The Unity Code - Where Science Meets Energy, Consciousness, and Spirit.

From Cringe To Clarity: How Self-Honoring Transforms Your Path

• Medium Nicole • Season 1 • Episode 157

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What if the moments you judge the most about your past are actually proof of your evolution?
In this deeply personal and insight-packed episode of The Unity Code, Medium Nicole pulls back the curtain on the real reason self-reflection can feel “cringe” — and how learning to honor your former selves becomes one of the most powerful activations on your spiritual path.

We explore the intersection of neuroscience, nervous system responses, soul agreements, and intuitive growth, revealing why your body reacts the way it does when you revisit old chapters… and why those responses are evidence that you’ve expanded beyond them.

You’ll hear:

  • Why “cringe” is a biological survival mechanism rooted in primal belonging
  • How past versions of you were doing the best they could with the tools they had
  • What it means to shift from judgment to self-honoring
  • How Spirit uses your life experiences — even the messy ones — as intentional soul curriculum
  • Why there are no accidents on your timeline (only initiations and skill-building)
  • How these insights set the stage for this week’s 2026 Activation Portal class on honoring your milestones and reclaiming every version of you

Nicole shares personal stories (including college, corporate life, and intuition-led decisions that changed everything) to help you see your own journey with compassion, clarity, and power.

If you’ve ever replayed old memories and felt embarrassment, shame, or discomfort — this episode will shift you into a higher perspective.
It’s time to recognize the masterpiece you’ve been sculpting all along.

Perfect for listeners interested in:
consciousness, nervous system healing, intuition development, spiritual awakening, timeline shifts, self-worth, shadow work, and soul purpose alignment.

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Join the Unity Code collective to participate in experiments: https://mediumnicole.com/podcast

Nicole Pope is an internationally-trained Evidential Medium and Soul Integration Guide dedicated to helping others reconnect with their higher self, awaken their gifts, and remember who they truly are.

To connect with Nicole, book a reading, or access her social media accounts: http://mediumnicole.com/links

SPEAKER_01:

Hello there. Welcome back to the Unity Code. I am so excited today to talk about what we are going to do in this week's session of the 2026 activation portal. And I am number one astounded, astounded by how many of you have signed up for this program. Um never in my wildest dreams did I expect to see that many people sign up. I'm so thankful and grateful for all of you. And I'm so honored to help you navigate this journey, but more so I'm so floored that many of you chose you and honored you and knew that you were on the cusp of change and growth and opted to walk towards that change and that growth. And that is huge. Like that is so mind-blowingly amazing to me how many of you know in your intuition that this is the right program for you. So bravo. And I know not everyone's gone out there. I know not everyone's signed up. I know not everyone's seen the video, and that's absolutely fine. But I would tell you that if you have signed up and you haven't been a part of those sessions yet, you are missing out. They are magic. They are clearing and integrations and downloads from me, from my team. And people are walking away saying how they blacked out during the last clearing, which is, by the way, the best way to clear. Can we talk about that for a second? It's the best way to clear when your mind physically blacks out and you don't remember what's happening. That means that your energy is clearing while you don't have to be conscious of it. And this goes back to this idea that my team has instilled in me that healing doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to be hard. We don't always have to push the rock, the boulder up the hill, right? Like in the mythology days, we don't have to always choose the most difficult path. Sometimes healing can be simple, can be small, can be your team saying, I got this for you. We're gonna black that out. You just sit back and relax, and we got this for you. And how amazing is that? How amazing is it to embrace the, I want to say the divine feminine way of healing, of coming at it from love and nurturing and respect, and not from the typical masculine way of trying to solve it by doing something head on. And so this is something I'm formulating in my head. Um more and more to come on that. I haven't figured it all out quite yet. But I agree, I agree. And I think there's a lot of my own journey where I've proven to myself, you know, this is what it looks like when I do go head on towards the problem, just like I would have in corporate America. I'm gonna look at it, I'm gonna analyze it from every single angle, and I'm gonna figure out the best root cause way there. And I think there's a path for that, absolutely. But for some of the stuff, we don't have to heat, we don't have to go through all those steps. Sometimes we can just let it go. Sometimes we can just shift and release and we don't have to revisit it again because we've already done the work. And that's what I'm talking about with this blackout thing here. So I'm I'm so grateful for all of you who have sent the messages, who have participated in the community again. If you haven't been, if you are on this program, by the way, we're closing that up on the 15th. I want people to, I have to close the doors before we start doing the visioning because I need you to clear and honor yourself before you do the visioning. So if people pop in just to do the visioning on the 2026 and just do the activation on 2026, it's not going to be anchored in the right energy. You're gonna anchor yourself in old timelines. You're gonna anchor yourself in the worry and the chaos and the energy that we've all been experiencing in 2025. And that's why these steps are so important to clear, to honor, and then to activate and help you get into the new year energy. So I'll be shutting that down on the 15th. So sign up if you haven't already. Um, and if you are in and you haven't watched the videos, I really encourage you to do it. They're they're only an hour. Everyone can find an hour out of the day. I promise you it is going to be worth your time. And so shifting gears into the topic this week in that class. And I want to give this as almost a precursor. This is not going to be what the class is on, but it kind of is. And I want to talk about honoring ourselves and honoring every single aspect of ourselves. And how and why that can be so uncomfortable. I really feel called to use the word cringe, probably because of my children, but it is so uncomfortable. It is so um, oh, you don't want to do it. You don't always want to look back and see all these different versions of yourself. And I want to talk about the why. Um, why does that feel uncomfortable? And then why is it also so important to do that? Which we are going to be doing in this class tomorrow on Thursday. And so if we take a step back and you think about all the different versions of yourself across your life, across maybe the last nine years, maybe across even this year. And there are so many times where I have relayed my life and what has happened to me and my cringe moments over and over and over in my head. And it's been very, very uncomfortable. And it creates this pattern of negativity, it creates this pattern of self-judgment, of self-rejection in looking at who I was and saying, why didn't I know better at the time? And so as we think about um, as we like take, I want to take a few steps back and I want to tell a story a little bit here as well, because I think it's so important to recognize that our our need to fit in, our need to be our best selves, this need for perfectionism is based in the biology of who we are. It is in the biology of our brain, our ego, our our caveman brain, our need to survive, right? Because if you think about caveman days, I always like to bring it there because it's so basic, it's so primal, it's so easy to understand because everything is so black and white, right? If you didn't fit in, if you didn't do what the group needed you to do, then they would probably kick you out of the group and/or the the group would starve to death and die, right? If I were, as a woman, a gatherer back in the day, maybe taking care of the children, and I chose to do something different, and I chose to not want to follow the status quo of everybody else, I would not be gathering food. I would not be watching the next generation of children that were going to help lead, right? That the literal future of the tribe would be at risk. And so, of course, if I chose to do that, I would be ostracized from the group. I would likely be either killed or kicked out of the group, probably killed. And so I would have not only social, uh, um, like so what's the right? What do you want to say? You've probably already thought of it in your head. Like, I would be socially ostracized and kicked out of the group, but also my life would be at risk because they would maybe literally kill me. If I was off of my own, I wouldn't be able to survive on my own. And so we have this deep-seated biology to belong. We have this deep-seated biology to not ruffle feathers, right? To maintain the status quo, to maintain the social norms, to, and that's that goes, you know, within overall society and also within your family. Let's talk about that because if you don't follow the status quo of the family, how many of you are the black sheep listening to this? And you've witnessed and experienced and lived through the toxicity and the trauma of your own families because you have stood up. Oh, it's different. You have stood up for yourself or different values or beliefs that you hold. Right. And how many times do they push back on you to try to put you back in your place, to try to get you back in the box so that you maintain the status quo of the group? And there is going to be um the Weather Vene Witches, I am going to do a podcast on that, I think tomorrow, in the sometime in the next few days, that talks about that crab mentality. And just to iterate before we get there, the crab mentality is if you take one crab, put one crab in a bucket, it can easily get out by itself. But if you put a lot of crabs, any more than one, if you put two plus crabs in a bucket, they will not get out because as one tries to climb up the sides, the other ones will pull them down. And so that's what I'm talking about here. That's why it feels so uncomfortable to be different, to stand up for yourself, to do something different. Because you are literally in your nervous system programmed to fit in, programmed to do the same as others, programmed to assimilate in the organizations, the families, the cultures that you are raised in. And so when you look back on that, you might have an actual cringe moment from your nervous system feeling that doesn't feel safe. That felt very insecure. That felt like, ooh, and because what happens is in your brain, your brain can't tell the difference between actual threats to your life and potential worried thoughts of that. Your nervous system in your brain reacts the same way. So as you are recalling these things in your past when you stood up and you didn't feel safe, you're reactivating those same centers in your brain all over again, like it's happening in the current moment. So not only are you trained socially to fit in, but also your brain is giving you the same exact nervous system response as if you were in that present moment. And that's why it feels so cringe and gross to look back at these moments in your life about who you were, right? Maybe doing something different from the status quo and why you have this physical response to it. The heart palpitations, the sweating, the um, you know, the fight or flight or freeze response that happens because your system is programmed that way. Now, can you deprogram that? I I don't know. Probably, I don't know. It would take a long time, but honestly, this is all rooted in your system as a human, in the way that your body functions for safety. And I'm not talking about ego because I think ego is in the mind. But I do think that there's there is a primal part of you that will always be this way. And your goal isn't necessarily to eliminate that from happening, it is to recognize when it is happening and not let that energy take over, not let your nervous system rule the roost and instead acknowledge what your nervous system is doing, understanding that it's trying to protect you and keep you safe, but also keeping the distance saying, I recognize that trigger in my nervous system, but I don't need to respond that way. Right? I can take a moment and let my nervous system calm down before I respond and react. And there's a wonderful, I can't, I would reference it if I remembered the reference, but there's something about like wait 90 seconds. Whenever you're having a massive nervous system response, wait 90 seconds. Don't do anything for 90 seconds. And and your like that initial rush of adrenaline or cortisol or whatever that hormone is, it tends to go away or at least reduces in the 90 seconds. And so you're able to make a much more um even keeled response to what is happening in that moment. And so this isn't like you're training your nervous system. You're training yourself away from your nervous system ruling everything. So that is one way and one example of why it can feel very cringe to look back at self-past versions of yourself because you might have done things that felt unsafe in those moments and you're feeling it all again. That's number one. Number two is this is so funny because this come, this has come up recently on a few text change with with a few of my friends, because we look back at ourselves in the past and judge us by what we know in the present. Let me say that differently because it's so important that you make sure you understand this. I can look back at my, let's say, freshman year and college self right now as a 41-year-old. And I can look back at my age, I was 17. I started school early when I was little. Fun fact about me. I was um in preschool at home doing third grade math. So my mom was like, You're not, you're not missing a year. I was after the cutoff. Um, and so you can look back at yourself. I can look back at myself, my my 17-year-old self in my first year of college and be like, I was so fucking cringe then. I had no idea who I was. I was a girl that grew up with music and show choir and also loving math. And I went to business school. Why? Because my boyfriend at the time was at business school. He's I'm married to him now, so it wasn't a bad decision. But I ended up going to college to study computers, which I love computers. Love it. I've been literally making web pages since 1993 when I've got my first computer. So I love computers, as most of you who work with me know, like I can whip out a web page in an hour. Um, and so I was this like music theater liberal arts nerd going to business school to study computers. I was so fucking out of my element, right? Should have known then. Because I was surrounded by a bunch. Can I say it? I'm gonna say this. It's gonna sound judgy. It is judgy. A bunch of wrench, pompous assholes whose daddies bought them prowlers that they were driving onto campus. Okay. Uh, you ain't seen nothing until you were a poor kid from lower middle class going into a business school. Damn. Did I felt, did I feel so fucking out of place? I felt so out of place that I didn't last three weeks living on campus. I moved back home. That's how out of place I went. That's how unsafe I felt in that environment. That's how out of the social norms I felt that I moved home and I worked full time during college. Hindsight, fantastic idea. Um, did not walk away with a lot of debt because I took put every money I had towards towards that, um, towards my college expenses, et cetera, tuition. And if I look back at that time, I can so easily judge it. I can so easily judge that I ran, that um, that I felt so out of place, that I have this nervous system triggers of, oh my God, who was I? Who even was I? I shaved my head. Like I was um, I was trying to stand out and be somebody totally different because I didn't just assimilate into the culture of the business school. I went 180 in the opposite direction and I said, fuck all these kids. I'm gonna be the exact opposite of them. And I wore, and I still do, giant hooded sweatshirts to college, right? Like I I didn't participate in any clubs.

SPEAKER_00:

I was like, I do not want to be a part of this culture. And yet I still thrived.

SPEAKER_01:

And yet I still graduated top of my class while working full-time, while commuting to college every day. Right? Because when you look back, and this is what I want you to think about, when I look back at who I was then, even though I was still finding who I was, there's parts of me that I'm so proud of because I knew I was different. I knew that I would not assimil. Could I have done it better? Absolutely, but I knew that I would not assimilate into that culture. I knew that hard work and integrity and ethics were gonna make get me through that, right? I played the game of business school so differently they did not see me coming because I worked hard, I worked my ass off, and I let my values lead me underneath the surface, even though on the surface I look like a hot fucking mess. And so you can always look back to these past versions of yourself and find the silver lining and the common threads of what you can be proud of. You can always find that because the reality is that at any given moment in our life, we do the best with what we know and what we have at the time. Everyone does. Do you think anyone consciously makes a bad decision? Does anyone consciously decide to be an asshole? I I don't think so. Like, I honestly I'm that person. I honestly don't think so. I think that things happen and we get in bad moods and it comes out of us because it's our nervous system response, but I don't think that anyone chooses to be an asshole. I think that people genuinely try to be their best selves and show up in the best way that they possibly can that day, and that's gonna look different every single day. And so when you're taking yourself now, when I'm taking myself now at 41 and I'm judging myself of who I was at 17, it is so easy to fall into the trap of why didn't I know better? Right? How did I not see that coming? What were the red flags that I missed? And so I'm just asking you to shift your perspective to say, wow, that was a really hard time for me. And I did a really good job navigating through that. Because I couldn't be 41-year-old Nicole today if I didn't do what I did at 17, if I didn't do what I did at 23, at 27, at 32, right? Like I wouldn't be who I am right now if I didn't find my way and navigate my way through all of those cringe moments, always led by my values and always doing what I thought was the right thing at the time, which has slowly evolved me. It's like Michelangelo's David, everybody. It was like chip by chip, the message. Masterpiece has come together. And don't you think that Michelangelo probably screwed up a couple times along the way? And yet he still created a masterpiece. Maybe he didn't. I feel like he did because that's the reality. Nothing is perfect. And so you have the choice. You have the choice to either look back at yourself and judge yourself from your current standpoint, from your current knowledge, from your current lessons that you've already lived. Or you can take a moment to understand and remind yourselves and put your back, put yourself back in those shoes and say, where did I, where am I proud of myself? Where did I hold steady? Where did my values show up? Because I'll tell you what. If you look back and you feel cringe, I love that. If you feel uncomfortable, I love that. Do you know why? Because you have grown since then. You have changed since then. Your perspective has grown and changed, and you've become a new and better person because of what you've been through. And so that cringe, that feeling of disgust, that feeling of, oh my God, I can't believe I did that. I can't believe that I used to do that. That feeling is the proof of your evolution. And I want to celebrate all of those moments that have led you to the current moment. And so that's what this podcast is about, everybody, is that every single twist and turn in your journey, good or bad, light or dark, um, empowering or disempowering, even when you got married and got divorced, you know, six months later, right? Like that's what I'm talking about. It doesn't matter because every single moment has led you to who we're who and where you are today. And here's the big kicker. Here is the biggest thing that I have come into the realization of since working with spirit. And I think I probably could have had this podcast episode without me diving into the spiritual world. But here is the reality of what I've learned now that I am so much closer with my team with spirit is that everything has purpose. Everything has purpose. Every twist and turn you've been on, do you think that they were accidents? Do you think that they were just missteps? Because I promise you they weren't. I promise you that with every side quest that you have been on, you have learned a different, a different skill, a different tool, a different coping mechanism, a different way to navigate life, et cetera, that you wouldn't have learned otherwise. And that's what I mean when I say there are no accidents. There are no accidents. Are there delays? Sure. Are there accidents? No, because everything and everything that you are is built in those small moments, in those side quests, and these in these lessons that we've learned. And your soul has probably planned most of them before you came here because you needed to learn that lesson. You needed that tool, you needed that that experience, that perspective along the way to help you with something else down the line. And so I'm gonna go one further. I'm gonna go one further, okay? Because, and I'm doing this live off the cuff. I've not completely unplanned this analysis right now. But let's take my cringe ass self back in the college days and me deciding not to participate in the culture of business school. What was it teaching me? So business school taught me the financial foundation that allowed me to feel comfortable leaving my corporate job. Point blank. Point fucking blank. Because if I didn't go to business school, I wouldn't have learned to put money into my 401k as soon as I graduated, right? I wouldn't learn the time value of money. I wouldn't learn about opportunity cost. I wouldn't learn that as soon as you drive a car off the parking lot, if it's a brand new car, it depreciates by like 20%, right? Maybe not nowadays. But I wouldn't have learned the financial acumen that allows me to feel comfortable and safe in the decision of leaving my six-figure job. Right? So step one, needed to go to business school. Needed to go there. Number two, the fact of not fitting in socially within business school, but also showing up and changing the rules of the game and not doing things the way that everybody else has done it. Was proving me that I can go up against institutions. I can go up against social norms as long as I'm living by my values, living by my truth, and doing what I think is authentically the right thing. And I will come out on top every single time. That's what that journey has showed me. I wouldn't be where I was, I wouldn't be who I was in corporate America doing the same thing, right? I wouldn't be out here talking to you as the former corporate executive, right? Former Catholic faith person. If I didn't learn that lesson of it's okay to feel uncomfortable, but living by your values and living in alignment with yourself is always going to be your best and truest path. And getting comfortable with people feeling uncomfortable with me. That's what I learned. And so again, I needed to go to business school. There is no accident in that. I needed to feel different. I needed to do different because that was the learning ground to get me to you hearing me in this current moment.

SPEAKER_00:

Let me see if I can break it down into a smaller example.

SPEAKER_01:

Um spirits like, can we talk drugs for a second? Is that okay? If you got kids around, you might want to pause it. Not that it's bad because I don't do anything ever, but my entire life I have been offered altering substances. Let's put it that way. Um, in my entire, like up to like started at 13, always have been offered my entire life. And I'm talking like from family, right? From friends, from strangers. Like the first time I went to Amsterdam, I literally stumbled. Has anyone ever experienced this? Dump stumbled off the train at 6 a.m. after my red eye flight came in, left the train station, somebody immediately offered me drugs. Immediately. And I have always said no. I mean, no, is anyone surprised? Those of you that you know, you're like Nicole's never done anything. It's totally true. Um, way too high strung for that shit. And so my entire life, no, no, no, I don't want it. I don't want it. I don't want it. I don't want it. Right. Even now to this day, you know, as a metaphysical practitioner, I can't tell you how many times I'm offered like shrooms and ayahuasca. And uh with what's the frog one? You know what I'm talking about. Um, where you you have the sick, this is a thing, everybody, if you're unaware. Um it begins with it's two syllables, it begins with a K. Um, it's like you you ingest the poisonous frog juice. Right? Um But every single time I've said no, I've said no, I've said no. Right. And and and that's my journey. So let me see what the hell the lesson is in this that spirit wants me to talk about this. Because again, everybody has asked me over and over again, and every single moment I've said no, or these micro moments where I stay in alignment with who I am. Because the reality is, is that I don't need, I've never wanted, I've always wanted to maintain maintain control, totally honest with you. Never liked mind-altering substances, period. Never, um, never something I've ever wanted to do. Probably lived a lifetime in the 70s where I overdosed on everything ever. Um, however, as we get into this current moment of my spiritual journey, wouldn't it be fucking cool to be able to access what everybody else has accessed? But here's the reality is that I never needed to access it because I can access that now without any sort of drugs, without any sort of mind-altering substances. I can go out into the galaxies and feel high as a kite without ever leaving my physical state, without ever needing differing drugs, because the mind is a very powerful tool, right? And I can, I can access the far reaches of the universe and have that same experience without having to lose my mind or um without having to alter the chemicals in my brain. I don't, why am I talking about this? Let me ask my team. And the the reason is they're telling me it's all about your instincts and your knowing and your um and and following your intuition. And so as you look back in these moments and you're like, I don't know why I did that. I don't know why I went to my first medium. I felt called to. Part of that is your soul. So there's something in there, and I don't know what it is. I'm gonna drop this and run with all of you. Take a moment at those historical moments in your time where you've made decision and you don't know why, because it will be the direction from your soul or the direction from spirit. And those will likely be major turning points in your life and/or proof of who you are as a soul at your deepest level, at your integration, at your frequency level, the purest reflection of you. And find yourself in those moments, find your truth in those moments, find the magic of spirit in your soul leading the way down these twists and turns, down these alleys, down these side quests that you've been on, and reflect back about how amazing you are, how guided and loved and supportive you are, because there are no accidents in your life. And instead, understand the perspective of what they taught you, understand the value of how you got through it, and also give yourself grace and love for living through and navigating through probably some very dark moments in your life and how you have survived. You have come here, you are still here, you still have a story to tell. So when you start looking at these themes, it's gonna be so important. And it will help you immensely discover who you are and what you are meant to do here. Because the parallels between our lives and the lives and who we are as souls and the lives that we lay out as souls before before we come here, there are no accidents. So when people come to me and they ask, well, what's my path? I can often reflect back at their entire journey and show them that every single step along the way, they have been walking that path. And that this path is nothing new. It's just a continuation of the journey that you've already been on. And so as I close this out, what I'm hearing in my head is the Oasis song of Don't Look Back in Anger. So go listen to that song, go reflect back. Um, and if you are in the class tomorrow, bring your things. We are asking everybody to bring artifacts that represent your milestones, your growth, your progress, the different phases of you, either in the last year or the last nine years. And we are going to do some really cool stuff with that. So I can't wait to see you all there. I am sending you all the love. Happy it's Wednesday today for me. So happy Wednesday, and I will see you all very soon. Take care.

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Medium Nicole

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