Can I tell you a secret I've only told my therapist
I’ll tell you a secret I have only told my therapist (well both of them, actually):
My biggest fear is that if people find out who I really am; if I dig too deep into my own story, my own wounds and skills, down to the deepest parts of me, I’ll find…
nothing.
And from what they have both told me in response, I am not alone.
Many of us deal with the shame of not measuring up, not being enough, feeling as though we have to be more to be someone of value.
Anaïs Nin said that:
“Shame is a lie someone told you about yourself,”
and I am here right now to tell you (and me) that the idea that you are not enough is a lie. Your work is to practice not believing that lie.
This will take some time. This will take much grace. As all change and transformation do, this will take practice, falling down and getting back up again, creating new pathways of self-acceptance in your heart and body and mind while unlearning and shedding some of the old paths of self-condemnation and rejection. Practice is a dance of belief and action. The more you behave like you are enough, the more you will believe it, and the more you believe it, the more you will behave like it. Which comes first? My experience is that it’s a messy, shaking, conglomeration of the two, like partners who trip over themselves reach to help the other while falling, while landing, while getting back up.
You are enough,
You are enough,
You are enough.
There is an abundance of enoughness at the core of who are, not nothing.
Your enoughness is not the end of things. Believing that you are enough will not turn you into a self-absorbed naval-gazing caring about nothing and no one human, giving in to every urge and unction, no matter the repercussions or impacts on the health and vitality of yourself and others.
Your enoughness is the base note, the foundation, the starting line. You do not have to live in such a way as to earn the right to be here. It doesn’t work like that.
If you try to find your enoughness in working hard and looking good and making money and achieving lots of things - all the places in which you’ve been told you will finally earn your significance - you will always be searching. You won’t find them there because enoughness doesn’t live in any of them.
Your enoughness is a part of your essential and True Self, who you are at your deepest. And I, or anyone else, could sit here forever gazing at your beauty trying to convince you of it, but only when you believe it for yourself will you find it, will you feel it, will you rest in its gracious embrace, will you rise in your power and live not to achieve but to be.
It may take a leap of faith to get there, and that’s ok. You will have to take that leap many times. We all have, and we all will again. The secret is to understand that your enoughness is not measured by progress or productivity. It cannot be measured. It is not something that can be. You are priceless, which doesn’t mean that you are expensive, but that you are beyond the realm in which your worth can be valued on a scale - your value lies in the sacred, and cannot be touched, dimmed, tainted, or ruined.
Not then, not now, not ever.
Take my hand; let’s take the leap together.
Remember: There is nothing you have done, can do, or could do, to make you ‘enough’ because you already are. You cannot find it, earn it, win it or achieve it; you can only believe it. And then, you’ll become it.
From my upcoming New Year’s series, "On Being Enough" this week with a subscription in the App.
Written by Liz Milani
Instagram: @thepracticeco
