What Nobody Tells You About Your Worthiness
By: Jordin James
Tags: Self, Spirituality, Psychology, Mental Health, Advice

Let’s talk about inherent worthiness for a sec.

“You are inherently worthy.”

What does that statement make you feel? Like, really feel?

For years, this statement made me feel…kind of good? (I guess). But there was always a question quick on the heels:

Then why don’t I feel like it?

The answer: Because I didn’t actually believe it.

How could I?

I’ve spent my life believing my worthiness is something to be proved through good performance. And even deeper, I had a hunch there was something inherently wrong with me — literally the opposite of inherent worthiness.

All the more reason to constantly prove my worthiness so folks won’t be tempted to pull back the curtain to see the wounded child for the wizard I made them think I was.

Someone telling me I am inherently worthy wasn’t enough to rewrite a lifetime of the opposite belief.

No matter how often I hear it and no matter how hard I try to believe their words, I never do.

Who can relate? We are legion, those of us with hearts convinced of our unworthiness.

But rest assured, this is just a chapter of the story of us coming back to our light. There’s a way to feel worthy again. It both requires nothing and everything from you.

What blocks you from experiencing your worthiness.

Whenever I sink into the feeling of my inherent unworthiness, I go to the darkest place inside of me. A dragon lives in this place and its terrifying.

Recently, though, I realized this dragon was the manifestation of my power turned inward on me because I didn’t believe it was safe to experience my power in the outer world.

Once I realized this, I got curious about it and started listening to what it had to say. My mistake, because it began asking me some very hard questions. As you read them, know the dragon inside of you is asking you the same ones:

How many more moments of your one life do you want to spend feeling unworthy?

How many more moments do you want to spend comparing yourself to others?

How many more moments do you want to spend proving your worth instead of living your life?

None. None more moments.

“So are you going to count yourself worthy, or not?” asked the dragon, its voice echoing deep into the dark caverns of my heart.

After much consideration, I replied, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

Wah-wah.

But at least I was honest.

There were too many reasons not to count myself worthy. For instance…

What about the terrible things I’ve done? If I count myself worthy despite those, isn’t that letting myself off too easy? Doesn’t that give me more precedence to do terrible things if I’m worthy no matter what?

What about that broken part of me I can never seem to fix? Don’t I need to do more work to fix that broken part? How can I be worthy and broken? Counting myself worthy seems like spiritual bypassing or living in a fantasy.

What if people don’t like who I am after I count myself worthy? What if I end up even more lonely after counting myself unconditionally worthy? If I count myself worthy, it means I don’t have to play society’s worthiness games — the games that make up the foundation of our culture. Who am I if I am not trying to prove my worth or make myself more likable and palatable to others? What if people don’t like the new me — the me after I’ve stepped out of the matrix? What if I find myself more lonely than before?

The dragon answered these rebuttals with the following:

What about the terrible things I’ve done?

A big part of your transition from surviving to thriving is forgiving yourself for what you’ve had to do in survival mode. Forgive yourself for what you’ve done when you believed you were unworthy. People who believe they are unworthy do things unworthy of their true character. Count yourself worthy, so you can break the cycle and do things that are worthy of your true character.

What about that broken part of me I can never seem to fix?

The only way to experience your wholeness is to count yourself worthy even in your imperfection. And at any rate — realizing you are already whole is what triggers your parts to begin to healing themselves. Counting yourself worthy even though you feel broken is the point: You do not have to be fixed in order to be worthy. You just have to be you.

What if people don’t like who I am after I count myself worthy?

Ah, here we are. The heart of it. You’ve been taught it isn’t okay to be you, and the more you you are, the more abandoned you’ll be. The real tragedy is that you had to believe them in order to survive, escape from crippling shame, get your needs met, and experience what sliver of love you could. It’s natural you are afraid of counting yourself worthy in a world that has told you it isn’t safe to do so. But in order to thrive, you must be brave enough to count yourself worthy, otherwise you’ll stay stuck surviving for the rest of your life. It’s a risk to count yourself worthy no matter what, but the biggest thing that blocks you from thriving is your commitment to the perceived safety of survival mode. Count yourself worthy, and thrive.

Experiencing your worthiness requires everything and nothing.

Experiencing my worthiness requires nothing from me in the sense that there is nothing I need to prove. There is nothing I need to “keep” up. I can just be my natural self in each moment.

Yet experiencing my worthiness requires everything from me in the sense that I must step out of the home I’ve made for myself in survival mode. I must take the risk to drop the armor of my defenses and learn what it means to embody my essence. I must be brave enough to count myself worthy, just because I am me, and say goodbye to everything that does not serve this truth. I must be brave enough to thrive.

How much more comforting it would be to stay in survival mode, playing the same old worthiness games, safe behind the armor of my defense mechanisms.

But we have one life to live.

How many more moments will you live in survival mode when you could count yourself worthy and thrive right now?