Practice 14

Healing Unworthiness

Suffering arises out of feeling separate. To the degree that we identify as a separate self, we have the feeling that something is wrong, something is missing.

In our families of orientation—those who we grew up with—we often learn a message of “who I am is deficient and I must be different from who I am to be acceptable.” This entrainment starts at a young age through our ‘mis-behaving’ and gets reinforced through the meritocracy of a society that we apply ourselves to. This leads to a deep internalized belief that, only those who have earned something through action are deserving of the good life. In this self-abnegating model, only by doing can one achieve being worth obtaining happiness. But this focus on obtaining worthiness through doing or being different than we are leaves us with an imbalance that keeps us seeking eternally without satisfaction. We develop a wound of unworthiness.

In our upbringing (domestication), we were told to be special, to look a certain way, to act a certain way, to work harder, to win, to succeed, to make a difference, and not to be too demanding, shy or loud. An indirect but insidious message for many has been, “Don’t be needy.” Because our culture so values independence, self-reliance and strength, even the word needy evokes shame. To be considered as needy is utterly demeaning, contemptible. And yet, we all have needs—physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual. So the basic message is, “Your natural way of being is not okay; to be acceptable you must be different from the way you are.”

This belief creates a shame-based form of relating to our self that’s crippling, and in Western society it’s pervasive—like an invisible toxin in the air we breathe. Feeling “not good enough” is the often unseen engine that drives our daily behavior and life choices. Fear of failure and rejection feeds addictive and compulsive behavior. We can become trapped in something like workaholism—an endless striving to accomplish—and we overconsume to numb the persistent presence of fear.

In the most fundamental way, the fear of deficiency prevents us from being intimate or at ease anywhere. Failure could be around any corner, so it is hard to lay down our hypervigilance and relax. Whether we fear being exposed as defective either to ourselves or to others, we carry the sense that if they knew . . . , they wouldn’t love me. We make ourselves wrong for simply being. For being sick sometimes, or wrong if we’re fatigued or if our mind is wandering, and then we add the layer of ‘shame-on-me for not being more______ (advanced, well, smart, etc.).’

Living in states of shame and fear are not the only consequences of our relating to our selves in this way. Because there is always something our ego-mind can find that is ‘better’ than who we are or where we are, we entrap ourselves in a prison that makes self-acceptance and love impossible. We believe that if we accept and love who we are, where we are now, we can never make it to the place where the idealized ‘better self’ exists. Here, self-acceptance creates a threat to our sense of how we will become worthy and we become locked in a vicious cycle. This can even happen when relating to our spiritual growth path.

Fear of deficiency is a prison that prevents us from belonging to our world. Healing and freedom become possible as we include the shadow—the unwanted, unseen and unfelt parts of our being—in a wakeful and compassionate awareness.

Carl Jung describes a paradigm shift in understanding the spiritual path: Rather than climbing up a ladder seeking perfection, we are unfolding into wholeness. We are not trying to transcend or vanquish the difficult energies that we consider wrong—the fear, shame, jealousy, anger. This only creates a shadow that fuels our sense of deficiency. Rather, we are learning to turn around and embrace life in all its realness—broken, messy, vivid, alive.

Yet even when our intention in spiritual practice is to include the difficult energies, we still have strong conditioning to resist their pain. The experience of shame—feeling fundamentally deficient—is so excruciating that we will do whatever we can to avoid it. The etymology of the word shame is “to cover.” Rather than feel the rawness of shame, we develop life strategies to cover and compensate for its presence. We stay physically busy and mentally preoccupied, absorbed in endless self-improvement projects. We numb ourselves with food and other substances. We try to control and change ourselves with self-judgment or relieve insecurity by blaming others. We are so sufficiently defended that we can spend years meditating and never really include in awareness the feared and rejected parts of our experience.

When we are in the process of trying to ascend through self-improvement, we never arrive and always feel spiritually insufficient. The very accomplishments—like improved concentration or periods of bliss—if owned by the separate self, reinforce a sense of a deficient self that is moving up the ladder. With either pride or shame, our awareness is identified as an entity that is separate and afraid of failure. This reification of the ‘separate, deficient self’ generates suffering.

Our most fundamental sense of well-being is derived from the conscious experience of belonging. Relatedness is essential to survival. When we feel part of the whole, connected to our bodies, each other, and the living Earth, there is a sense of inherent rightness, of being wakeful and in love. The experience of universal belonging is at the heart of all mystical traditions. In realizing non-separation, we come home to our primordial and true nature.

The Buddha taught that suffering arises out of feeling separate. To the degree that we identify as a separate self, we have the feeling that something is wrong, something is missing. In that separation, want life to be different from the way it is. An acute sense of separateness—living inside of a contracted and isolated self—amplifies feelings of vulnerability and fear, grasping and aversion.

Feeling separate is an existential trance in which we have forgotten the wholeness of our being.

With our Western experience of an extremely isolated self, we exemplify fully what the Buddha described as self-centered suffering. If we identify as a separate self, we become the background “possessor” of whatever occurs. This conditioning of attaching an idea of self to experience is “self-ing” and is done by I-ing and my-ing. Life happens emotions well up, sensations arise, events come and go and we then add onto the experiences that they are happening to me, because of me.

When inevitable pain arises, we take it personally. We are diagnosed with a disease or go through a divorce, and we perceive that we are the cause of unpleasantness (we’re deficient) or that we are the weak and vulnerable victim (still deficient). Since everything that happens reflects on me, when something seems wrong, the source of wrong is me. The defining characteristic of the trance of separation is this feeling and fearing of deficiency.

Any pathway toward remembering our belonging to this world alleviates the trance of separation and unworthiness. After his night under the bodhi tree, the Buddha was very awake but not fully liberated. Mara had retreated but not vanished. With his right hand, the Buddha touched the ground and called on the Earth goddess to bear witness. By reaching out and honoring his connectedness to all life, his belonging to the web of life, the Buddha realized the fullness of freedom.

We are not walking this path alone, building spiritual muscles, climbing the ladder to become more perfect. Rather, we are discovering the truth of our relatedness through belonging to these bodies and emotions, to each other, and to this whole natural world. As we realize our belonging, the wound of unworthiness heals. In its place is not worthiness; that is another assessment of self. Rather, we are no longer compelled to blame or hide or fix our being. When we turn and embrace what has felt so personal, we awaken from feelings of separateness and find that we are in love with all of life.