Unraveling Insecurity and Revealing the Authentic Heart

This is a very long and vulnerable post that becomes much lighter as it goes...scroll down to the line of dashes near the bottom if you just want a little dose of upliftment!

Insecurity has been the most prevalent theme through all of the healing work I have done in general. One thing I have learned is that every single human being experiences insecurity to some extent. I remember having conversations with other ceremony facilitators, people I looked up to as role models for the confidence and empowerment they seemed to radiate, and being shocked to hear they too experience insecurity. We all receive some form of childhood conditioning that we are “not good enough”, whether from parents, siblings, schoolmates, messages given through popular music, magazines, advertising, or a combination of these and a number of other sources.

In my case, most of this came from bullying from fifth grade through High School graduation, receiving countless messages from my peers like “You are so ugly”, “your nose is big and crooked”, “you sound terrible when you sing”, “you shouldn’t talk to anyone”, “you have hair growing on your face like a boy”, “no one likes you”, “you have no friends”, “you will never get anywhere in life”, even to “you should do everyone a favor and just kill yourself”. It was true I had no friends for these eight years, and was too terrified to connect with anyone until halfway through college. I deeply internalized all of these repetitive messages, and attempted suicide in eighth grade. They remained strongly ingrained in my mind and body into my late 20’s and became my sense of identity. I developed severe social anxiety that I still experience occasionally to a much lesser degree at the age of 33. For over 20 years I silenced myself, avoided connecting with people aside from a very unhealthy relationship of 8 years, and was afraid to express myself for fear or ridicule or rejection. I hated myself and extended this hatred toward my family and people in general. Much of this hatred became lodged in my body as a fibromyalgia-like pain affecting my entire body, to a point where it became debilitating and prevented me from completing basic tasks of daily life. This was the point in my life where I made a trip to Peru seeking help from the plants. I felt I had hit rock bottom—physically with pain and energy levels of the senior citizens I was caring for in my career at the time, emotionally unstable, living in constant anxiety, unable to sleep properly, constantly projecting my trauma and emotions onto my partner and damaging my relationship, etc. Much of my early medicine work was healing and nurturing this pained inner child and unraveling all the messages deeply lodged in my mind and body from others.

As I began to hold healing spaces for others, amidst my own continued processing, the insecurities continued to surface in the form of self doubt--

“Do I have the right to be sharing this work?”

“What will my parents think of what I am doing?”

“What will the medicine community here think, or those more experienced than I am?”

“What if someone has a process so intense I lose my center and do not know what to do?”

Among others. In the end, most of this was in my mind and my trauma influencing my perception. My mother ended up visiting to sit in ceremony with me and is supportive of the work I do, I have facilitated 60 some ceremonies and have never encountered a process that was out of my ability to assist with, and most people around here support what I do. I have most definitely received judgment from some people, most of which have never shared space with me and do not know me personally outside of the work I do. Some of this criticism has been productive, and shown me some blind spots surrounding my ego and ways of seeking validation, approval, or a feeling of significance, or ways I was beginning to fall out of integrity. The rest showed me that these people were simply projecting their own internalized self doubt, insecurity, and self judgment onto me and thus taught me deeper layers of compassion. The medicines have shown me that this is the case for anyone who judges another person, or “bullies” in grade-school. Whether it is expressed through criticism, gossip, jealousy, anger, etc. the behavior is simply an outer projection of their inner experience of “not enough-ness”, and this understanding makes detaching from taking it personally and the process of forgiveness much easier. Over the years some of the people from grade-school have reached out via social media and apologized for the way that they treated me, going on to confess what was happening in their family life that made them act out in these ways.

As all of these fears of judgment and rejection began to fall away, I noticed that my singing voice began to develop naturally, and my ability to channel and move energy through my voice. My creative expression began to blossom through more fluid writing, music, and dance. (The latter felt shameful and utterly terrifying for most of my life). The majority of charges around these things have cleared at this point, but I notice now even typing these words, little mental blips popping into my awareness--

“What if I am being too open?”

“What if as I continue to share in vulnerability, people see my process as extreme?”

“What would a potential client think if they read this?”

“What are people going to think of me as someone holding space for others and sharing in this way?”

At this point I can witness these stories without attaching to them, give my love to and hold space for the part of me who is still afraid at times, and gently move forward…and I learn again that this is all in the mind. I know in the times of seeking assistance from others in my healing process, I was never drawn to work with people who appeared “perfect” or had perfectly presented websites and advertisements by general marketing standards. I wanted to receive help from someone “real”, who understood intimately what I was experiencing, and had learned to navigate it themselves. I wanted people who knew there is always more to learn and grow from, and that there is no such thing as “arrival”. I found these people to be the most powerful facilitators and healers. Very few people have criticized my open sharing, instead it has been a flood of gratitude, feeling seen and not alone in their process, and funny enough people who see me as someone to look up to.

The medicines have taught me through this part of the process to simply live and interact from the heart in every moment, to share myself exactly as I am, letting go of any desires to “impress” someone or influence their perception of me to gain their approval. Through this, I have found a lover that I can be in 100% transparency and authenticity with, clients who are in perfect energetic resonance for what I offer, and a small handful of people I can genuinely call friends. These same things have presented themselves over and over in my clients since my first Reiki session in 2012. So please know, you are most definitely not alone in your fears, insecurities, and feelings of insufficiency and unworthiness.

I leave you with this--

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YOU ARE ENOUGH! You are the only unique individual expression of the divine that exists the way that you do and has lived the life you have. You have a gift to share deep within your being that can be of service to others who have had a similar life experience, a piece of a 7.9 billion piece puzzle that comprises humanity in its collective process of healing and expansion. Whether through your simple presence and the energy you embody, your words, your music, your art, your ideas, what you do for a living… Every moment of your life that you spend sharing your authentic heart and expression, every moment you spend sharing your joy, your success, your passion… and conversely your pain, sadness, inner process, in complete vulnerability, is a moment of healing in this society centered around competition and comparison. It creates a ripple that opens the space in all of those you come into contact with, whether consciously or subconsciously, to do the same. Whether your line of work is serving food, doing the best you know how as a stay at home parent raising the next generation, cleaning people’s homes, sitting in a corporate office, or something more traditionally considered “healing work”, you can express this authenticity. There are so many more layers to all of this, and this process of insecurity has crossed over with so many other things that I will probably elaborate on in the future. In the spirit of this writing, if you are reading this post and want to send a PM rather than post a public comment, I encourage you to just take the risk of leaving it here and see what happens! Or take it a step further and share here how insecurity shows up for you.