You Cannot Receive What You Are Not the Vibrational Frequency Of
What if the life you are trying so hard to create is not asking you to push harder, strategize better, or control the outcome more tightly? What if it is asking you to become energetically aligned with it first?
I know! That is a sentence that may make some of my very science-minded, Type A, evidence-loving women in dentistry raise an eyebrow. What does that even mean!?!?
I totally get it, I was trained the same way. As women dentists we were taught to assess, diagnose, anticipate problems, prepare for what could go wrong and create a plan to prevent it. Dentistry rewards precision and foresight. In many ways, that training makes us exceptional clinicians. Not only that, but looking for evidence to give us confidence before taking action is what we pride ourselves on, evidence-based dentistry and all!
But I have also come to believe that constantly assessing the worst case scenario and scanning our environment for potential disasters can make us incredibly skilled at rehearsing the very reality we do not want.
We can spend many sleepless nights worrying about the team member who might leave, the schedule that might fall apart, the patients who may be unhappy if we take a day off, the production goal we might miss or the conversation that could go badly. We tell ourselves we are simply being responsible in preemptively anticipating the worst case scenario. “Measure twice, cut once”, even when it comes to asking for what you need or what you want.
But there is a difference between being prepared and living in the energetic expectation that something is going to go wrong. And that distinction matters far more than we realize.
Recently, I spent a weekend in Boston with my 14-year-old daughter, her best friend and her best friend’s mom. We went to see an Olivia Dean concert (which I highly recommend), wandered around Newbury Street, ate great food and spent this beautiful stretch of time together. Almost immediately, we started noticing how unusually wonderful everything felt. People were so kind. Strangers stopped my daughter to compliment her shoes and earrings. Someone stopped me on the street to ask where my skirt was from. At dinner, a woman came over just to tell me how beautiful it was to watch my daughter and me communicate so lovingly with each other.
We kept saying the same thing.
“Oh my gosh, people are so nice here, we are so lucky.”
Before the concert we ordered dinner in while the girls were getting ready and DoorDash forgot part of our dinner. When I called to let them know, they comped the entire meal. Later, we arrived at the concert and discovered that our row of seats no longer existed because the scaffolding had been changed. So they moved us. To the floor! Right in front of the action! My daughter ended up close enough to Olivia Dean that she practically could have touched her as she walked by.
By that point, the four of us were laughing.
Of course this happened. We were living a charmed life.
And as the weekend went on, something became very obvious to me. We were not simply experiencing a series of nice things. We were living in the energetic frequency of feeling lucky, supported, cared for, and surrounded by good-natured people.
And life kept meeting us there.
You cannot receive that which you are not the vibrational frequency of.
That phrase has stayed with me because it explains something we experience all the time, even if we use different language for it.
You might call it energy. You might call it expectation.You might call it subconscious belief. You might call it the universe. There is even a psychological component to it through the way our brains filter and prioritize information via your reticular activating system.
But whatever language you prefer, the question underneath all of it is the same:
What energy are you living in most of the time?
Not what do you say you want. What are you actually embodying? Because those are not always the same thing.
You may say you want a supportive team while walking into the office every day thinking, “Nobody cares as much as I do. It is so hard to find good help in dentistry anymore”. You may say you want to feel less overwhelmed while carrying the belief, “Everything ultimately falls on me. I have to do everything myself.” And if that is the energetic frequency you are living in, then it is very difficult to create something fundamentally different from it.
Not because you are being punished. Not because the universe is withholding anything from you. But because your beliefs change how you enter the room. They change how you communicate. They change how you interpret people. They change how tightly you control.They change what you expect and therefore what you create with the people around you.
I know this because I lived it in my own practice.
There were periods of my career when I felt like everything rested on me. I felt responsible for every problem, every outcome and every person. And when that was my internal experience, guess what my reality looked like?
Everything rested on me. I was constantly needed. I was exhausted.
And I had plenty of evidence to support my belief that this was simply what practice ownership and success looked like. In fact, I convinced myself that that is what was required of me in order to experience success.
When I began changing the way I led, the way I thought about my team and the way I related to responsibility, my practice changed. The people around me began showing up differently because I was showing up differently. I did not stop having standards. I did not become passive. I did not stop leading… I started leading from a completely different frequency. I simply stopped living from the frequency that said, I am alone in this.
This powerful alignment has proven itself over and over in my life.
When my family immigrated to the United States from South Africa, we arrived with very little. My dad was a prosthodontist in his 40s moving his wife and three children across the world without a practice waiting for him and with zero financial cushion. They were starting from scratch. My first winter coat came from Kmart. So did my first snow boots. And yet, the vibrational frequency I was feeling and living was that of enormous wealth. I had no story that said, We don’t have enough. I was fascinated by everything that was available to me.Those Kmart snow boots felt extravagant to me because I had never needed them before. America felt enormous and full of possibility. Then things started appearing.
Our neighbors put nearly new ice skates out on their sidewalk because their children had outgrown them, and they fit me perfectly. A beautiful bicycle appeared on the side of the road and suddenly I had a bike. I remember experiencing all of this not as evidence of what we lacked, but as evidence of how much was available, of the literal wealth I was the center of. “Look at everything that keeps coming to us!”
I did not have the language for energetic alignment then. I just lived it.
Somewhere along the way, I developed a belief that opportunity exists. That money can be created. That there is always more. That I can try something new and figure it out. That belief has shaped countless decisions in my life. It helped me build businesses, make investments, change careers, leave what was familiar and step toward ideas that did not yet have guaranteed outcomes. It did not mean everything worked out perfectly! In fact, some things failed spectacularly.
But even failure never convinced me there wasn’t always more possibility.
And that is what energetic alignment feels like. It is not pretending. It is not positive thinking pasted over fear or spiritual bypassing. It is not standing in front of your mirror repeating affirmations you do not believe. It is the deeper internal state from which you are living.
If you want abundance but are constantly bracing for loss, there is an energetic mismatch.
If you want support but are constantly expecting disappointment, there is a mismatch.
If you want ease but believe your value comes from working harder than everyone around you, there is a mismatch.
If you want a different experience in your practice while waking up every morning convinced that dentistry is exhausting, your team is impossible and everything rests on your shoulders, there is a mismatch.
And this is where I think the work becomes incredibly freeing. You do not have to force yourself into some completely different emotional reality overnight.
In fact, I don’t think that works. CHANGE HAPPENS AT THE SPEED OF SAFETY AT THE LEVEL OF YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM.
If you have felt unsupported for ten years, telling yourself tomorrow morning, I am completely supported in every area of my life, not only feels ridiculous but is an assault to your autonomic nervous system. Your nervous system knows when you are lying to it and your body and your energetic frequency will go straight into fight or flight.
But you can move toward a different frequency. You can begin with possibility and curiosity.
“Maybe I am more supported than I have realized. Maybe there are extraordinary people who would love to work in a practice like mine. I wonder where those people are? I am open to finding someone phenomenal to welcome to this team”
Notice the difference.
You are not demanding that reality change immediately or overloading your nervous system with a belief that feels completely foreign. You are changing the energetic place from which you meet reality. And from there, you begin showing up differently. You become less desperate in an interview. less controlling with your team, more willing to delegate, more open to an unexpected opportunity. You start energetically aligning with a completely different reality.
The energy shifts FIRST. Then your choices begin to shift. And eventually, your lived experience can begin to look very different.
“Believe it and you will see it” – Dr. Wayne Dyer
So instead of falling pray to the narrative that feels so seductive within the dental world, or the limited beliefs someone else injected into your psyche, I invite you to try asking something deeper this week.
What is the energetic frequency of the life I say I want?
If you want to feel deeply supported, what does support feel like in your body? Can you start noticing it in your life?
If you want abundance, what does abundance FEEL like? Can you start living in that feeling? Even before needing the evidence to support it?
If you want a thriving team, what kind of leader is energetically aligned with trust, collaboration and shared responsibility? What does it FEEL like to be a leader who is fully supported? Can you practice more of that?
That weekend in Boston was not perfect.
Our dinner order was wrong. Our seats did not exist. Those facts were real. But they did not determine our experience. We were already living in the energy of feeling lucky. So even the disruptions somehow became part of the evidence. And that is what I keep coming back to.
Energetic alignment is not about controlling exactly what comes your way.
It is about choosing HOW YOU WANT TO FEEL and HOW YOU WANT TO EXPERIENCE LIFE, BEFORE IT SHOWS YOU THE EVIDENCE OF IT.
Because from that place, you communicate differently, you lead differently, you attract differently.
And very quickly, life begins to look different too.
A personal Invitation
If you recognized yourself in this article, perhaps in the way you’ve been bracing for what could go wrong, carrying more than you need to, or working hard to create a life that still doesn’t feel the way you want it to, I want you to know you’re not alone.
This work isn’t about forcing yourself to think positively or pretending everything is okay.
It’s about understanding the patterns that shape how you experience your life, helping your nervous system feel safe enough for something new, and learning to live from a different internal place.
As an orthodontist and Self-Leadership and Stress Management Coach for women dentists, these are the conversations I have every day.
Together, we can explore what you’re experiencing, what you want to create, and what it might look like to begin moving toward that experience in a way that feels safe and sustainable for you.
If you’re ready to explore what that could look like for you, I’d love to have a conversation.
You can schedule a time to connect with me HERE.
I can’t wait to meet you.
Only love,
Tarryn
