Returning To You with Kelly Allison | Ep. 60

On this week’s episode of The True North Show I am joined by a very special guest Kelly Allison. Kelly and I have a beautiful and deep conversation about her journey over the last 18 months and the very deep inner work she has been doing to move through another uplevelling in her personal and professional life. She shares with us why she believes healing isn’t about fixing yourself and the gifts and wisdom that comes with understanding yourself. Kelly’s journey is really inspiring and one that many women can relate to, it is a conversation you definitely don’t want to miss.

Bio:

For over 10 years, I have worked one on one with women, helping them understand the deeper emotional and behavioural patterns held within the body and nervous system.

At the heart of my work is a simple belief: healing is not about fixing yourself. It is about understanding yourself.

My work brings together mind body principles, intuitive insight and more than a decade of experience understanding the connection between our emotions, our behaviours and the body.

I help women understand the ways they have learned to be, the beliefs beneath them and the patterns that may once have served them but no longer feel right. When we understand why we think, feel and behave the way we do, we are no longer simply living through patterns formed long ago. We can consciously decide what we want to keep, what we are ready to release and how we want to move forward. Because awareness gives us something incredibly powerful: choice.

This work is not about becoming someone new. It is about returning to who you already are.

Social Media:

Website:         www.kellyallison.com.au

Facebook:       https://www.facebook.com/KellyAllisonAlchemy/

Instagram:       https://www.instagram.com/kellyallisonalchemy/

Transcript:

[00:34] Megan North:
Hello and welcome to The True North Show. I’m your host Megan North, and I’d like to start by thanking the sponsors of the show: Quantum Awakening, Beth Lewis, Anne C. Clarke, and my guest who paid to be featured.

Today I am joined by Kelly Allison, the founder of Kelly Allison Alchemy, and a woman whose work is as beautiful as it is profound. Kelly has spent over a decade working one-on-one with women, helping them uncover the deeper emotional and behavioural patterns held within the body and the nervous system. Patterns that were formed long ago, that once kept us safe, but that no longer serve who we are becoming.

Kelly’s work beautifully weaves together mind-body principles, intuitive insight, and over ten years of lived experience understanding the deep connection between our emotions, our behaviours, and our physical body. At the heart of everything Kelly does is a belief that healing is not about fixing yourself. It is about understanding yourself.

She helps women understand the ways they have learned to be, the beliefs beneath the surface, the roles they were taught to play, so that for the first time they can consciously choose what they want to keep, what they are ready to release, and how they want to move forward. Because as Kelly says, awareness gives us something incredibly powerful. It gives us choice.

Kelly’s work is not about becoming someone new. It is about shedding everything that was never truly you and returning to who you already are.

Welcome to the show, Kelly. I’m so delighted you’re here today.

[02:26] Kelly Allison:
Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

[02:29] Megan North:
Kelly has spent over ten years helping women understand the patterns quietly running their lives, patterns held so deeply in the body and nervous system that most people don’t even know they are there. Stay with us because when we come back, she’s going to take us into the heart of that work and share what truly becomes possible when we stop trying to fix ourselves and start choosing to understand ourselves instead.

Welcome back. I’m here with the wonderful Kelly Allison, founder of Kelly Allison Alchemy. Let’s go back to the beginning of your working career and learn more about your journey and the defining moment that has led you to the purpose-led work you are doing now.

[04:20] Kelly Allison:
I’ve been a kinesiologist for over ten years and I was also teaching kinesiology. I like to call kinesiology a gateway drug because it teaches you how to work with the body and the energy body. I found really early on that, as much as I loved it, there were so many other ways you could apply muscle testing and tap into the body’s innate energy. So I trained as a medical intuitive and did some holistic counselling, and everything became a hybrid model of how I chose to use all of my training.

That continued until about eighteen months ago. The catalyst for change was that around eighteen months to two years prior, I had opened a clinic. So I was wearing a few hats: running the clinic, managing my client base, and teaching kinesiology.

In December 2024, the building next door burnt to the ground. We were in a terraced block, so while it was a separate building, there was no gap between the two properties. The building that burnt was on the room side, so one long hallway and the treatment rooms were right there. I was overseas when it happened. I knew from the moment I got the call that it was done.

[06:13] Kelly Allison:
The make-safe works next door shut us down for two weeks with a day’s notice. You simply cannot do healing work with someone literally banging on the wall beside you. It ended in May 2025, and then I spent the next six months, as I like to say, dying a thousand deaths.

[06:51] Megan North:
How did kinesiology come into your life in the first place?

[07:02] Kelly Allison:
Kinesiology came into my life because I have an autoimmune disease. I’ve had psoriasis most of my adult life and was always trying to find answers for that. It led me to a kinesiology session when I was twenty-five, and I was hooked from the first session. I had kinesiology monthly until I was about forty.

I’d always wanted to study it and become a kinesiologist. I spoke about it so much, but I was scared. I was scared to give up my career and everything we are supposed to value. Then I had my second daughter, and I like to say that I birthed my spiritual awakening with her.

She was a sick baby and we couldn’t work out why. She fed every two hours around the clock for six weeks. I was at my breaking point, and then she got whooping cough. I was so frazzled and sleep-deprived that I wasn’t being taken seriously by the doctors. She had an episode where she was very sick and then passed out. She was eight weeks old. I thought she had died.

[09:13] Kelly Allison:
We ended up in hospital, were sent home, it happened again, we went back, and finally they worked out what was wrong. That was a huge turning point. I basically needed to be brought back to life. The lack of sleep and that trauma just changed me. It took me a good eighteen months to feel strong again. And then I thought: things like this don’t happen for no reason. That experience gave me the courage to push through the fear and start studying. From the very first class I was giddy. This is it. And that was 2013, 2014.

[10:23] Megan North:
I love that you touched on the fear piece. So many people feel pulled toward something that lights them up and then stay frozen, especially when they have financial and family responsibilities. Did you feel that?

[11:01] Kelly Allison:
I think most of us are running around terrified of what people will think or what will happen if something goes wrong. I’ve learned a few times what happens when things do go wrong, and it hurts. It hurts your ego and everything else. But no one else is thinking about that thing anywhere near as much as you are.

Losing the clinic and what happened when my daughter was born made me realise: if I can bounce back from those things, I can bounce back from anything. I feel fear a lot. But to me, that is what being strong actually is. It’s not brave to do easy things. Strength is not being tough or armoured. Strength is pushing through discomfort and seeing what’s on the other side, even if it doesn’t turn out the way you expected.

[12:37] Kelly Allison:
And once you’re in it, you turn back and think: why did I let that be such a big thing for so long? It really wasn’t anywhere near as scary as I thought it would be.

[12:49] Megan North:
It’s a natural state too, isn’t it. Our fight, flight, and freeze response constantly wants to keep us safe. So when we think about doing something different, of course our system pulls us back. But having a plan helps. When you start to think through the possibilities, your nervous system begins to settle. It goes: okay, if we do this, it doesn’t feel as scary, because there are actually some options here.

[13:45] Kelly Allison:
Exactly. And the more you do it, the more reference points you build. The subconscious has evidence that it has worked before, so it starts to give you a little more permission. It won’t make it easy, but it will let you try.

[14:10] Megan North:
And that’s where kinesiology ties in too. Muscle testing tunes into the subconscious. I use a pendulum, which is my version of that. You can ask: is this stored in the body? Is this my belief or someone else’s? When you learn how to test your own body, the wisdom it gives you is extraordinary.

[14:46] Kelly Allison:
It can give you a single word to connect to a feeling that you have never been able to name. I remember when I first started having kinesiology sessions thinking: my goodness, I finally make sense to myself. Someone is putting words to everything I have been feeling.

My mum said to me a couple of weeks ago, lovingly, that she recognised from a young age that there was a depth to the way I see the world that she just could not meet me at. It was a beautiful way of saying it. But the result of that was often being made to feel like my feelings were inconvenient, like I was the problem. So I shoved them all down. And then, hello, psoriasis.

I learned to think of my feelings as an inconvenience. Now I think of them as the best thing about me. And that is not something I am willing to negotiate with anyone. Not anymore.

[16:19] Megan North:
Those boundaries. I remember when you came back from overseas and the clinic had burned down. We had a conversation on Zoom, and I remember thinking: something is going to be reborn out of this. And then the next time I saw you on screen, I thought: wow. It was like watching the phoenix rise. That fire next door was almost a catalyst for your own rebirth.

[17:02] Kelly Allison:
People say I look different. There is something different about me. And it is true. I went through what I can only describe as a dark night of the soul. I was reading one of my journals recently and every page just said: death, death. It really was about shedding and letting go and seeing what came out the other side.

A lot has changed in my life. Some people are gone, new people are coming in. People who weren’t as close have become closer. It’s always interesting, when life is really hard, who shows up when you can’t show up for them. Beautiful friendships have deepened. But I almost can’t remember who I was before that. It feels like I’m telling the story of a movie I watched. I don’t feel connected to who I used to be.

[18:37] Megan North:
I think that’s actually a validation of healing. When we change our belief systems at a deep level, the story that was attached to them dissolves too. Not remembering that version of yourself means there is no story left to hold onto. You have healed it.

[19:26] Kelly Allison:
Yes. And I used to say to people in kinesiology sessions: you can never go back to who you were once you’ve released a belief system. You can’t, because most of those beliefs developed before the age of seven or ten, when the brain is at its most programmable. Your brain will never be that malleable again. Once a belief is cleared, you might occasionally catch yourself starting to act from an old pattern, but then you stop and wonder why. It is just not there anymore. It is extraordinary.

[20:28] Megan North:
And that is why, when you are doing healing work, whatever you release needs to be replaced. If you leave a void, you will attract the same energy you just cleared. Replacing it with unconditional love, or the opposite of what you have healed, is really important.

[20:50] Kelly Allison:
Really important. And in the work I do now, we also look at and validate the benefits of the ways we have adapted. We can make lemonade from lemons, so to speak. I became a caregiver in my family, and that is my natural tendency. I don’t want to let go of all of that, because it has shaped the healer I am. If I throw the baby out with the bathwater, I lose things about myself that I love and value. It’s about shifting the lens from hurt and pain to: look at the wisdom you have also acquired. The empathy. The way you see the world differently. Sometimes the pain is so consuming we can’t even begin to see that something worthwhile could have come from it too.

[22:22] Megan North:
Forgiveness plays a big part in that as well. When I have healed belief systems from my childhood, I have always extended forgiveness to my parents, because they were raising me the only way they knew how. The forgiveness, for self and for others, is really powerful on a healing journey.

[23:13] Kelly Allison:
It is. And I can forgive someone and still choose to have nothing to do with them. Forgiveness is an internal process. But I also think it is something you arrive at rather than decide upon. You can’t just wake up one morning and say: today I’m going to forgive you. It is almost a secondary outcome, a destination that appears once the awareness is there. Once you understand that someone was doing the best they could with what they believed to be true, evolution past that becomes possible. And every generation should be evolving past the one before it.

[24:36] Megan North:
Yes. Self-forgiveness is so empowering. And from a mental health and wellbeing perspective, how has your own practice shifted over the last eighteen months?

[25:08] Kelly Allison:
There was a lot of self-forgiveness, for sure. I can fall into the habit of blaming myself when something goes wrong. But I think I look at mental health a little differently now than I did a couple of years ago. I don’t consider good mental health to be feeling happy all the time. I truly believe good mental health is riding the waves. It’s the adage that you can’t always control how you feel, but you can choose what you do about it.

I can have flat days and I will say to my family: I’m just a bit flat today. Nobody has done anything wrong. Because that is good mental health. Feeling the feelings and maintaining perspective. Some things should flow through you in an hour, and some things might linger a little longer. Good mental health is not about feeling better. It is about being better at feeling.

After the clinic closed and I got sick, I made a decision. I can do this the hard way or I can do it properly. These feelings aren’t new. Nothing here is blowing my mind. But I am not doing this again. So I am going to do this well. Everything, so that it doesn’t come back and knock me for six again in six months.

[27:30] Megan North:
I love that you share how you’re feeling with your family. It means they don’t spend the day wondering what they’ve done wrong. And it opens the door to connection.

[28:17] Kelly Allison:
Exactly. And the irony is that when I go upstairs for some quiet time, the three of us often end up on the bed together. Nobody is really reading. Everyone just wants to be near mum. Which is often exactly what I actually need. But I never want my children to worry that they have contributed to something I am feeling that has nothing to do with them.

[29:04] Megan North:
Let’s talk about the work you do with women. There comes a point where a woman begins to question the roles she has always been playing. What usually triggers that moment? And why do so many women still push it away rather than lean into it?

[29:54] Kelly Allison:
When people hit that real discomfort within themselves, if they are honest, they have felt it building for a long time. It often happens at obvious thresholds: juggling a career you love with a new baby, going through divorce or loss, children leaving home. These are the experiences that force you to reevaluate who you are.

For women at my age, the really obvious one is midlife. And I think we are starting to understand that midlife is not just a physiological change. It is a rite of passage and a reckoning. The body is essentially saying: okay, now what? What do you want?

Why do we ignore that? Fundamentally, I think we still place unrealistic expectations on women. We still raise girls to be sweet, to smile, to not rock the boat, certainly not to be angry. We reward women who push themselves to their limits. We celebrate the CEO with two children who looks great, without ever asking what is happening behind the scenes. We don’t judge men on the state of their homes or what’s in their children’s lunchboxes. We judge women constantly. And we are a long way from that levelling out.

[34:01] Kelly Allison:
The other practical factor is that it is often just easier to do the thing yourself. You fall into the pattern of doing it because it’s faster than the argument. And then fifteen years later, that one small thing has become a deeply entrenched dynamic. Shifting a dynamic that has been in place for a long time is genuinely hard work.

[34:47] Megan North:
And the beginning of that work can feel heavy. When you really commit to the journey, things start to surface. But having done this for twenty-plus years, I find now that when things come up, they move through much more quickly. The bigger, heavier work has already been done.

[35:28] Kelly Allison:
And as a healer, the hits often come bigger and stronger, because you are frequently working through things so that you can support other people through them too. But it is not all or nothing. You can address one area at a time, at your own pace. I cannot make anyone release something they are not ready to release. The awareness alone can be enough for some people. Others want to go deeper. Both are completely valid.

And what the subconscious does beautifully is give you what you can cope with. You might be dealing with a difficult dynamic at work, and that becomes the focus of the work. And then you realise the dynamic at work exists because you grew up in that same dynamic. You build tolerance around the workplace pattern first. Then, when you are ready, you can move to the root cause. The brain can overprotect us, but it is also taking us on a journey at a pace we can manage.

[38:52] Megan North:
And I find that when I’ve just worked through something myself, a client will arrive the very next week dealing with exactly that. Because now I can meet them there properly.

[39:08] Kelly Allison:
Yes. I used to sit with clients and think: they are telling me my life. Or my small number of male clients would all essentially be describing my husband. I always say to people: I don’t think you’d believe how many people have sat in front of me and told me the same story. And I find real comfort in that, because it means it is not you. It is a dynamic, a pattern, a way of being that many people have been through. You are not the reason it happened.

[40:10] Megan North:
For someone watching who has never thought about healing this way, can you explain what it actually means for patterns to be held in the body and the nervous system?

[40:31] Kelly Allison:
Everything is held in our body. Unprocessed emotions, trauma. It is physiological, it is in our cells, it becomes part of us. As it continues to be triggered or accumulates, it creates discomfort, whether that is physical, mental, or emotional.

Anger and resentment are really good indicators that your boundaries have been overstepped or that you are giving more than you genuinely have. We only over-give from a place of a wound. So when you see exhaustion, frustration, anxiety, or repeated immune responses, they are signals. Autoimmune disease is now recognised as being strongly connected to early trauma. Psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, thyroid conditions. There is typically a seven to ten year gestation period, and if you look back, you can often identify the trigger.

And I think the most powerful moment is when someone hears the explanation for the first time and thinks: I knew that. How did I never see it? It is like switching from black and white to colour television. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Your subconscious is the lens through which you see the world. Remove a belief, and suddenly you see everywhere it has been operating.

[42:37] Megan North:
Tell us about the Unbecoming and the RETURN method. Where did it come from and what does it actually look like?

[43:21] Kelly Allison:
It came from a download while I was driving. I felt that familiar tingling and the message was simply: enough. I am so tired of picking myself apart and trying to be someone different.

Last year I couldn’t push through. I couldn’t show up when I didn’t want to. I was parking my car down the side of the house so people would think I wasn’t home. I had nothing left. And in that stillness, with all the noise gone, I had to face how much I had been running from myself. The depth of it still moves me, because I hadn’t even known I was doing it.

Unbecoming came from that. From realising I cannot be anything other than myself. I was exhausted from showing up differently for different people, from preempting everyone else’s needs. I had to come back to who I actually was. And quite humorously, I realised I wasn’t fooling anyone anyway.

The RETURN method is the process I moved through myself. Recognise who you have become. Explore the beliefs and fears driving that. Tune in to what the body is telling you. Uncover what is still worth keeping. Release what is not. Navigate your liberated truth.

That final stage is not about walking out healed forever. It is about awareness and choice. You choose how you show up. You choose where your energy goes. You choose who you walk away from. And you do it from an empowered place, because you now understand why you didn’t used to make those choices.

[48:47] Megan North:
I love that. And what I really love is the choice piece. Just stepping into that power and saying: I’m going to do me.

[49:13] Kelly Allison:
Yes. And how that looks will be completely different for every woman. I am an extrovert. I will say things out loud and have the conversation. I am not going to make an introvert loud like me. I am going to help her sit in her power in a way that is true to her. There is absolutely not one size fits all in healing, and especially not in this work. It is about your individual journey and coming back to the parts of yourself you have denied.

[51:19] Megan North:
We are almost out of time. What is one lesson or truth from the last eighteen months that you wish you had known earlier?

[51:34] Kelly Allison:
Maya Angelou says something beautiful, and I am sure I won’t get it exactly right, but the essence is: things can change you without diminishing you. That really resonated with me.

But the thing I keep coming back to is simply this: it is so exhausting to try and be someone else. It is genuinely exhausting and, when you step back, it is also a little ridiculous. Of course we want to be the best version of ourselves, but honouring the fundamentals of who you are is not something we should have to fight for. We say it to our children constantly: just be yourself. And here I was doing the opposite.

Someone said to me recently that they wanted to talk to people about their anxiety but were afraid. And I said: when you come out and say it, nobody is going to be surprised. The truth is, ninety-nine percent of what you are trying to hide from the world, everyone else already sees.

[53:33] Megan North:
That is so beautiful. Thank you so much, Kelly. This has been exactly the conversation I knew it would be.

[53:52] Kelly Allison:
You are always so easy to talk to. Thank you for having me.

[54:05] Megan North:
And I’d like to thank all of my amazing and dedicated audience, my supporters, and my sponsors. I hope everyone has a wonderful rest of the week, and I’ll see you all again next time. Thank you again, Kelly.

[54:17] Kelly Allison:
Thanks, Megan. Bye.