YOUR WORTHINESS IS NOT AN OUTSIDE THING – WORTH
I sit here on my balcony contemplating the question: what is worthiness? I hold a cigarette in one hand, I’m wearing a baseball cap, and my mind is running amok with memories of the past and thoughts of what my future looks like.
Recently my life has taken a direction that is less than desirable, but desirable to who? If I was to choose a religion, mine would be self-inquiry. I am constantly questioning – where did that thought come from? What’s influencing my actions?
And then I look at the cigarette burning away and I look up at people walking by. Thoughts fill my head again. But now they seem to be attached to how smoking this cigarette somehow has something to do with my worth. How wearing this cap to cover up my thinning hair is a reflection of my worth. And how the thoughts I’m having about my future and what that will look like are asking me: am I, or will I be, worthy?
Are these my thoughts, or are they 40 years of other people’s thoughts interfering with my own inner voice? And at the core of that voice, my own self-worth. And here comes the anxiety that has so aggressively sat down at life’s table unwelcome for my entire life, the conditioned thoughts that I can’t help but hear. And then I pivot back and forth between throwing it out on its ass and screaming ‘fuck you’, to inviting it in for a cup of tea, and allowing it to be listened to.
Asking these thoughts, ‘Which is really me?’, ‘What’s coming up for me?’, ‘What’s my story?’ And then listening with the awareness that I have worked on for my entire adult life.
Be still and know, Shayne, be still and know …
I know because I’m sitting here about to delve into the topic of worthiness that it must absolutely be the subject, and because I’ve struggled with it my entire life, and I – we all – really so desperately want to be free from it, to be valued and for the world (and ourself) to accept us just the way we are.
But it’s not been the case. We learn this at an early age, sometimes as early as our first memories trying to pick out our own clothes that didn’t match, or weren’t gender specific enough, and the voice of our parent or guardian speaking up, gently or sometimes not so gently, ‘people will laugh at you’, ‘boys/girls don’t wear that’. And then you feel a sinking in your soul.
We don’t want to be looked at as not belonging, and we so desperately want our parents and peers to see and love us. And there it begins. We bargain for love (our worthiness) by showing up the way we’re ‘supposed to’, and suppressing our innermost selves in the process.
We’ve not applied for but accepted the position of worthless – it is not something that is forced upon us, but we accept it. It’s created in our head when we fail to tick off the labels of society, when we fail to receive the gold star of approval. You know the gold star, right? The one you perhaps received on your first assignment as a child? Or perhaps you didn’t and then there was that sinking feeling again, and the birth of your desire to get that gold star at whatever cost, even at the cost of not being yourself.
It’s all too familiar for me and its grip tightened as I began to grow. Because deep inside I knew I was so radically different than ‘the norm’. However, I knew that in order to survive, at least in that world, I would have to conform. I would have to wait in the line with everyone else, in the hope of receiving my gold star. And if I didn’t I would then have to pay enough attention to figure out what it was I had to do to get it.
Even today I catch myself looking to my peers, within my genre, to see what’s acceptable, what’s trending, to see what it takes to receive my gold star. Or in today’s language, social media likes and shares.
And it’s painful, oh so painful. And it changes so rapidly that it’s a whirlwind of anxiety just trying to keep up. And a distraction from the reality that is who I really am now, and a deep inner knowing that my worthiness is not an outside thing.
And somehow I’ve known this all along. It’s a voice that’s travelled with me from aged five (my earliest memory) until today – nearly 40 years later. Sometimes it’s been a whisper and most recently it’s been shouts, shouts so loud it’s impossible not to listen.
‘Who am I? Who are you?’
Who are we without the conditioning that we’ve allowed to dictate our worthiness? And what even is this word we call worth?
The dictionary describes worth as ‘the value equivalent to that of someone or something under consideration; the level at which someone or something deserves to be valued or rated’. But under consideration by who? Deserving to be valued or rated by who? Who is this person or group of persons who decides our worth or what or who is valued?
But as children the dictionary seems to have become our dictator of authority. Or perhaps if we grew up in a religious household, that religion or whatever theology our family adopted became that authority as well. Above our own inherent voice or truth, we started our lives handing over authority to words above feelings (our inner voice), to other people’s truths rather than our own. But we trusted them because, hey, they knew, right?
Or did they, do they? Does anybody really know? Or can anybody really know who we truly are, or what is right for us?
We’re born into family units, and blindly trust that they have our best interests at heart. We then board the bus to institutions such as schools, churches and libraries governed by collective theologies and rules by which to live, perhaps never even questioning if they are right for us.
Or when we do, we end up with our nose against the wall, or in my case sat under a desk facing an entire class in shame. And when we don’t question, when we follow the rules, when we dress how we’re supposed to dress, act how we’re supposed to act and hand in our papers in the perfect form, we get the gold star.
Or as adults that gold star becomes accolades, admiration, career advancement, things and money. For some reason a puppet comes to mind and the strings bear the names of every theology and rule that’s controlling our lives which we so desperately want to cut.
But what if we fall? What if we can’t stand by ourselves?
And that scares the shit out of us. Because up until this point we’ve been safe. We’ve been supported by the ‘norms’ because we’ve allowed them to carry us, and to break free from that may mean that we no longer have support, that we are no longer worthy, and that’s what we’ve been afraid of our entire lives. Not being seen, not being part of the collective, being thrown out in the storm with no protection. Or if we take a tour through history, tied up and burned at the stake, literally burning our worth and taking our lives with it.
Perhaps today it’s not legal to burn us at the stake, but it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Maybe it’s not so literal. The sticks have turned to words, and the fires turned to an inferno of loneliness, where our worthiness dies to the world as we know it and we’re forced into mental purgatory. And for those who are not so resilient, that could still mean death (suicide).
I contemplated that path once; well, many times, once even almost succeeding. However, once I awoke, wiped my lips of charcoal, looked around and saw no one there, just me alone, I had an awakening … a rush of life, and an awareness that I am it. I am whatever words follow, I am. That life begins and ends with me, that I went to sleep alone, and I woke up alone, and that everything, everyone and every experience was a mirror reflecting back to me the opportunity to stand up like a lion and roar and when I did the world began to listen.
That day I cut the strings that almost killed me, stood on my own two feet, and began the journey to the awareness that my worthiness was not an outside thing. However, like any realization, beginning with learning to walk, we first scoot on our bums, then crawl, stand up, wobble and then run.
Some of us walk at six months, some at nine, and, well, me, I was more interested in food and so too chubby to stand, so I crawled and crawled until I gained the inner strength to realize that however heavy life is, I could stand, I could walk and I could run.
Because whatever force was responsible for that wasn’t outside, but within. And such is our worthiness.
Sometimes life can feel like a game of ‘pin the tail on the donkey’. We’ve been blindfolded, spun around and then pushed to find ourselves. There are people shouting, ‘this way’, ‘no, this way’, but the only way we will find our way is to be still enough to remember, and with that awareness, drown out the noise and take baby steps towards it.
Take a walk back through your life to an experience when you were five years old. Or 10 or 12. Or perhaps 16 when you got your first job, and then you lost it. Perhaps you were 17 and you went on your first date, and they didn’t show up. Or 18 and you got your final college paper stamped with a D, or 21 and you just found the confidence to tell your circle of friends who you really are, or 29 and you’re losing your hair, 40 and you find your first wrinkle, 50 and you start to go grey, 60 and so on.
Where within those experiences did you give away your worth? When did you start believing you were not good enough, not educated enough, and didn’t know how … Where did you hand your value over to others, or your idea of how you’re supposed to be or what your life was supposed to look like? Where did you consciously or unconsciously surrender and hand your worth over to the collective? If we don’t define our own worth, others define it for us.
It’s time we shifted our focus from outside to inside, and when we’re not feeling worthy ask ourselves what it is, or better yet who it is, whose thoughts and ideas we are believing? And then centre back to believing ourself.
There are so many excuses that create the resistance to knowing our own worth. Like poison we’ve collected along the path to our own awareness, but what we need to be reminded is that we are the force within that makes the decision to drink it. And that without its intoxication we know that we’ve always been worthy, we were born worthy.
This now is our opportunity to embrace the extreme power of the self that is gained with self-inquiry, to look to cleanse our outside around us and to release our own beliefs about ourselves and our worth.
My Story: He Spoke to Me in My Dreams
‘Within each of us is another whom we do not know, and (s)he speaks to us in our dreams.’
Carl Jung
This quote nails it. He spoke to me in my dreams. My whole life from the time I can remember I dreamed of writing, I would write poetry from my heart but was graded poorly, I would write plays and ideas for television that were reality versus soap operas (which were popular at the time) to feedback that my reality was too heavy, to dreams of travelling the world learning about other cultures and making what difference I could, to thoughts that I was a poor boy from the ghetto who wasn’t worthy. However, beyond the conditioning of my unworthiness and the resistance that bullied me, sometimes into submission, was innate curiosity, a powerful desire to achieve it all, and the gift of resilience.
And one day I woke up from that dream to realize I could make it a reality, but what awoke with that dream was a monster that I call unworthiness.
I was wearing a suit that I had purchased at a swanky downtown store, looking out of my office window and realized ‘this is not my life’. I had the car, the money, the loft, but somehow I felt an emptiness inside of me. A depression set in, a not-so-distant stranger. I’ve experienced this before, except last time it looked like a prison, was full of students and almost led to my death. But this time it wasn’t being inflicted on me by others. It was my own choices that led me here.
My choices were choices that were led by a desire to prove my worth. I chose to acquire everything that was perceived as success so that I could walk into my high school reunion (something like Romy and Michele) and say, ‘Look, I am worthy,’ ‘I’m the king of the world,’ ‘I’ve got the job, the money and everything that I need to look and feel powerful and you can’t take my worth from me anymore.’
My worth was from the outside (things), and in the process I had completely been disconnected from what was inside. Because success (worth) defined by the collective looked like money and things but what was knocking at my window as I looked out of my office that day was the truth.
My dreams, my true desires, my destiny was calling to me that day and because I was too afraid to listen, for fear of stepping outside of what I believed held my worth, I didn’t listen. I kept it up. I kept getting in the car, that led to the job, that brought me the money, that dictated my worth. And every day that knock would get louder and louder and my depression deeper and deeper.
I would spend evenings trying to suppress the voice with drugs and alcohol and long drives into the city wiping my tears. Until one day, the pain of remaining in a life that wasn’t my truth was more than the fear of being perceived as unworthy. And on that very day I sat in my office with my head down, and anxiety so bad I felt like I was going to pass out.
Thoughts were running through my head, ‘What would I do?’, ‘I won’t have any money’, ‘What will people think?’ and then I would go deeper, inquire to the depths of my soul. ‘Whose voice was this?’ And I remembered the book I had been reading that was the catalyst to a deeper self-awareness: The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz: ‘Be impeccable with your word,’ ‘Use the power of your word in the direction of truth’; ‘Don’t take anything personally,’ ‘What others say and do is a projection of their own reality’; ‘Don’t make assumptions,’ ‘Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings,’ and ‘Always do your best.’ ‘Under any circumstance, simply do your best.’
I closed my laptop, packed up my bag, went home and wrote my resignation letter. I spoke my truth with conviction, without the fear of how it would be received, and with no mind chatter about what would happen, how they would see me, or how I would be seen by others. In that moment I felt so alive, so deeply in connection with myself and with a sense of ease that from that day forth doing my best was good enough, and if that meant jumping from a corporate career that I felt defined my worth, and falling through mental purgatory until I found solid ground again, so be it. Because at that time what was most important to me was being impeccable with my word, and standing in the power of my own truth. Whatever that looked like. But what I knew for sure was that it wasn’t in that office.
Days passed by as my employer questioned my decision, and even questioned my sanity. But I was determined to follow my truth and embark upon the journey to defining my worth from the inside out.
Not without a lot of struggle. There were so many moments when deep panic took hold of me, leaving me feeling suffocated at times, not able to catch the breath I needed to survive. Day by day the reality set in as my bank account began to drain, as I watched the bills pile in from the life they used to sustain.
The pressure to cave in and go back became so strong, to surrender to the collective idea or worth versus having the courage to uncover my own. I watched everything fade away – the money, the car … and then finally the trip to the bank to bankrupt the life I’d left behind and embark upon a deeply spiritual path to discovering my own self-worth.
***
It was a journey not for the faint of heart and, had resilience not been my superpower, I’m not sure I’d be writing this today. However, whenever I have listened to the whispers (or screams … I was a little stubborn) they have always led me in the direction of my highest good.
Sometimes – ok, a lot of the time – I was kicking and screaming, and resisting … choosing ‘vthe school of hard knocks. But looking back from the awareness I have now, and the fullness of my self-worth, which I’m still working on, I wouldn’t change a thing.
Even though my worth is challenged daily, I’ve gained the awareness to put my monkey mind into perspective, put down the poison and drink from my own cup of worth.
The Practice of Self-Worth
Self-Inquiry
Self-inquiry is the practice of constantly bringing our attention to our own inner awareness. This practice was introduced to me by American-born spiritual teacher Gangaji and has since been my religion. In any situation, be it a conflict or new direction, I give myself the space to practice asking myself questions and being still enough to hear the answers.
At first this practice can be a mind struggle. Every thought and idea about ourselves that we’ve been conditioned to think runs amok in our heads and can sometimes be very convincing that it’s our truth.
But if you keep sitting, keep asking, and keep being still and listening, as the loud voices of others (conditioning) begin to fade you will slowly and clearly begin to hear your own voice and then act from there.
I often refer to this as conscious action versus reaction. Reaction most often comes from a place of conditioning, using our past experiences to dictate our current reality, and is often a heightened, sometimes aggressive and angry energy not connected to our truth or in alignment with our self-worth or value.
Responding with conscious action is always in alignment with our highest value or self-worth. We’ve stopped and listened long enough to tap into our inner awareness, to sift through our triggers, past stories and grievances to connect to the truth of our highest good, and from our highest place of self-worth our reactions or responses convey our self-worth.
Looking Your Best
Looking my best always makes me feel my best. And this doesn’t mean conforming to what others’ versions of your best are. It’s about you, standing in front of your own mirror, comfortable in your own skin.
It’s amazing how incredible we feel about ourselves just by simply grooming – getting a haircut, a manicure, or showering daily. Especially showering daily! I know when I’ve gotten into ruts of depression I’ve gone a few days without showering, and more than a month without a haircut and it definitely affected how I felt about myself. The moment I stepped out of the salon I felt like I could take on the world again. And that was just from grooming.
It’s also so very important to be comfortable in what we are wearing. Because the more comfortable we are the more confident we are. I have tried so many trending styles; however, when I looked in the mirror I felt as if I was wearing a costume. It didn’t look or feel like me, and anytime I went against those feelings and left the house things didn’t work out for me. Whether it was the level of my engagement at a social event or a meeting, people can tell when you lack self-worth and confidence. It’s almost as if you’re wearing it on your t-shirt.
Part of feeling comfortable in your clothes and in your body is keeping healthy, whatever that looks and feels like for you. When I am looking and feeling my healthiest I am so alive and it seems that things just work out better for me.
And I’m prepared to look my best, to feel my best to get the best. However, I get the struggle. But looking your best wherever you’re at is kind of like gratitude. The more you do it the more you have to be grateful for. So whatever shape you’re in, start by perfecting that and work in baby steps from there.
And always wear a smile. It’s contagious.
Trusting Yourself and Your Desires
This kind of goes hand-in-hand with self-inquiry. It’s the answers that come when we sit and listen. And then the courage to trust what comes up. I know. It can be challenging to sort out what’s yours and what’s not, especially when you’ve been running on conditioned auto-pilot for your entire life.
It can be scary because when what’s coming up for you is incongruent with your current reality it may require an entire life shift. So many people in my life over the past few years have come to this realization, and when they do, the resistance kicks up hard. It begins a sometimes overwhelming rush of self-evaluation.
Who am I really?
Am I this house, this car, this job, this marriage?
And if we’ve never stopped long enough to ask such simple questions, the shit can get real and quick, often hitting all our triggers at once, forcing us to pay attention and then act accordingly.
But it’s challenging when our whole lives have been dictated by the lust of gaining our self-worth from conditioned values and desires versus our own, and it seems from my experience that upon this type of awakening old systems and relations fall apart to make way for what’s real.
And during that process we may have the involuntary reaction to dig our nails into the pavement and try to hold onto our past for dear life, for fear of the unknown. However, from my own personal experience and that of my dear friends, you need to ‘let go or be dragged’ (a Zen proverb). If you don’t have the courage to listen to your own voice and desires, you will end up in a life that, like an outfit, never quite feels like it fits. And the longer you sit in that uncomfortable space the more uncomfortable it gets.
So the best thing you can do for yourself is to listen to yourself, and take baby steps towards the whispers of your deepest desires. I say baby steps solely because first, that’s what works for me, and second, remember that you didn’t get into a disconnected life overnight, so you won’t get out of it that way either.
Self-Appreciation
When I think about Self Appreciation I giggle, both because of the conditioning I have floating around in my head that we’re not supposed to be proud, and it reminds me of an interview I did for my MyVividLife web series with author and financial wellness expert Kate Northrup (you can watch it at VividLife.me) where I spoke about affirmations.
‘I love myself, I love myself, I love myself; no, I don’t, I hate myself.’
Not quite funny that I hate myself, and at the core I really don’t; however, what I was trying to relay is that unless you actually believe it to be true it’s not going to penetrate your resistance to your own self-worth.
We have to believe and feel this with all our hearts, which is why with a self-appreciation practice I would suggest starting out small. Perhaps begin each day not looking in the mirror, although that little girl on YouTube makes it look epic (search for Jessica’s ‘Daily Affirmation’ on YouTube). I think starting with a pen and paper, or a fancy leather-bound Harry Potter-looking journal in my case, and writing down one thing every day for a week that you appreciate about yourself is a good place to start. As I’m writing I keep hearing the line from the movie The Help in my head: ‘You is smart. You is kind. You is important.’ It just makes me smile and a smile is a good place to start.
Choose something that makes you feel light in the heart, and remember it doesn’t always have to be physical. We seem to always jump to our physical appearance when thinking of our self-worth, when we know that our worthiness is not an outside thing, it’s an inside one.
So perhaps start with what personality trait you most love about yourself. Mine is that I love my ability to see the good in others no matter how they present. You could also be more in-depth and write an ‘appreciate paragraph’ that highlights your favourite personality trait and then gives examples through your story.
I love to write, so that would be my choice. And the more in-depth we are, the more details, the more we activate that inner voice that knows and then sometimes invokes a river of self-appreciation we never even knew was there.
So go ahead, give it a try. What do you most appreciate about yourself?
Good Vibe Tribe
We are a reflection of the people we spend our lives with. Think about that for a moment. Look around. Who’s sitting at your table and what do they reflect to you?
I’ve done this many times in my life. In my younger days the process could be pretty volatile, involved a lot of projection and alienated a lot of people. I wasn’t yet seasoned emotionally, didn’t even have a clue. I just knew something wasn’t right and those surrounding me didn’t make me feel how I wanted to feel. It was never that I felt better than them, it was always that I felt bigger than the sum of the actions by the majority, and so I would move on.
As I grew and began to value myself more, so did the people in my tribe. They say your vibe attracts your tribe, or as others might say, you attract the people you have in your life based on how you’re projecting or reflecting your life. And the clearer we get, the higher our sense of worth and the less we will attract people into our lives that don’t align with that.
However, like negative thoughts, negative people can slip into our lives and it’s our responsibility to ‘pay attention to the whispers’ and act accordingly. It may seem that it never lets up. No matter how much we’re in alignment and value ourselves, negative people and experiences creep into our life.
I believe perhaps they’re reminders to listen, to value that voice, to speak it and to act on it. But I also believe that these people could come into our experience to learn from us and so I’m not always so quick to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’.
Not everyone needs to show up polished to perfection as we are all perfectly imperfect, but what is most important is that the people that we invite to our table mirror our highest worth (or vibes) and that if we’re constantly neglectful of that, we must learn to get up from the table.
Reflection: Is this Right for Me?
Self-worth. Self-worth. Self- worth. That is the question. Where do we find it, and how are we defined by it?
It’s an inside job. A place that due to the conditioning of our lives can be difficult to access, but with practice unlocks a magical force within us that aligns us with our highest good. We look to our stories, our ancestors, our teachers, our culture and even our neighbours to define it.
But, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, we go on an outward journey only to discover it within. And such is life, as I often say: ‘every experience is walking us home to ourselves’, and I believe we need those experiences to mirror to us where to look.
It was all so innocent – the process of following the leader because we trusted they knew the way, and perhaps they thought they did, and perhaps they did know but they could only know what was true for themselves. We start out students in life and we are so quick to graduate to teachers, most often without even mastering the subject ourselves. I refer to myself as a student of life and always will; sure there are some following me as how I’ve turned my tragedies to triumph inspires them, but like them I am still learning, still growing and through experiences always shifting my perception.
I keep an open heart and open mind. Never limiting myself to the thoughts and opinions laid before me and always taking life’s big and little questions to self-inquiry. This, to me, is the ultimate amplification of self-worth – to value ourselves enough to check in with ourselves constantly. Is this right for me?
It’s no different than our relationships with others, if we’re in it together we consult with them before we make decisions. Is this right for you? And then if not, we take it to deeper inquiry and if we’re not in alignment we don’t go that way.
So why not value ourselves the same? After all, life begins and ends with us. We go to bed and wake up with ourselves and if we’re not valuing our own self over the collective, we’re mirroring a disconnected world. Disconnection from self is disconnection from the whole. Spiritually I tend to believe that there is no place where one begins and the others ends, that we are all an extension of the creative force that exists within – and when surrendered to that truth we become an expression of it and by the law of attraction we give others permission to do the same.
So, give yourself permission to value yourself first and watch how that unfolds within your life and attracts to you the people, places and experiences you deserve and desire and to a life full with self-worth and the peace that passeth understanding.