Echo Counselling

27/08/2026

16/08/2026

Most people spend their whole lives trying to become someone by piling things on. Eckhart is saying the actual work runs the other direction entirely.

The instinct to grow through addition is almost universal. More knowledge, more achievements, more identities, more roles collected like proof of a life well built. Each addition feels like progress because it’s visible, measurable, something you can point to. Eckhart is describing a different kind of growth that produces no evidence you can display, because it consists entirely of things being removed rather than acquired.

What gets subtracted isn’t virtue or capability. It’s the accumulated layer of false self that builds up over a lifetime, the persona constructed to be liked, the defenses built to avoid old wounds, the beliefs adopted because they were safer than the truth. None of that was ever the soul. It was armor, and armor, however necessary it once was, eventually becomes the very thing standing between a person and who they actually are.

This is why real inner work so often feels like loss before it feels like anything else. Letting go of a defense you’ve relied on for decades doesn’t feel like liberation in the moment. It feels like exposure. But what’s being lost was never the self to begin with. It was insulation, and insulation, however protective, also blocks contact with anything real, including your own depths.

You were never meant to become more. You were meant to become less covered.
-

25/07/2026

Trauma can leave lasting patterns in the nervous system...like becoming hypervigilant, startling easily, or feeling unsafe in situations that are objectively safe. Those responses can persist long after the danger has passed.

However, the hopeful part is that the nervous system is capable of change. Through experiences of safety, healthy relationships, therapy, and time, those patterns can become less intense. The memory of what happened may remain, but your body's automatic responses can soften.
Quote: (on Instagram)