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Healing the Energy of Unworthiness
Unworthiness is a sneaky culprit. It eases into your thinking and steals your self-worth when you are not looking. Once it’s in deep enough, it directs every action you take, for the worst.
Unworthiness starts out as the “rational explanation” for why things have not been working out for you as expected. Thoughts, such as “I didn’t get that job because I wasn’t good enough,” seep into your subconscious mind. After a while, your most intimate thoughts about yourself are contaminated. It is here where unworthiness takes hold, and, the seeds for underachievement and chronic failure are firmly planted.
What Is Unworthiness?
For some, unworthiness is an insidious thought-form. For others, it’s a feeling. Whether unworthiness is a thought-form or a feeling, it is the self-belief that whispers, “You’re not good enough,” whenever an opportunity comes around. So, where do those self-sabotaging beliefs come from anyway?
Your negative self-perceptions began when you accepted false beliefs about yourself. To help you gain some insight about your life, you either misinterpreted what you experienced, or you were given bad information. Either way, bad information was accepted as personal fact. Personal decisions were made daily based on false information. This caused poor life choices and much personal suffering. There is good news, however. You can rid yourself of all that relatively quickly.
Recognizing Unworthiness in Yourself and Others
As a life coach, I have noticed that many people have become far too complacent in their unworthiness. There are also those who are totally unaware they have it, as I was. I did not recognize that I had a sense of unworthiness until my mentor pointed it out. I finally recognized that I had this penchant for making terrible decisions and accepting every negative and limiting experience my unworthiness attracted.
So, how did a highly intelligent, well-educated, savvy and self-sufficient woman, like me get caught up in such a state? Marriage and Family Therapist Eric J. Christopher believes that “growing up in an environment in which we don’t feel safe or cherished can reinforce feelings of “not being good enough.”[1] Sampling a few of my experiences, I will illustrate how unworthiness develops. See if you recognize someone you may know in these samples.
In a nutshell, a great deal of my sense of unworthiness came from how I viewed myself and others’ input. It started for me with caregivers not having the time to nurture me from infancy to school-age. Mom taught school full-time. Grandma managed the household and took care of my semi-invalid grandfather. Dad was out of the country for the United States Air Force. All were taking care of their responsibilities. Nevertheless, the daily message I received was:
“When I need love, they won’t pick me up. I’m not good enough. They don’t love me.”
During my elementary school years, I sat in the backseat of my mother's car while she and her friend and co-worker talked. Mom wanted to enroll me in an accelerated class. I overheard my mother’s teacher/friend tell her that I didn’t have what it takes to be in an accelerated class. This message was not given to me daily, but it is obviously one I never forgot. That message was:
“I’m not good enough to be where Mom wanted me to be.”
This is how the idea of not being good enough is seeded and reinforced throughout a lifetime. Many have been crippled by their sense of unworthiness. If any of the above bold statements give you an uncomfortable feeling, it is time to find out why.
After reading samplings of my story, you may feel that you have become too complacent with your own sense of unworthiness. If so, that’s fine. There is no reason to feel ashamed. We all experience unworthiness at some point in our lives. BUT, there is no reason to continue throughout life feeling or thinking this way. Feeling and/or believing in your own unworthiness is a normal and natural reaction to perceived neglect, abandonment, indifference or abuse from someone or something significant in your life. A perfect case of perceived unworthiness is told in the story of the Great Sage Agastya of the Indus Valley tradition. For time’s sake, I have greatly paraphrased and summarized a segment of the story that pertains to our topic.
The Great Sage Agastya thought he was “unfit” to attend the wedding of his beloved deities and friends, Lord Shiva and Parvati, because he never received an invitation. Earlier, at Shiva’s request, Agastya had relocated to southern India which was a good six-months journey by caravan from the location where the wedding would be held. With no way to get to the wedding, Sage Agastya went into a deep meditation, sorrowful about not being asked to come to the wedding. In his sorrow, he never noticed that his wife had been missing from their home all morning. After a few moments of meditation, Lord Shiva picked up his friend’s thoughts and mentally asked why he had not yet arrived. Before Agastya could respond, Shiva instantly realized why Agastya was feeling slighted. Shiva laughed, explaining that he doesn’t do invitations and never sent out any. All who knew about the wedding were expected to attend. To resolve the issue, Shiva sent his bride Parvati to pick up Sage Agastya. Parvati didn’t have any time left to bring him physically to the wedding site. She created a functioning, sentient clone for the sage, and then left. Parvati brought the spirit of the sage back with her to the wedding and popped him into his new temporary body so that he could fully participate and enjoy the wedding. While there, he discovers his wife had arrived much earlier and was hurrying about, helping with preparations for the bride’s side of the wedding party.[2]
Sage Agastya’s story demonstrates how a perceived slight or neglect from someone important in your life can make you feel unworthy almost immediately. Any emotional or physical neglect, lack of appreciation, not feeling loved and other unhealthy feelings and experiences can create the conditions for unworthiness to thrive.
Healing the Energy of Unworthiness
Before you can rid yourself of a personal sense of unworthiness, you must first be honest with yourself. Be a good listener. Have a strong determination to be free. And, you must give yourself permission to heal and be rid of your unworthiness, once and for all.
Once I realized that the cause of my failures was my sense of unworthiness, I immediately knew what I needed to do. I had to find the source of the unworthiness, recognize what happened, dis-create the ideas of unworthiness and replace them with thoughts of love for myself, in that order. For my self-session, I grabbed a pen and pad. Then, sat down in my favorite chair, in my quiet space. I closed my eyes and started with deep breathing exercises. Breathe in, hold and exhale to the count of 7. This put me in a light meditative state. Several memories popped up in vivid color. I almost cried. It became absolutely clear to me why I had such a deep-seated sense of unworthiness. My next step would be to devise a plan to be rid it.
The clinical mental health strategy is to trace back to earlier times when you first remember having thoughts of unworthiness. Write them down in your journal. Then, ask yourself what was happening at the time? Who was involved? What was said? Who said it? Then you are to re-frame the situations with a more positive spin. Monitor your thoughts to flag any thoughts of unworthiness that crop up later.
After my meditation, I did not want to re-live those experiences by journaling. I wanted to get rid of the energy connecting the thoughts and experiences. Therapy is good for healing unworthiness, but it can take as long as six months. Spiritual coaching using the HuMethod is also good and provides an opportunity to dis-create each thought of unworthiness, permanently. Then, there is sound healing. I used a combination of the HuMethod and sound healing.
I used sound healing in layers. I searched YouTube.com for “mantras for unworthiness.” One of the mantras I found was Om Gum Ganapataye Namaha, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skB_3r-KmM0. Recited 108x was a big help. I also discovered a binaural beats subliminal video. And finally, I was drawn to one more video. This video seemed to wrap it all up at the end of my self-coaching session. It was Abraham Hicks “Why Do We Feel Unworthy,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh2lb7N71PQ.
After listening to all the recordings, I began to feel a light stirring in my chest. Then, the stirring became more intense. Finally, I sat back in my chair and opened my chest as wide as I could, pulling my elbows back as far as I could. It felt like something was being sucked out of my chest. This lasted for about ten minutes. When it was over, I felt as if I had a gaping hole in my chest. It did not hurt, but it did feel weird. Just as suddenly a loving, healing energy began to fill the void left in my chest. It felt light and airy, but focused. It poured into my heart-solar plexus area for about seven minutes. When it was done, I was exhausted. I was healed. Years of emotional and some physical pain had been released.
It is important to recognize unworthiness and know that it can be healed. For parents and teachers, it is essential to know that a child learns to feel unworthy when it does not feel safe or cherished. That child will grow up to become an adult that has a distorted view of itself and find it difficult to move forward in life. The adult will sidestep great opportunities and frown on meeting new people and learning new behaviors. By going to therapy, coaching and/or using sound healing, unworthiness is removed. Practicing mantras, affirmations and having loving self-thoughts replaces thoughts of unworthiness. And, finally, someone who once believed they were so unworthy becomes a vibrant, strong-minded, loving, whole individual.
[1] Eric J. Christopher, Healing the Sabotaging Beliefs of Unworthiness, 6/01/18, www.edgemagazine.net/2018/06/healing-the-sabotaging-beliefs-of-unworthiness.
[2] Thomas Ashley-Farrand, “Shakti Mantras.”
© 2018 Carole Smith-Rea