One thing I battle with and I see most women battle with is their sense of self worth. This battle between the deep seated and often silent knowing of our own power and magnificence and the feeling we can’t be this and that we must hide or suppress it for our own and others safety. Our inability and struggle to stand in our true power, not with dominance but with love, is one of the deepest struggles I believe women face.
This is for a number of reasons. There are the obvious ones like generations of suppression of feminine power including our magic, intuition and healing abilities, financially we have been dependent on the masculine and we have been separated from our communities. I acknowledge though that these are all past traumas and genetic patterns that we have been exposed to and even indoctrinated with. However more seriously I believe, we have become the perpetrators of the diminishment of our own self worth.
For most women (especially western women), we now live in a world of comparative freedom and choice. However most of us still live as victims. Why? Because we have a voice I our heads that warns us of the perils of our power…and we empower this voice. We listen to it, accept it as fact, we assume it speaks the truth and so continue to ignore our greatness, potential and longings and instead drift through life. We continue to serve others first, put aside our wants and needs and often rely on the masculine (or others) to sustain and provide for us.
If your voice is like mine, it is loud, fierce, threatening and a bully. It both tells me how hopeless I am for not taking greater strides towards the things I love and at the same time tells me I must serve others first and any step outside my comfort zone is dangerous and off limits. It creates inner conflict until I am immobilised. It even gets violent. It uses shame. It uses thoughts and feelings to suppress and control. Noone else is doing this, it is my inner world and while ever I listen to it, I am empowering my own victimhood.
We all have this voice, these feelings. Yours may look different to me, they may be quitter, louder, more manipulative, use fear and depression rather than shame. But I will bet, as a powerful magnificent women, that you struggle with these inner conflicts when you consider going for your heart and what you deeply love and stand for.
So what to do about them. Well for me the first step is to look the bully in the eye and recognise it is here to serve me. It wants to keep me safe, it actually wants me to have a life I love, and it wants to be heard. I write or journal. If it is running my life and I am feeling inner conflict, turmoil, anxiety or even down right panic. I give this part of me a voice. I write out everything it has to say until it is empty (I have written 14 pages as my maximum!!). What I notice at the end is that it always comes round to what I would love, that I can see it is in support of this and that it is just the voice of my scared, unsupported little girl inside.
Then my next step is to reaffirm what I love, what I am going for. I do this either by writing it or speaking it out loud and then I take an action on what I love. This piece of writing is just that. I felt resistance, I acknowledged all my fears around writing, I acknowledged that what I truly want is to deeply serve women to live from their heart….and now here I am writing this piece. This tells my sub conscious what I am empowering….Not the inner bully as I have for 46 years but my truth and what I love so much.
What messages is your inner bully sharing today?
How does it speak to you, what are it s strategies…is it words, feelings, speaking/doing things that don’t feel true, trying to get approval/permission from others who never give it?
Where do you want to focus your love this week? Your energy is precious!
With a loving curiousity, be sure at the end of the day/week to check in with which you empowered through your actions. Was it what you love, your heart and your magnificent, divine self? Or your inner bully, victim, wounded self?
