Do you ever feel like in order to motivate yourself to do the ‘work’ you feel you need to do on yourself, you need to be working from a place of feeling like you aren’t good enough?
Do you ever feel like if you were to truly check in with yourself, you find that the most powerful motivating voice in your head that’s getting you to engage in your self help work, your spirituality pursuits, your personal growth and in ‘becoming a better person’ is the voice that is continually reminding you of how NOT good enough you are right now?
Does it ever feel to you like if you were to love yourself for who you are right now, if you were to ‘let yourself off the hook’ in ways, if you were to allow yourself to slow down or not to push yourself so hard, that this would lead to you doing NOTHING, being stagnant, wasting your life, not pushing yourself to be better and that thought really scares you?
Do you ever look at the efforts you’re making to improve yourself, to change your life, to move forward with your personal growth/spirituality/self help work and feel like you could be doing more? Do you look at your progress, your efforts and your attempts at moving forward and constantly beat yourself up about where you’re at, the fact that you aren’t ‘totally healed yet’, the fact that you aren’t transcended or the idea that you still have pain and suffering in your life?
Do you feel like no matter how hard you try, you never seem to ‘get there’ in terms of living up to your own expectations or the expectations you feel others have of you and the progress you ‘should’ be making?
Is the main motivating factor in your self help, spirituality and personal growth work the idea that who and what you are right now is woefully lacking?
Do you have an idea in your head of who you ‘should’ be, what your life ‘should’ be like and what you are supposed to be doing/being if you were really ‘healed’ - and this continually reminds you of just how far you are from who you want to be and what you think you should be doing, and it’s that PAIN that drives you?
Do you ever find that when you think of how much you are failing, how far you are from where you want to be and how inadequate you are - rather than actually being motivated to do what you think you need to do or to become who you think you need to become, instead you find yourself feeling ‘motivated’ in the sense that you have all those stories of what you could and should be doing - but in actual reality you aren’t able to ACT on all of those shoulds and plans because the shame and guilt shut you down so much?
If so, you’re not alone.
Many of us are living from this place of internal pressure and stress without even realizing it - or we perceive it to be ‘normal.’
We believe the way we are seeing ourselves is accurate - that we are broken, bad, wrong, shameful, not good enough and not acceptable how we are - and we believe that we need to be in a perpetual state of reminding ourselves of how we are failing, how we ‘aren’t there yet’, how we should be better and how we could be DOING better.
Many of us believe that reminding ourselves of how we are failing or ‘not there yet’ is going to motivate us to do better - only to find that over and over again we become LESS motivated and that these voices actually drive us deeper into our coping, self sabotage and scapegoats - leading to even MORE shame and guilt that we aren’t doing as much as we could be or should be - creating a vicious cycle that perpetuates itself.
You see - the reality here is this - this kind of negative self talk, this kind of ‘motivation’, this way of looking at ourselves and seeing inadequacy, incompetency, seeing ourselves as failing or not trying hard enough is actually NEVER going to get us from where we are to where we want to go.
As much as we may feel like these voices of negativity are motivating us, as much as we may feel like if we were to let them go we would fall into a state of not caring or letting ourselves become the worst version of who we are, as much as we may feel like this negativity is pushing us to do what we ‘have’ to do - in real reality these voices are actually the voices of shame, blame and guilt.
Shame, blame and guilt are always lies.
What we are ACTUALLY dealing with when we are looking at these voices that tell us how inadequate we are, how we aren’t trying hard enough and how we need to be doing more/better all the time, are voices that are likely working from CONDITIONING rather than from a true place of wisdom or growth.
What we are actually looking at with the above, isn’t a healthy perspective of ourselves or what we need in order to have a good life - rather we are looking at voices that are working from a place of confusion and pain.
As hard as it may be to accept that these voices don’t actually see reality clearly - this is the truth.
These voices are actually working with toxic motivation - and this motivation is likely always going to leave us feeling like we are striving and never arriving.
If this is how we are feeling right now, and if this how we are motivating ourselves - then I am hoping that this article can help us take a step back, reevaluate and come to a new place of clarity around what we actually want, what’s actually happening, what is truly important for us to do or not do and what we actually need in terms of moving forward.
Toxic Fuel
As hard as this may be to accept, when we are working from this place of feeling like we need to feel terrible about ourselves in order to be motivated to do what we think we need to do, chances are we are working from what I call ‘toxic fuel’ and not true motivation.
We are working from a place of utilizing the motivation of ‘when I become ‘x,y and z’ I will finally be good enough, lovable, worthy of love and will then have access to all the things I want and need in life that I don’t have right now.’
When we feel like the main thing that ‘motivates’ us is the ever present idea that we aren’t good enough how we are, that we’re failing, that we’re not enough, that we’re not doing enough, that we’re not accomplishing enough and that we’re not ‘who we should be’ - the best thing we are going to do for ourselves is start to recognize that this is actually toxic fuel that is causing us to force our way down paths that may not be right for us OR it’s causing us to subconsciously shut down and not be able to move forward even when we really want to or feel like we ‘should.’
When we are working from the starting assumption that who and what we are right now is not enough, not good enough, is shameful, is inadequate, is wrong and bad - we are automatically putting ourselves into a state of fear.
We are then going to be creating a situation where we disconnect from our bodies and feelings and start acting from our ‘heads’ and our intellects.
For some of us, this is going to feel very buzzy, high and like we are running on adrenaline. For some of us this is going to create a kind of acidic battery power that allows us to engage in all sorts of extreme and challenging ‘self improvement’ modalities for short bursts of time. It’s going to help us feel like we are ‘in control’ and are finally able to ‘get our lives on track’ - and this will then create a situation where, temporarily, we ARE able to push ourselves.
We will find that in these times where we are operating from fear based toxic fuel, that we are highly motivated to make big changes to our lives.
We radically overhaul our diets, go on long fasts, engage in ‘challenges’ to kickstart our new lifestyles, get up at 4 in the morning to meditate, dive into ‘taking responsibility for ourselves’ and pushing ourselves to sit with and ‘feel our feelings’ or whatever else we feel like we ‘should’ be doing to improve ourselves.
We’re able to ‘white knuckle’ our way through these disciplines and lifestyle routines for a while - and for a while it really feels like it’s working. We are going to see some changes, we are going to experience some benefits from pushing ourselves, we’re going to feel like we’re on top of our emotions, like we’re conquering our bodies, like we’re really DOING it and evolving.
Then, we’re going to crash. We won’t see it coming usually, because in order to be in this state we likely have to be in a place where we aren’t connected to our bodies and feelings and thus we won’t be getting those warning signs that we’re teetering on our edge until we’ve actually tipped over.
We will find ourselves falling off path, not being able to keep up with the discipline, losing our footing and falling back into old ways of being - and rather than being able to see that this is a result of the fact that the path was WAY too hard and extreme and likely not even the path we needed to get to where we actually wanted to go - we will think that the reason we feel badly is because we ‘fell off track.’
We will be convinced that we felt amazing while we were on the path - when in reality we were likely mostly just riding that wave of toxic fuel and were in a state of dissociation - and we will really really believe that it was the ‘falling off track’ that then led us to not feeling good.
When in reality, we didn’t actually ‘feel good’ during any portion of this process.
Rather, we just had a sense that we were going to be CHANGED by the modalities we took on, and we had a deep, often subconscious or even unconscious belief that with this change we were going to feel SAFE, LOVED, APPROVED OF and like we were finally going to get our needs met.
Or, this shame, guilt and feeling that we aren’t good enough how we are will lead us to a place where we feel like we know in our minds what we ‘should’ be doing and how much we ‘should’ be doing it - thinking we should be doing more spiritual practices, should be going to the gym, should be meditating, should be more able to control our emotions, should be able to tolerate and be ‘less judgemental’ - but the more we try to force ourselves to do these things, the more we are going to find we just run into more and more resistance.
We are going to find that with every moment that we tell ourselves what we ‘should’ be doing, there is a part of us that seems to take over and drive us to do the exact opposite.
We will feel like the more we tell ourselves we should be doing more, the more we find ourselves doing less.
We are going to find that the more we try to push ourselves, the LESS we are able to do and the more we actually seem to get stuck doing our current behaviors, the more we get stuck feeling like we can’t change no matter how hard we try and the more we are going to feel like it’s almost not even worth trying because we simply can’t get ourselves to do what we need to do.
This is because toxic fuel doesn’t work.
Toxic fuel either stimulates us for a while driving us out of our bodies and into a state of dissociation and it leaves us in a place where we no longer have access to the guidance system we need to be able to figure out what we ACTUALLY want and ACTUALLY need, and thus how to get it OR this toxic fuel moves us into a place where we aren’t able to do ANYTHING different and where we feel even more stuck because we are in such a state of fear that we become immobilized.
Either way, this toxic fuel drives us out of our bodies, it drives us away from our capacity and it takes us to a place where we can’t actually discern what’s really going on for us.
Conditioning
From here, we want to start to lean into the idea that we may be working from a place of CONDITIONING rather than working from a place of TRUE internal motivation.
In other words, we want to take a step back and look at all the ways we are telling ourselves we ‘should’ be better, we ‘should’ be in a different place, we ‘should’ be achieving this or that - and we want to ask ourselves with the most compassion and curiosity possible WHY.
Because the reality is, many of us are believing that we must do and become the things we feel we must do and become for reasons that are outside of what’s truly good for and supportive for us. For reasons that are not actually connected to who WE are and what is genuine for us and our growth in life.
Rather, we are moving from a place of trying to become something we’ve been told by OTHERS that we need to become, or that we believe for some reason that we need to become in order to be worthy of love, worthy of safety, worthy of acceptance and worthy of the provisions in life that we need.
Many of us grew up in households where we weren’t loved for who we are.
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Let’s take a break here, and come back next week for the rest!
<3
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