What I’ve learnt about self obsession.
2026 and the jealousy reframe.
I’ve been sitting with a question lately, can you pursue self development without becoming self obsessed?
We are living in a time where everything is about the self. Self growth, self healing, self optimisation, self protection.
And I understand it. A lot of my own work is about self discovery through spirituality. The more you understand yourself, the easier it is to make aligned decisions. Sometimes that has meant boundaries for me, removing access, and stepping away from dynamics that were not healthy.
But the point was never to live in isolation.
And that is where the goddess Hera comes in. For 2026, I kept feeling pulled toward her archetype. Hera has been reduced to the jealous wife, the bitter woman, the wicked stepmother. But before those distortions, she was the mother of mothers. She presided over women bringing life into the world, not just literally through children, but creatively.
She was central to partnership, to commitment, to the structure of society itself.
Which is interesting, because we live in a culture that praises independence almost to the point of disconnection.
When people talk about having children and how it changes them, what they are often describing is the feeling that there is something bigger than them now. Their world expands beyond their own needs, and that is the threshold Hera supports. She understood what it meant to be connected to something larger than yourself. And even if children are not your path, that threshold still applies.
What are you committed to that is bigger than you?
What are you building that requires relationship?
Where are you practising partnership instead of isolation?
In my 2026 energy guide, I spoke about the asteroid Juno, the Roman name for Hera. When I started to look into Juno (even though there is also an asteroid named Hera, I kept feeling pulled toward Juno), I found it represented commitment, partnership, compromise, and what we need within long term dynamics.
Understanding my Juno helped me see my patterns in partnership more clearly. It showed me that knowing myself was not about withdrawing from connection, but about entering it consciously. I could see my triggers without turning them into reasons to detach. I could understand what I give and what I need.
That is very different from the current narrative of “just focus on yourself.”
There is something else I’ve noticed that relates back to Hera.
I have seen an online rhetoric from younger women talking about how older women automatically hate them because of their looks. And I want to approach this carefully, because some of these experiences are real. But at the same time, jealousy often becomes the focal point when connection has not even been given a chance to form.
And that, to me, is the shadow side of Hera.
Hera’s story was turned into one of the original wicked stepmother archetypes. The shadow feminine. The inner critic. She became the personification of envy, of ambition as a problem, and the part of us that withholds nurture from ourselves, that sabotages joy and punishes growth.
It is the part of us that begins to see enemies everywhere. We assume contempt and interpret neutrality as threat.
But what if power has been misunderstood altogether?
Hera was not meant to represent petty jealousy. She was meant to represent the power that exists within commitment and connection. When that power is distorted, it turns into control, comparison, and projection. When it is integrated, it becomes loyalty, partnership, and creative life force.
Self development without connection can easily become self absorption. You can know yourself deeply and still be disconnected. You can heal in isolation and never practise relating.
Some seasons require solitude, but that is not the end point.
True self knowledge should expand your capacity for partnership, not shrink it. It should allow you to move toward people with clarity instead of fear. It should help you understand where you sabotage connection by assuming jealousy, competition, or contempt.
Hera’s reclamation, and perhaps the point of 2026, is about not abandoning yourself for the sake of others, and yet not isolating yourself in the name of growth.
Power does not live in a vacuum. It lives in how you relate.
Knowing yourself is only meaningful if it allows you to participate more fully in the world, not retreat from it.
If something in your life feels like it’s shifting and you want to understand it properly, I offer personalised energy readings that provide clarity to decisions, emotions, and your next step.
Aleen
Learnings By Aleen
Psychic Medium | Energy Reader