“I am enough and I belong.” We must believe this in every part of our body and in every part of our consciousness to fully relax into thriving. If we don’t, a part of us will be perpetually seeking a way to earn a sense of worth, being social beings who crave a pack. By belonging I don’t mean fitting in or conforming, but rather the deep sense of “I deserve to be here; like the trees who don’t question their existence, I can root down and feel that I have a place on earth.” We humans either feel entitled to love and joy and allow ourselves to savor pleasure, wonder, creativity and intimacy or we instead operate from states of lack, perpetually seeking ways to fill the voids we discern within and to prove ourselves. Our nervous system is completely bifurcated in this way. We live from love or we live from stress. We either feel worthy of being a human and enjoy the ride or we worry about what others think of us and whether we are doing the human thing right. We can go in and out of stress and love states, but we can’t be in both at the same time. However, if we didn’t feel we deeply belonged and were enough in childhood, we don’t have full access to love states ever; instead, we spend our lives jumping between stress states (shame, anger, fear, panic/anxiety, sadness/depressive shutdown, and seeking some kind of distraction or dopamine hit to alleviate our perpetual distress). That is, unless we radically reset our nervous systems.
Because our society normalizes both competition and avoiding pain, many of us don’t realize that we are operating from a traumatized nervous system and a consciousness stuck in survival mode. We become so content with our defenses and the fleeting joy we derive from external validation and feeling impressive/better than as well as from the ways we numb our shame and fears (and most of all the fear of shame) that we don’t even contemplate the potential of a life lead from love of ourselves and others. This life is what is offered by shifting into the enough-ness thrive mode of our nervous system (social engagement activation and parasympathetic flow) and out of sympathetic arousal (fight, flight, flee and fawn states). We all have the capacity to live from the love/thrive states encoded within us (these are joy, wonder, creativity, care, lust for life, and creativity). These is our original source code, in most cases hidden under layers of fear and shame wallpaper. We can all strip these layers away by disidentifying from them—by deeming them as belonging the past and unnecessary in our present life. This is the way our nervous system would naturally flow if we let it, but we don’t do so because of the many ways we have resisted moving into (and then out of) the pain of the past encoded in our bodies. We believe that the process of feeling and then releasing pain would be too painful to endure; it is painful by definition because we need to feel the pain as we let it go, but this is survivable and temporary, and there are hacks to be had here—more on this. Just like a stage actor is taught that if they have an itch on stage, they are to fully focus on how badly they want to scratch the itch and how uncomfortable the sensation is so it can crescendo and then naturally dissipate, were we to fully feel the pain in our bodies and the action urges to yell or shake that come with them, these sensations and the painful memories that accompany them would be gone forever and replaced by the love states that want to flow through these areas. If we instead try to circumnavigate around these places within us, they become insatiable monsters, just like an actor would completely fall out of character if he tried to ignore an itch — our minds are horrible at repressing things —what we deem unsurvivable and worthy of repression become leaky dread chambers that make us start dreading every aspect of our lives if we let them reach monster status.
If we could trust that there was a safe, loving part of us to lean back on (and to allow to take charge of our nervous system aka “surrender” to) we would easily choose to move through the pain of the past and let it leave, but we don’t have this faith. This is because it is attachment deficits that landed us in survival mode in the first place. If we didn’t have parents who deeply loved and trusted themselves (aka who could confidently say “I am enough and I belong”), they couldn’t impart these capacities to us, as these are transmitted via mirror neurons. Basically, our social engagement system (the love and ease flows within the nervous system) can only “come online” in infancy as they are supposed to if our parents model this to us. If we don’t learn how to feel safe and lovable from parents with these aptitudes, we don’t internalize the permission to be innocent or cared for. Instead, we believe it is unsafe to trust not only others or ourselves (nor our capacity to determine who to trust); thus, we learn to operate from fear and a sense that something is missing (both within us and in the world). A basic prerequisite of thriving is deeply, deeply missing: secure attachment, and with it a sense of unconditional love and innocence.
As you can imagine, secure attachment is very rare in today’s society. This is not only because of the afore mentioned normalization of competition and a sense of lack/scarcity, but also because secure attachment is derived intergenerationally, meaning that your parents would have needed to have learned this from their parents, and your grandparents from your great-grandparents, etc. In the next post, I will flesh this out by talking about my personal and ancestral story, but for now, let’s jump to a solution.
As I said, this is a kind of hacky solution. However, we can’t completely hack our way out of feeling the pain in our bodies. But, we can be in charge by knowing why we are doing this, which takes the helplessness out of the equation — which is often the source of significant pain. Basically, the way to derive secure attachment from scratch is to attach first to yourself and then from here to feel safe enough to attach to others. This is done by repeating “I am enough and I belong” until this feels true in every cell, head to toes. Some parts of your body will readily accept these words and reverberate with pleasant tingling or bliss-like sensations while others will reveal the physical pain in the way of feeling them. When you encounter dissonance/distress/numbness, you can “feel and heal” this by holding steadfast to “I am enough and I belong” until these words feel true, at which point your attention will take you to the next physical location that needs healing. What we are doing with the words “I am enough and I belong” is giving your nervous system the foundation it requires to thrive.
Where is the hack? This seems tedious. It is—kind of. It will feel like work until you can lean into your existence not being work, into a body that feels at ease rather than on edge— until you can actually feel deserving of being here. This will happen. As you move through this exercise you will gain more awareness of and trust in the all-loving part of you, who can eventually take over your day to day functioning (including intellectual and business endeavors as it will be able to handle them from love-fueled creativity and flow states; we don’t need stress states at all in optimum functioning). Still feel tedious? Let’s break this down into steps.
Articulate to yourself why you are doing this (e.g., I am moving through old pain and cultivating secure attachment to move forward with confidence)
Distract your intellect with back and forth tapping. Left hand then right. This can be with palms face down on your thighs, with index fingers tapping back and forth on the arms of a chair, with arms crossed and hands/one or two fingers tapping opposite elbow or shoulder, or any other back and forth tapping motion that you come up with that feels comfortable, including foot taps on the floor. Bilateral tapping helps you get out of your own way and also invites a trance-like state from which deep change is possible. Go as quickly as feels comfortable.
Repeat “I am enough and I belong” (in your head is the most effective for most, but play with out loud too to see if this is better for you) for five minutes (set a timer). Pay close attention to your body as you do this, and move through areas of distress, knowing that you can survive even the most excruciating pain. If you feel something somatically (in your body) it means it is making itself known as it leaves. You cannot create new distress with this. The most discomfort will probably come from parts of your body that hold memories of feeling deeply alone and unlovable. These are not only remnants of the past that don’t belong in the present but they are also illusions. You deserved to have been an innocent child who got to relax into the love of securely attached parents. You can now give your body what it has craved since infancy. Your parents couldn’t give you what they never had. It had nothing to do with your worth. Similarly, if someone shamed you later and life, your body naturally would have responded by feeling shame (just as your arm would have responded to a punch with pain); this shame has lived on in your tissues since that incident, but this doesn’t mean you are shameful. Similarly, if someone neglected you or rejected you you would of course feel neglected and rejected in response — that doesn’t mean you merited these sensations, and certainly not their morphing into identities living on today. Let the past go by sending “I am enough and I belong” into every nook and cranny of your body. You are worthy of tolerating and releasing all old pain revealed by doing this. You can help this along by imagining what the pain looks like (e.g., loneliness being represented as a dark shape or as bobbing in open water encircled by sharks—just go with the first image that comes up); then, imagine these images breaking down and eventually leaving as “I am enough and I belong” flows through in the form of sunlight or some other positive energy depicted visually here. Images are by now means necessary but can help you feel more in control of what you are releasing if it feels insurmountable.
Make a “buzzing” bee sound in your head or out loud as you do this. This relaxes your nervous system. You may want to imagine that you are a bee getting to join a community/hive of love as you do this, or that you are a queen bee receiving long overdue love and care from a whole dedicated tribe.
Breathe and pause after five minutes are up. Notice what is leaving you.
Repeat this for as long as you can feels right to you. The suggested time being 30-60 minutes.
Consider interspersing rounds of “I don’t belong and am not enough because…” Here, you can invite all the parts of you resisting love flows to try to mount a good defense of why you don’t have the right to be here that any other human or tree has on earth. Again, this is not why you don’t fit in; you don’t need to conform to intrinsically belong. Doing this counterintuitive exercise will allow all inner critic itches that want to be scratched to leave you. Leaning into them and giving them the stage is the best way to let them go.
Similarly, if fear [of change, of losing control, of letting go of other defenses you no longer need] arises, intersperse five minute rounds of “it is not safe to believe that I am enough and I belong because …..”
Towards the end of the exercise, consider rounds of “we are enough and we belong” during which you imagine all your family members and ancestors having had access to secure attachment and finding freedom alongside you.\
I would love to hear feedback on how this goes:)