And the trauma is the wound which causes part of me to employ shame strategies when I cannot do more because of sickness or exhaustion.
Safe in the Shell, Until …
The trauma wounded my self, and the survival instinct forms a shell around this part; a rock-solid golden shell impenetrable by anything other than extra-ordinary success by anyone’s standards. Only when this superheroic level of success is achieved – the book deal, the millions, the fame and fortune – will the wounded part be safe. Anything less is not good enough, because anything else is unstable, unpredictable, and unbelievable. The scope of our trauma and our sensitivity to it directly correlates with the extent to which we trust and believe in our own security and success, both material and emotional. If we cannot believe it is real – even as we sit in comfort, loved and loving – the trauma that has wounded us will continue to pressure our actions, asking us to enrich the golden shell until it is as hard and cold as ice.
We are hermit crabs, evolved to change and outgrow what doesn’t fit, but we resist this wisdom when we become emotionally and cognitively attached to the glittering shell we have created, seeing it as an extension of our self, our ego. Yet our bodies do not resist this wisdom. When the body and soul start sending us the memo to slow down, it is because the wounded part, hidden within that golden shell, needs our attention. It has outgrown this house, and it’s ready to move; it has done some healing, and is ready to do more, if only we choose to listen. If we ignore these notices from our bodies, and instead turn once again to bedazzling the shell we carry, enamelling and lacquering it with ever-more intricate designs, our physical forms will shout louder and louder that things are getting tight in here – that we need space – that whether or not we feel ‘healed’, it’s time for us to move on and up and out.
And when we are tipped out of the shell – either through choice or necessity – just like a hermit crab, the minutes between these ‘homes’ feel as an eternity. Whether through physical sickness, mental distress, or releasing a particular golden shell we have spent much time and effort decorating, in the space between these protective spiral frameworks our tenderness and fallibility are exposed, our humanity and weakness exhibited for all to see. We scuttle nakedly about, even more afraid of pain because now our wounds are visible, vulnerable. We stop pretending we are capable of every-expanding action, always able to do more, more, more – because all we can do is really survive, really just try and make it to whatever comes next. And we realise, with some surprise, that our shame strategies are utterly pointless; it turns out there is nothing to hide now that everything we were most mortified about – our most hidden, most embarrassing secrets – is suddenly on public display.
Your Medicine Sparkles
Eventually we do get to the next shell, and as we ease into it gratefully the cycle begins again. We have a new way of winning, a new impenetrable shell. It is comforting, and undoubtedly we will exert plenty of effort glazing its surface. But perhaps this time, rather than respond when our body is screaming in our faces, we will choose to listen to its small, gentle voice.
Perhaps we’ll spend fewer hours gilding and re-gilding our shell, and more minutes curled within it, attending to the wounded part, making time for healing and creating safety within rather than waiting for it arrive without.
Maybe we’ll be quicker to slough off whatever we have created when it stops feeling comfortable and starts feeling claustrophobic. We might choose to think and say and do things that help us shrug off our shell, preparing ourselves emotionally to move on and up and out. Maybe we’ll be more curious of the eternity between homes, taking some small delight in scampering about bare and unmasked, less fearful of the pain because now it is in the sunlight, and the shame doesn’t stick any more, and we can breathe.
Of all the practices I employ in my daily spiritual life, it is writing that continues to aid me in this effort to shrug away tightness, to be curious about the space between. It is the light when I am trapped in the cave of my own golden shell; it is the breath when I feel too ashamed to inhale. When I feel compelled to win at all costs, I know I must write, for in the writing I find healing – and this is the real success, the genuine ‘win’: to heal and thrive beyond what I ever believed was possible for me. I no longer kick myself when I am down; I write, and lift myself up.
What is this for you? What is it that will stop the violent drive to win, no matter what, and offer you what you truly need? Rather than worrying what strategies to use to find a bigger, brighter shell, or how to embellish and adorn its too-tight surface, what is the practice you must employ to break free from its constraints? What is it that will allow you to feel the sun on your skin, and the release from stifling shame? What will help you listen to your body, and to the wounded part of you?
What is it that will help you heal?
Running Home
There is a shore fading down from the cliff tops. It is covered in coarse, gold glitter; the sparkle of thousands, perhaps millions, of golden spirals scattered over the sand, each a distinct and beautiful shell that was once treasured – is still treasured – yet now lies shining silently on the shingle. They are all empty, ready to be a home for the next soul – or perhaps for no soul, no next phase, instead existing only for a moment in this one lifetime.
In the distance you hear a stony tinkle, followed by a muffled yell of delight. My latest golden shell has been stripped off and I am away and running naked across the beach, heart exposed and lungs full of air.
I do not care if I am judged, or pointed at. I do not care if I am seen as I am, my wounds bruised and bleeding, or discovered in my raw humanity. All I care about is that I am heading toward the wide blue ocean I came from all those years ago. All I care about is that I am free.
This piece of original writing was created by Astra Soulfeather. No AI was used to ideate, write or edit this work. The featured images are digital artworks created by Astra Soulfeather in open-source software GIMP using images generated by Chat GPT and botanical illustrations from Heritage Type available under a Creative Commons license. © 2025 Astra Soulfeather & Higher Love Co. All rights reserved.
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