Notes on Self Worth
During my first yoga teacher training, I felt as tiny as a mouse.
When I had to stand up and teach in front of everyone, I cried. My cheeks burned red in shame during the ‘asana lab’ sessions. I loved to practice yoga, especially in the far back corner of any room, but I dreaded these moments in the marrow of my bones.
Two hours of group work, looking at each others bodies - mine, always the most inflexible, the most resistant to turning upside down. I cried again, when my peers looked at me with confusion and pity, wondering why my body wouldn’t lengthen or extend in the way they knew in their own.
Sometimes I look back on that training and wonder how I managed to actually go through with it. Feeling so consistently terrified and ashamed, I was in love with what I was learning - giddily so - but it was like I was constantly on high alert, always waiting for my stomach to drop. For something to come up where I’d be seen or called out, imagining the dialogue spinning in everyone’s minds: she’s not good enough, she shouldn’t be here, she’s embarrassing herself.
Self worth feels like my life’s work.
I feel like I’ve spent most of my adult life reckoning with it. Tested on it, thrust into situations and relationships and experiences that force me to deal with it, learn it, feel deeply what it looks like to be totally devoid of it and, more recently, what it looks like to move from a place of having it - a feeling that makes me think mostly of trees, deeply rooted, growing steadily toward the sky.
What I’ve come to learn about self worth, is that, like everything else, it is a practice.
It is a combination of inner and outer work.
The inner work can take many forms, but it feels a lot like gentle self study and self reflection. The inner work is a building strength, vitality and firm but loving boundaries. The inner work is building a well of deservingness inside of yourself. A shaking away of all the expected modesty and “I don’t need anything to be happy” and the allowing of the desire to be loved, to be celebrated, to be respected, to be seen and accepted for who you truly are.
Then there is the outer work.
The outer work is the strength and the courage to make decisions based on this inner wellspring of worth and deservingness. For me this is where the heavy lifting starts.
Let’s try something together:
Bring to mind the most magnificent person you can imagine. Maybe it’s Cleopatra. Maybe it’s some kind of Medieval Queen. Maybe it’s your grandmother. Maybe it’s your best friend. Maybe its RiRi.
Close your eyes and really feel what it is like to be this person. To embody their depth of Self Worth and Self Reverence and Self Respect.
Really get into the sensation of it.
Would this person accept a guy who doesn’t text back?
Would this person accept being treated poorly, day in and day out without making a peep?
Would this person say yes, over and over and over again, when all they want is to say Hell.No.
How would they respond? What would they allow for themselves?
Why would you accept any less?
~
For me, it’s still an unravelling.
There are days and weeks where I still hang all my happiness on the praise of others and what I have achieved.
There are days and weeks where I struggle to speak up. To ask for what I need. To remember no is a full sentence, all on her own.
But there are days where I read on the couch for hours, or lay in the sun on the grass, drinking three different beverages at once and eating olives straight from the jar and there is a kind of softening in my body - a letting go of my shoulders and my jaw and thinking of the people I love — and maybe there is the smoke of incense lilting in the breeze and I remember, in those moments, that I would have to be completely insane to not be deeply committed to consistently preventing anyone or anything or the way of the world itself to steal this most precious feeling on earth from me.
That feeling we all deserve to feel.
That feeling we have come to this planet for.
Content. Warm. Accepted. Loved.
Worthy and Deserving of it all.
Friends of the Self-Worth theme~
Softening into Self-Worth, a playlist
Working with cacao, calendula, nettles and sandalwood in whatever way you feel called
Journalling in the best of the best.
Herbal hair oiling. Forever.
Currently reading this and this (written by a woman I used to buy from at the local markets every week!) and re-reading this.
Okay not about Self Worth but NSW friends — Dec. 4th is my first in person event in over a year! Get on the waitlist for tickets coming soon.
As many of you know: being the loving custodian to a small business or creative project certainly tests the hell out of your patience, steadiness and grace. The Soft Business Circle is a very small group mentoring program for the self employed or those hoping to be in the future. Starting November, we begin a journey of six months of meetings, to learn, connect and support each other in this wild, deeply fulfilling and sometimes, lonely path of working for ourselves.