Loving my not-enoughness changed it all for me

I found myself doing it…

Willing away my fear.

I was missing something…

I knew it wasn’t there…

I soon realized that I wasn’t sitting in my pain.

I wasn’t sitting in my discomfort.

Seeing myself reflected in my loved ones’ frustration, pain and sorrow…

“Where am I not loving myself?”

Where?!

Then it dawned on me…

Not all at one time, but as the moments, days and weeks accumulated…

The thought struck me:

I am not loving my not-enough-ness

I know we need to love ourselves, even when we don’t feel good.

Here I am, catching myself, as I have a fearful thought, a fearful sensation, and start to

will in away

I do affirmations like:

I am willing to release my pain

I am willing to release my fear

But I was doing this in a way like;

Feel pain…know that it’s not serving but I literally am so sick and tired of feeling this way and I am desparate to move this and desparate to not feel this way…. repeat.

Then I immediately shift to a mantra

I am willing to release this pain…I am willing to release my fear…I am willing to.

My fear was crying out to me!

“Love me! I am here! I am a part of you! I need your validation!”

Somewhere, along the way, when I was little…when we were all little..

…it wasn’t ok to not feel like enough.

Being ok, with not feeling ok, can get all tangled up in ungratefulness…

… and when kids get mixed up in ungratefulness, we get bratty, spoiled kids…

…Right?

Not so much.

It’s not that we (as in our inner child) are un-grateful, or don’t appreciate,

It’s that there is something that we are missing and we are not sure what it is.

Externally, we clearly have everything we need… the gifts, the loving adults…

What more could we possibly want?

I have even said the following to my own kids:

• Some kids don’t have the nice toys you do
• Kids are starving in Africa
• You have people in your life that care about you (implying that other kids don’t?)

It’s natural for parents to want to teach their children gratitude, and inadvertendly reveal a lack mentality…through comparison… and make the kid even more confused than they were…

Why do we feel lack when we clearly have enough?

If we weren’t allowed to feel not enough then it became a point of shame… and guilt…and pain….and fear.

So, here I am, clearly aware that I have feelings of not enough-ness.

And I am so quick to move past it and say it, “Ok, I don’t feel like enough.I am enough…we all are…so let’s move past it and carry on.”

No, no,my dear….

….not so fast.

When I actually sat in my feeling like I wasn’t enough…

It was painful.

I started to cry.

I realized that one of my biggest fears is that my kids will grow up and think about me, “Oh, she did the best she could…” with this vibration of inadequacy…

…like I am not enough, but I am their mom so they love me…even if I was a terrible mother.

…this sensation of…disappointment.

Then I realized that I could change that thought.

What do I want my kids to think about me?

It turned tears into sobbing:

An overwhelming sensation came over, as though the past and future were all here in the present:

I want them to feel that I was more than enough, that I am a breathtakingly beautiful and purposeful person that inspires them everyday.

I want to be loved.

And it was then I learned that the recognizition I was looking for in my children, was the validation I had not been giving myself.

I had not been ok, not being enough.

It’s not about holding my inner child and saying, “You are enough, my dear. You are enough!”

It’s about holding her and saying, “You do not feel like you are enough right now, and that’s ok. I am here with you anyhow. I love your not-enoughness.”

I love my not-enoughness.

It’s not something that I am…willing to release.

As in, I am not using my will to release it.

I am going to love it up. I am going to accept it and give it a big space here. So it feels ok. To not be ok.

We must love ourselves, even the parts of us that we want to change. Because the minute we want to change it, we are resistant to what is…and we know what that means.

I have never cultivated that piece in which we must love that which we are resistant to.

Let it begin.