The Gift 8 – Identity Comes Before Healing
- Feb 14
- 4 min read
Written by Fredrica Kinlow, Intuitive Life Coach
Free Kinlow is loved for her intuitive coaching style and her ability to help others discover and uncover their spiritual giftedness. She is the founder of Freedom Love Experience coaching service and The Gift Shoppe, a virtual workshop designed to support participants in learning how to identify and tap into their spiritual gifts.
For a long time, I have believed that healing makes us whole. That if I/we do enough work, emotional, spiritual, ancestral, energetic, we will eventually arrive at who we are meant to be. The assumption is subtle, but powerful, something about us is broken, and healing is the process that fixes it. But what if that assumption is backward? What if identity does not come after healing, but before it?
The recognition that changed everything
I recently encountered a short but profound text called Pratyabhijñāhrdayam, written by the Kashmiri Shaiva philosopher Kshemaraja. The title is often translated as The Secret Heart of Recognition, and that word, recognition, changed everything for me. To be honest, reading it didn't send me down a philosophical rabbit hole. Instead, it allowed me to question everything I knew about healing. At first, I didn’t necessarily agree with the author, I felt like once you heal, that is when you realize who you are. But then, I began to ask, If we are who we say we are, if we are an incarnation of God, and if God is perfect, then how can our identity be broken?
That’s when the "Aha!" moment landed in my heart. I realized that healing does not lead us to identity. Healing works because identity was never broken. Nothing heals unless something intact is doing the healing. The very capacity to heal proves something unwounded is present. That unwounded presence is identity.
The ascension loop
"Many people begin their spiritual journey through healing, trauma, relationships, the nervous system, the inner child, the past, all for the sake of Ascension. We do the work because we think it's the ladder that takes us to that 'higher' version of ourselves. But over time, a quiet exhaustion sets in. A sense of always becoming, but never quite arriving. There is always one more layer, one more ceremony, one more version of the self to fix. And quietly, without meaning to, identity gets placed in the future, 'I’ll be myself once I’m healed enough'.
What if what we are experiencing is actually an Identity Deferral? Identity wasn't lost, it was just deferred. Ascension language subtly places who we are in the future, but liberation is not something we work toward, it is something we reclaim. Once that identity is recognized and reclaimed, then the healing can truly take place. We don’t ascend into freedom, we stand back inside who we already are." Again, nothing heals unless something intact is doing the healing. If identity were actually broken, healing would be impossible, repair would never complete, and wholeness could not be remembered. Healing does not create wholeness, healing reveals what was never destroyed.
Healing happens naturally when identity is already whole
When you scraped your knee as a child (in my case as an adult LOL), you didn't have to fix who you were. You just cleaned the scrape and a five-year-old knows this already. The part of you that knows how to heal was never hurt. The body heals because life is intact, the psyche heals because awareness is intact, the soul heals because identity is already there. The wisdom of the child is the wisdom of the Soul. It knows that the life within is never at risk. When we finally stop trying to 'fix' the God-seed and simply decide to be the garden, everything changes. Let’s move from the concept of identity into the embodiment of it.
A practice for embodying identity:
Pause and inhabit. Set aside five minutes. Place one hand on your body.
Ask the vital question. Who is here right now, before healing, before effort, before improvement?
Claim the truth. Then say, "I do not need to become myself. I am choosing to inhabit myself."
This is The Gift. The recognition that you didn't mess up, you weren't punished, and you certainly didn't fall from grace. Nothing went wrong. We don't ascend into freedom we stand back inside who we already are. And like my mama always said, “It just keeps getting gooder and gooder.”
Read more from Fredrica Kinlow
Fredrica Kinlow, Intuitive Life Coach
Free Kinlow is a world-renowned Intuitive Life Coach and spiritual gift cultivator. Since the tender age of five, she demonstrated an organic level of awareness of kindred spirits through her God-Given intuitions. She was not fully aware of her assignment in life, but was drawn to embrace other people. She enjoys living life in the realm of service and uses her love, clarity, and intuitive gifts to meet people where they are and support them in their healing and growth. Her motto is that every soul is beautiful if you look with the Eye of God.
