One of the lessons and states of being that’s my job to work through in this lifetime seems to be the feeling of “not enough”.
I’ll spare you the psychological roots, because if you’ve heard one story about this you’ve heard them all. The “not enough” state is compounded by society, culture, media, relationships and so on.
Remembering my worth, your worth, is critical when the “not enough” whispers start to direct life. Because it’s my choice as to whether or not I engage in this sort of detrimental thinking.
It’s easy to fall into this trap of “it’s never enough, I’m not enough” because of who I see around me. If I only look at the surface, making those blanket (and frankly unhelpful) statements sounds true. But what if something else is true? That there is more to meets the eye?
Back when I was hoping to “be an herbalist” as a part-time clinician, in addition to my full time job, and hobbies, and marriage, and living in NYC, LOL, I would berate myself for not being able to get “more” going with it.
I felt like I wasn’t “enough” of an herbalist because of the number of clients I had, or didn’t have. That I wasn’t doing it as my job the way I saw other people “being an herbalist”. Then I did some digging and discovered that those people didn’t exactly have the full plate that I already had. They had space in their life for (clinical) herbalism in a way that I didn’t.
So all that time with me giving myself a hard time for not being enough of an herbalist was wasted, and truly harmful. I couldn’t simply enjoy learning my craft and refining my skills as they were. I felt pressured to be in a different place in my life than I was. And that pressure? It didn’t come from me, I became an herbalist because I wanted to help myself, then fell in love with Chinese Medicine, and suddenly people (teachers, friends, family – all well-intentioned) were asking if I was going to make money from it.
(This is where I can go on a diatribe about how just because we love to do something, doesn’t mean we should be trying to make money from it.)
Anyway…
Take out “herbalist” and replace it with “musician”, “artist”, “wife”, “girlfriend”, etc., and you can see how “not enough” is nothing but a setup.
It’s a trap for never being able to be truly present, to live in the moment and feel peaceful and contented with where you are in your journey.
I got divorced at 40, started over. Then, three years later, I really started over: I moved to an entirely new place, knowing no one, and am living quite the different life than I was.
Yet so much is unchanged: I still have the things I love doing, I still have my job, I’m still “an herbalist” (though without the pressure for my herbal work to be anything other than what it is in this moment) and something new: I’m in a post-graduate program to gain new knowledge and (theoretically) skills to grow my full-time job/career.
It’s A LOT!
And, frankly, that “not enough” poisonous internal voice will still kick up from time to time.
It was giving me a hard time for not having more in retirement savings, for not having more in a savings account to buy a house, for not having more energy/oomph to exercise more, for not, for not, for not.
Have you noticed that these are all the “nots”?
Yeah, me too…
Ego (or if you want to instead say: the inner critic) focuses on the nots. Ego focuses on the black and white picture (so does the Metal element when out of balance in Chinese Medicine, but that’s for another time.)
Ego focuses on self-protection, and self-criticism as a way to protect the very young self. Ego is introjected – it’s NOT YOU. This introjected junk is from other people, society, media, etc. It’s things the ego’s taken on to keep me safe. (Same for you, it’s how the ego works.)
For example: ego introjecting the “nots” growing up was a way to protect me from hearing about it from an adult in my life. But now, doing that is a coping mechanism that’s causing more harm than doing good.
This is something that I’ve been working on for a long time. Because this part of us is deep, it’s old, and it’s worked for a long time. It has strong neural networks in our brains and beings.
I used to argue with this part of me, to counter and show proof. To my detriment: I’d wind up with crippling migraine headaches after such an internal argument.
Seriously, as soon as I realized what was happening in connection between these ego-internal-arguments and the migraines, I was able to make amazing progress on reducing the frequency and severity of the migraines. No herb was able to do as much for me as this important internal shift.
More frequently, and recently, I’ve not been getting caught in this argument loop. It was so automatic that I wouldn’t realize I was in the argument loop until hours later, or days later, and now I can spot it as soon as it starts. Practice makes progress!
And recently, happily, I finally said to this voice, “HEY, STOP IT! All these things are in progress, I’m making steady progress towards these goals every day, every week, every month, and I’ll get there when I get there. I am doing <lists all the things I’m managing> BY MYSELF, I’m officially cutting myself some slack, giving myself some compassion and feeling grace towards myself. This stuff is hard sometimes and I’m doing the best that I can. Compassion, grace. Right now.”
Breathes in and out. Hand over heart. Feeling love towards myself and where I am, what I’m feeling.
Then I say, “Pam, you are doing so great. You just keep doing you and it’ll all be okay.”
When I first started doing this it felt forced, fake. But as they say: fake it ‘til you make it.
And it’s true: it will all be okay.
The Universe wants that for me, I want that for me, and so long as I am willing to show up, and work through this stuff instead of combating it (or denying it) then I’ll feel yet more peace, yet more contentment, and be able to continue growing into who I really am without all that introjected garbage.
I slept like a baby that night.
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