Have you ever felt unworthy of putting your work out into the world for serious consideration? Have you ever felt like if you just had the right education, just one more certification, something more, that you’d be good to go, but you never felt good to go, only temporarily, as if the thought was an addiction, an endless looping program that kept repeating itself, no matter how qualified you actually have become over the years? If not, you are truly blessed, but if this sounds like something you’ve chronically experienced, welcome to the club, the crazy club, because it can drive one near crazy, like an addiction, you’re just never enough so you keep searching and searching but there is never a good enough resolution for you to move forward. This is the condition I, with the help of Parashakti, set out to recover from.
Thankfully, our session was quite a breakthrough session. For so long now I’ve been feeling like my fire has been dampened significantly. In real life translation that meant hardly ever feeling that I was enough. As a result I have been a perpetual student for some time now, attaining certificate after certificate in the field of health and wellness, not to mention all my grad school work in the field of business and finance. Yet I never quite felt ready enough to put my extensive training into vocational practice. Little by little I saw my peers move from study, into work, and rise up into success. Where was I? Still feeling like what I knew, what I had achieved just wasn’t enough. It was sad really. It seemed that this feeling of not being good enough pervaded practically everything I did, but especially hit me hard in the area of career and creativity.
There was a time when this wasn’t as pronounced and I was able to peak my head up above water enough for a few accomplishments under my belt, but more often then not, I held myself back when it came to stepping out into the world. It was more than the fear of failure, it went deeper, it was that I was not worthy of success or of putting myself out there for paid work, or even putting my artwork out in the world as serious work. In other words, I failed to take myself seriously enough to put my work out there as being any more valuable than just me dabbling. At the same time, I knew my work was good quality work and I knew my commitment was solid and my heart and intentions were true and pure.
Soon enough, as we started this new session, it was clear that some work was required. The work of making peace with whatever was holding me back so that I could rekindle my fire. I was surprised just how far back it went and just how seemingly unrelated to real work my problem stemmed from.
In reality when I have put myself out there, despite my resistance and self-doubts, I’ve done just fine. As an adult, I have emerged from being a painfully shy, quiet, introvert to a community builder, budding artist, and proficient and caring healing facilitator, with several accomplishments under my belt. The catch was, it was never for any significant compensation, I could not allow myself to feel worthy enough of positioning myself as someone who’s work deserved compensation. In this session, however, I was willing to at least get back to a place where I felt comfortable expressing my creativity without the fear of judgment from others and without harshly judging myself. Vocation would come later, hopefully.
With Parashakti’s help, I was able to locate what seemed to be the root of the problem. The genius was when she pointed out that the feeling just didn’t match the reality of the way my life had turned out, in spite of it all. The truth was that not good enough was a deception. It wasn’t true at all, despite my hanging onto it incessantly, and I had proven that with what I was able to accomplish, even in the throws of self-doubt. I no longer wanted to live like that, constantly doubting. The path I was on required that I let that go and I was determined to do so, but it had to be with self-honesty. This was no intellectual exercise, this was a matter of being and knowing, not thinking.
With the work of the fire medicine that we nurtured together, I was able to overcome my self-doubts about my creativity, not intellectually, but rather in practice. In other words, I wasn’t thinking, oh, hey, wow, I am creative, no. I just started expressing my creativity in the playful, intuitive way that I once had before my doubts consumed me to such a degree, without thought, and instead with action. Something had shifted, which was quite a blessing.
The result of this work has been so rewarding and so much fun. Now, I have two really cute shirts that I have made, because I’ve always wanted to sew creatively but have never allowed myself to go in that direction before. My medicine is Fire and my task now, as Parashakti has advised me, is to bond with this lost energy and see what unfolds. She asked me how more I can nurture this bond between the fire and myself. I vowed my commitment to this bond without imposing the requirement that I had to believe anything in particular. The only requirement was to move into action, to play, to let the fire guide me and heal me and ignite my dreams through to fruition.
I know the next step is to begin to find a way to feel confident in my chosen vocation. However, for now, just feeling the flames of my creativity getting stronger, no longer being blocked by self-doubts, the addiction to perfection has dissolved into the love of playfulness and the understanding that mastery comes with practice, and practice requires moving into action.
-Salma 12/7/10