Alchemising Shame
Are there times in your life when you feel unworthy? Not good enough, not appreciated, inferior, inadequate, unwanted…?
I’m not sure if it escapes any of us. We live in a culture where advertising informs us of all the things we need to do and buy to improve ourselves and our lives and thus ensure happiness, and with which we are shown a baseline a comparison point of a (mythical) perfect person, well it’s no surprise that we don’t think we’re up to par.
The lie of inferiority is of course something that women in particular have been fed for millennia, with direct programming that informed us that we were the weaker sex, constraining us to be lesser than and something other than what we naturally are - powerful and more than enough.
Those words hold promise, yet often ring hollow don’t they?
I am powerful and more than enough
does it ring true in your body?
The insidious feeling of not-being-enough was familiar to me from a very young age, it dominated my school years, and would raise its head in certain contexts in my 20s & even 30s. Usually masquerading under the umbrella term of what people love to label as ‘anxiety’. It caused me to hide, to play small, to miss out on doing things I wanted to, and left me doubting my every turn.
The belief that I-Am-Not-enough, (or am too much, a variant of not-enough) is perhaps central to everything that we experience. This is one of the core wounds we have come to hold at the very deepest levels of ourselves. It’s a wound that carries with it a large cloud of shame that dims our power and our light and blocks our path, in ways that we are not even aware.
I believe that meeting our worth is a continuous journey. We will naturally contract and stumble with questions around our worth as life unfolds and we find new edges. It is ultimately up to us whether we dwell here or choose to meet it and continue to evolve.
two principles FOR self worth
The two principles I apply to my own evolution with self worth are this:
Meet it.
This ‘meeting it’ in my opinion is *key*.
Positive affirmations, mindset work, gratitude practices, psychology will typically ask you to transcend and bypass the shame and lack of worth you feel and find a new way of thinking about something.
An embodied approach will ask you to meet it. What does that mean? It means to embody the feeling of inadequacy and inferiority that is alive within our body, and surrender to it, and feel our heart break apart in the surrendering. Releasing the tension and falsity’s and returning back to our truth.
Embodiment asks us to inhabit all that we are. When we surrender to ourselves, more and more deeply, as painful as it can be, no part is denied, and in the total acceptance of self we embody our worth. .
2. Relinquish
The second component to ‘meeting’ your shame is to look long and hard at your life. What areas of your life are contributing to a sense of inadequacy? See them, and make the difficult but worthwhile choice to remove them.
There have been times when my lack of worth was crippling. On reflection I can see clearly how certain people, jobs, relationships and behaviours reinforced my feelings of unworthiness. Making the hard call to leave these inevitably, sometimes painfully, meant a return to self. Meeting my worth and relinquishing what is not true for me is something I can now do with more trust, efficiency and effectiveness than I ever could before.
The journey to self-worth is one that requires gentle compassion, willingness, and the gentle knowing that it is undoubtedly a journey that we will make again and again and again.
You are worthy, loved one.
Yours in solidarity xx