So many of us are walking around having no idea of our worth. Worse, so many of us struggle with feelings of unworthiness. There are so many different ways this manifests in our lives and we are often quite oblivious to it, or perhaps just feel helpless. Today, I am walking through some of the ways unworthiness appears in our life and some tips for replacing feelings of unworthiness with unconditional self-love.
I want to help you realize and connect to your worth. To do that, we have to understand our dominant paradigm and how it reveals itself in our day to day life, our reality. So, we’re going to dive into how it shows itself in:
- Relationships
- Finances
- How we limit ourselves.
In a recent morning meditation, I asked God a simple question. I said, God, what word would you give me for today, what is my guidance for today? Within an instant I heard, love yourself as I love you. See, even after years of working on my own self-healing, I still uncover more areas of focus. This is how it is, though; the work is never truly done. We continue to improve and we continue to grow, but as we do, we also continue to bump up against new things that reveal to us another layer or level of healing to do.
To better understand this, we have to first look at some of the ways these emotional blocks, limiting beliefs, or the imprints of long-past emotional wounds are reflected back to us in our reality. So, let’s get into it.
Have you ever heard the expression that your reality is a reflection of what’s inside you? I’ve heard this said in a number of different ways. There are a few different examples of the reflections in your reality that clue you into what’s inside; what your dominant thought paradigm or belief system about yourself is.
- Relationships.
When you reflect on your relationships, be it friendships or romantic partners, do you notice a pattern? Do they tend to end in similar ways or are there certain challenges or frustrations that are consistent across them? I’ll use myself as an example to illustrate. When it comes to my romantic relationships, they have all had rejection or abandonment in common. Now, it took me years to figure this out, because it wasn’t always the exact same scenario.
From my teen years up to as recently as several years go my relationships ended for one of the following reasons, he cheated, he ghosted, or he dumped me. Each relationship only added to my paradigm that I was unworthy of love, unlovable. Each was more proof of this. I always questioned myself – what was wrong with me? It never occurred to me to ask what in me is attracting this? It was when I finally did ask that question that I was able to trace it back to something in my childhood. - Finances/Income level.
This may be a rough one to swallow for some, I know it was for me, but your financial situation and income is a reflection of what you think you are worth. If you understand that everything in your reality is a mirror of your dominant paradigm – what you believe is possible for you, what you believe about yourself, what your story is, then it starts to come into focus. We attract what we are, what we believe we are. There are all sorts of different stories we have around money, how we obtain it, and how much we can obtain.
For most of us, there stories aren’t even ours, there are parents’ and grandparents’. In my family, the story is struggle; if you work really, really hard and hustle and give 110%, then you can earn “good” money. If you get a “good” job, you can make a “good living.” So, what was the story for how to do that? Work really hard in school and get good grades, so you can get to a good college. Put yourself through college. Get a good job. Be ok with starting at the bottom and work your way up. Earn the next level by working hard.
But, there is often also a ceiling, right? Like, in my case, we weren’t wealthy people. Wealthy people were “other.” They were different than us, and because we weren’t like them, we could never be wealthy. There is this weird unspoken understanding that starts to happen with this. It’s like you know your parents want you to do better than them, yet, they’re also kinda telling you, only to this point though.
When you start to list these stories or things you’ve picked up around money and work growing up, and really thinking about them, asking yourself is this true? They all start to fall apart really quickly. - How we limit ourselves (what we don’t allow ourselves to do or have).
This one is a bit trickier because it gets really tangled up with money. We have stories or beliefs about certain things. Perhaps it is in your paradigm to spend a long weekend camping with your family every year as your family vacation, or maybe you spend a week somewhere each year, but it’s always a similar thing, within a certain price range. Now, you might really dream of a two-week trip to somewhere new, but you tell yourself that you can’t afford it, or you can’t take that much time, or whatever.
Another one we tell ourselves, I am certainly guilty of this, is I’ll do that when…and we all have a different fill in the blank, but a lot of people say “when I retire.” We put these conditions on ourselves about what we can or cannot do, and if it is something that feels like a big dream, we condition ourselves right out of it. What most of us never realize is that we do this, because on some level, we don’t think we deserve it. Again, there’s all kinds of different whys for this, but at the end of the day, that’s what it is.
So, what can you do with this? Well, first, become aware of the patterns you see in your reality and ask yourself what it reflects to you. This can be difficult because it’s not easy to face that you created your reality, at least when it comes to the parts you don’t like. I know I struggled with this a lot in the beginning. I was very stuck in my story that this is how it is and that things happened to me. So, before you do anything, you must decide you are going to be honest with yourself and have an open, inquisitive, neutral mind.
As you become aware of the patterns, start asking yourself what the story behind it is, what is the underlying belief or feeling you have about what you deserve or what you are worth. Start listing these out and tracing them back as far as you can, so you can get to the root. Once you start to identify what these are rooted in, you can start to break it down and take it apart. Ask yourself, is this ultimately true; is there some universal law that says it must be this way for me? Hint, the answer is always “no.”
From there, you get to the fun part, the part where you get to make a new paradigm. You can rewrite the beliefs you have about yourself and the story about what you can have and deserve. And the most beautiful part of all is that you can have and you deserve anything your heart desires, so long as it is in alignment with God and universal laws. Because, what somehow gets lost over the course of our lives as we grow from child to adult is that we are worthy because we are. It’s that simple.
There is no eleventh commandment that says Jane Doe is specifically not worthy of x,y, or z and Jill Doe is worthy of whatever her heart desires. So, as you start to do this, and rewrite your story and your beliefs, ask yourself, if there are no limitations to what I can have and I am deserving of my dreams, what do I want to ask for?
I hope you give this a try. It can be hard work, but like all great things in life, it is well worth it!
I would love to hear from you, so please share your thoughts in the comments. If you find this helpful and want to continue the pursuit of faith, fitness, and joy with me, please like and subscribe. You can also find Faith Fitness Joy on Facebook and Instagram or check out the Faith Fitness Joy Blog. Thanks for stopping and I hope to see you in the comments and on the socials!