I Am Worth It – Are You?

​Image by William Adams from Pixabay 

One topic my partner and I have often butted heads on, in the many years we have been together, is my propensity to engage in alternative ways to maintain my health and wellbeing that don’t involve a GP’s prescription pad.

While I eat fairly healthily, practice meditation and take exercise regularly, don’t partake in any of the modern habits of drinking coffee or alcohol, and use various therapies as and when I need them, he is the opposite.

We are very much opposites in many ways, but for some reason this one seems to needle him more than any other and – in turn – his reaction inflames me. What I discovered this week was the reason it triggers me so much is not actually any of the reasons I had pinned it on.

My mind had placed its bets on all the usual things that trigger me around healthcare. Amid the most stringent levels of restrictions here in New Zealand I wrote to our Prime Minister advocating for access to my customary homeopathic remedies, rather than being restricted to pharmaceuticals, for me it’s important to have freedom of choice.

But from that line of thought, anger spirals me down the path of political greed, money and pharmaceutical control and off into the realms of patriarchal oppression, which is not exactly productive when trying to resolve differences between my partner and I.

When I finally dropped into my heart space to explore what my inner sense of self had to say about it, the voice was much softer, and hurt. It said “I don’t want begrudging acceptance of my priorities; I want support and encouragement to be the best me I can be”.

I decided to sit with this and go deeper, because unlike many of the issues that rise up from my subconscious, opposition to pursuing alternative forms of healthcare doesn’t have any obvious link into my upbringing prior to my early twenties, which is when I first pursued it.

After really allowing myself to feel the way I had after our last argument about it, with my eyes closed, I then looked into the blank movie screen in my mind – a technique I first learned from Brandon Bays many years ago. It doesn’t involve searching conscious memories; it’s more about being in a deeply relaxed state and waiting for an image to appear once I asked myself when I had first felt like this.

To start with I just got vague images: a pinafore dress, a stripy top. It was me somewhere between the ages of five to seven; I had my glasses on so I must have been at least five. Those glasses were the standard issue British National Health Service glasses of the day.

While I was glad the colour range in the late nineteen seventies had expanded from the iconic plastic tortoiseshell rims, they were still limited, and I felt totally frumpy in them. That brought with it a flood of memories, the “money doesn’t grow on trees” and “there’s not enough so don’t ask” messages.

A swathe of memories related to practical clothing and footwear then came flooding into my mind, in particular this really lovely pair of navy blue leather school shoes that I really wanted but had to settle for the cheaper clumpy black ones instead.

Then there was the hideous hand knitted red aviator-style hat with small navy pom poms all over it, like one of those velcro hat-and-ball games, that I was told to wear under pain of death. And the pink brocade rubber swim hat with chin strap I was made to adorn when I first started training with the speed squad, looking like something out of a nineteen fifties synchronised swimming musical.

The list of examples that made me feel embarrassed and dowdy seemed to go on, and they all pointed to a feeling of “I’m not worth it”. And while healthcare outside of the National Health Service had never really been an issue I’d had to contend with, I certainly knew that anything deemed self indulgent was derided.

That has stuck with me, to the point that, after several whiplash injuries in my twenties, when the Osteopath told me (when I was around age thirty) he had done all he could and recommended ongoing massage therapy to manage the aches and pains, I felt guilty and self indulgent about booking a treatment.

Logically I understand the context of all these messages I had been given in my childhood. Both my parents had grown up in post war Britain, and rations were in place most of their childhood. My mum’s dad died when she was age seven and my gran was a single working mother the whole time she was growing up. Times had been tough, and – in contrast – my life was really pretty darn comfortable.

However, as a little kid who felt my light being dimmed in all these unfashionable, frumpy things that I wasn’t given any choice in, I just felt that I was not worth any extravagance.

This is one of the reasons, later in my thirties when I received a big bonus cheque from work and had no debts to pay, I took that money and carefully chose myself one of the most extravagant things I could imagine, a delicious big diamond solitaire ring, which I wore for many years.

Suffice to say, the ring did not heal me, nor did the holidays or all the clothes and other material choices I’ve had the privilege to make since, apparently still inside was the voice of a little girl who was sad because she didn’t feel worth it.

As an adult, I have come to know each and every human is born worthy; it is not something we have to earn. But that part of me hadn’t got the memo. Of course, once uncovered, I went through a process in order to soothe and heal that particular emotional signature, the same one I described in How to Heal the Past so You Can Live Your Best Present.

Listening to the beautiful Sarah Blondin this week, she reminded me that we are taught to search for our worth, taught to find ways to prove our value, by people who were lost to their own given worth too.  She says “in all of your searching and all of your gaining, you are simply uncovering what has been here all along waiting for you to discover”.

As to my partner, what lies behind his issues around this topic is for him to uncover, but if my own experience is anything to go by, I can be pretty certain it isn’t any of the things that we argued about.
For my own part, I hear Sarah’s challenge “How would your life be different, dear one, if you could remember you are worthy, as you have always been?” and her insight “it is in the moment we stop trying to prove that we learn how to receive”. Profound.

It’s interesting that it took someone trying to govern how I manage my health and wellbeing to flush out that little voice that still lived within me, but I’m glad it did because it now allows me to live more authentically.

My dream is that each human recognize and reclaim the sovereignty of their own soul, heal the emotional signature of all their childhood wounds and inherited trauma that tells them they are anything less than the beautiful, whole souls they are. We are all worthy and deserving of that.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Reclaim the Sovereignty of Your Soul, How to Heal the Past so You Can Live Your Best Present, How Relaxed About Your Own Differences Are You? and Take Your Broken Pieces and Make a Beautiful Life. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.