enoughness

You Don’t Need to Do More

Dr. Amanda Love 1 Comment

YOU DON’T NEED TO DO MORE

Be as you are

Nearly all of us have bought into the story that we need to do more and more and more.  It’s as though we could give everything we’ve got to give and somehow we still come up short in what we think we need to give.  The doing, and the thoughts of all the doing, are exhausting.  We then wonder why we are so tired and depleted, and yet we keep attempting to give more than we’ve got to give.  What happens when we run out of fuel, but we keep giving anyways?  Breakdown.  Breakdown of our body, our mind and our lives.  We see the breakdown and still we don’t stop trying to give more than we’ve got to give.  

Where does this insatiable need to do more come from?  It comes from a deep seated belief that we are not enough.  We think that if we can somehow give or do more, then we can bridge the gap between our not enoughness and what we think we need to give in order for it to be enough.  It’s as if all of our doing can somehow compensate for our sense of not being enough in/as our natural state of being.  As an extension of this, our sense of not enoughness often shows up as a feeling of lack in abundance of resources.  We give or do more, more, more so that we don’t feel this lack of enoughness.  We fear that if we don’t over-give or over-do then we won’t have what we need or we won’t be taken care of.  So we are like slaves to our avoidance of feeling the not enoughness that we fear we are.  

It’s an edge for many of us to simply be rested as ourselves without feeling the inner obligation, necessity, or burden to do or give more than is natural for us to give or do.  We hope that our doing will make us feel like we are enough.  We try to get to enough through our giving rather than simply being enough.  It’s a losing game, because we can never feel or experience what we don’t first become.  We must become enough before we will experience the feelings of enoughness.  Nothing we do can will ever sustainably get us to feeling complete.  We are attempting to do it backwards.  We somehow think that we have to prove, attain or show our worthiness in order to experience it.  Yet the recognition or realization of our enoughness, in our already state of being as we are, is the answer to the end of feeling not enough.  When we see ourselves and what we have to naturally give as enough in its expression, then so it is.  This doesn’t always mean that the people or things in our life will always get what they want from us, but it does mean that you will be alignment with yourself as you are.   

A WORLD OF ENOUGHNESS 

Abundant in abundance

A world of absolute and complete enoughness.  Can you even imagine what that would feel or be like?  Imagination is exactly what we need.  Imagination that is rooted in knowing that it is already so.  In this way our imaginations can create the playing field of experience to match what we are already convicted in to be true.  This is the way it works.  It’s already working this way.  It’s simply that what we are currently convicted in is lack of enoughness of self, and the projection of that is the experience of lack in this world.  One might say that we are abundant in lack.  There is no real lack, but only the perception of it.  That is true for how we view ourselves and the world.  We can see ourselves as not enough, but we can never actually be not enough.  This is not to say that other flavors, resources or beings might not be needed in certain situations in life, but just because something more or else is needed has nothing to do with our inherent enoughness.  

We don’t need to be everything, we just need to be ourselves.  Being ourselves is enough even if more is needed.  We don’t have be the more.  This is why there are billions of beings on this planet.  Each being has the responsibility to be itself, nothing more and nothing less.  Neither is even possible.  You can always and only be what you are.  You can try to be more, but this where burnout and breakdown occurs.  Give over trying to be it all in order to be enough, and let in all of the other beings in this life to support whatever is needed in each and every moment.  We are not designed to do it all or be it all rather we are designed to be who we are, just as we are.  

It takes courage to not take it all on as yours.  Courage to trust that you being you is enough.  That you can love yourself just as you are and you don’t have to first be more.  Give what you want to give.  Do what you want to do.  Let whatever your giving and doing is be enough.  It is.  Just because you think that other people, or the situations of your life, want or need more of you than you have capacity to give or be, it’s ok to let it be or let them want.  It’s ok if they are disappointed or upset and/or if you are disappointed in yourself.  Come back to knowing that you are enough in your current state of giving, being and doing.  Get more and more convicted in the knowing of your enoughness.  The paradox is that the less you attempt to be more than you are, the more of you that you’ll have to give.  

Knowing you are enough is the same as loving yourself.  Honor who you are.  Stop wishing you could somehow be different or more.  That’s unkind, and if you value kindness then start with yourself.  You will naturally grow, expand and develop as a being, but none of that growth makes you more than you already are in this moment.  You are complete and enough right now in exactly whatever it is you give and do.  More giving or doing doesn’t make you more. Recognize your enoughness now and you will experience a world of enough.  A world that is abundant in abundance rather than abundant in lack.  It all starts and ends in how you view it.  How you see, so it is.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Network Spinal Analysis Chiropractor, Boulder, Colorado

More than Enough

Dr. Amanda Love 1 Comment

MORE THAN ENOUGH

Coping strategies to avoid

Feeling like we are not enough is the most pervasive of human wounds.  It is a cloak nearly all of us wear.  A deep sense of inadequacy, unworthiness, and unlovability.  Our biggest fear is that we are not lovable and that who we are is not valuable, and because of this we seek outside of ourselves for significance and love, thinking that it must be elsewhere.  That it must be something that we need to earn, achieve or somehow otherwise get.  This patterning, and our belief in our unlovability interferes more with the expression of ourselves than anything else does.  It is our biggest roadblock to fulfillment, health and well-being.  It stops us in our tracks, keeps us in our comfort zone, allows us to think small, live small and keep a certain distance from ourselves and others.

We have all learned strategies to cope or manage with the sense of fundamentally being not enough.  So much so that you might not even recognize the not enough story playing in the background of your psyche.  Some people learn to achieve, do and accomplish in order to not hear that voice of not enough.  Others learn to give as much as possible to others hoping that their not enoughness won’t be seen in the flurry of doing for others.  Other strategies include distracting ourselves with whatever we can find to distract ourselves with, leaving our body and living up in our heads or far away in the stars, creating or maintaining unaligned relationships, and/or distancing ourselves from life and others.  We all have utilized or are utilizing some or all of these strategies.  Without doing so life would be unimaginably hard.  Yet there is a cost to these strategies, which is that we never get to really just be or relax as ourselves.  

This keeps us exhausted and the fulfillment of the moment and the sweetness of life never seem to arrive.  It often feels like they are somewhere other than where we are.  If we can just keep up our strategies then we will get there.  We can see it on the horizon, even taste it, but it always seems like it’s just right out of our reach.  Never being able to surrender to and feel the not enoughness we keep at our strategies, convinced we will arrive in bliss, yet bliss can’t get in.  It can’t reach us or touch us because it is a completely different frequency than what we are currently constituting ourselves as (ie. not enough).  We can’t see how we are keeping all of it at bay.  We just believe that we are almost there while continuing to convince ourselves that there is somewhere else we can get too.  The thing is that there isn’t.  So that idea that we have in our mind stays just as that, an idea of fulfillment, bliss, and well-being that we continually chase and almost just touch, but never live. 

FINDING THE GIFT  

Being all that you are

Inside of every wound there is a gift.  In fact the entire spiritual journey is moving from wound into the gift of whatever the wound gives us.  It’s seeing how we couldn’t be who we are and share what we do without that wound.  However we can’t always just jump right into the gift from the wounded place.  There is learning involved (ie. transformation) before we can resolve, come to peace and give the gift that the wound gave us.  Even though most of us know conceptually that we are enough, many have not embodied it.  If they had we would be living in an incredibly self-empowered world, which we are not.  Rather we live constricted by our inner fears of expressing ourselves, of being not accepted by others, of not being able to make it, of not deserving, of being judged, cast out, separated, and of being left alone.  We feel these fears as limitations and often rather than noticing our deep story of inadequacy and unlovability we go into feeling like we don’t know how.  We think if we just knew the how or the what of our next step or steps then everything would be clear and we would feel better.

Not knowing how or what is our biggest “excuse”, if you will, to not move into our expression, power and worth.  It’s how we avoid, deny or escape the feelings of not enoughness.  The first step in any transformational process is courage.  That means courage to feel not enough rather than stuff it down or pretend that it’s not there (ie. spiritual bypassing).  Without acknowledging and feeling not enough we don’t have the energy, fuel or momentum to take new actions.  This is why we frequently feel like we don’t know how/what.  While it’s true that you may not know all of the details, when you face not enoughness head on you generate an inner power that knows how to figure it all out, even the stuff you currently don’t know.  

Often I hear people say that they don’t want to feel certain things, such as not enoughness, because they feel like they will never get out of them.  Like they will fall into a pit of despair from which there is no escape.  I find that the real pit of despair is avoidance of what we are feeling and/or staying in the story of what we are feeling, while not actually feeling what we feel.  The result of avoiding what we feel is that we experience stagnation, we feel stuck, we don’t grow, we continue to feel bound in limitation and never generate the energy we need to change.  While feeling things, like our sense of unworthiness or not enoughness, is not a picnic in the park, it will with time generate movement in your system.  You will start to see a pathway through.  You will begin to feel a hunger surge up inside of you.  You will take new action, think different thoughts, and see things in novel ways.  A power will rise up in you that says, “Enough of this!  I am enough! I do deserve! I do matter!”.  You become less and less afraid to express or be yourself.  You will discover the paradox of the simultaneity of relaxation and action.  

The gift in having the courage to face, feel and transform is that you give what you learn.  The world needs the gift of you.  No one else can be the specific frequency or flavor that you are.  Your flare is perfectly as it should be.  None is better or worse.  Moving that knowing from concept into embodiment is the missing link.  To surrender to who you are, just as you are, perceived inadequacies and all, everything included, is when you truly become a channel for all that you are here to be.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado