This is an edited extract from The Art of Self-Kindness by Rebecca Ray, published by Pan Australia, RRP $19.99 and available from 6 August in all good bookstores.
Let’s get clear on something: no one else gets to cast judgement on your choices and use that information to evaluate your worthiness. Not your parents, not your teachers, not society, not social media. No one.
If you give up your power in this way, the result can only be dissonance between the life you want to create for yourself and the life someone else tries to design for you.
Soon enough, it will be you that’s doubting your own worth because if you’re measured enough by the outside world, measuring yourself becomes a habit.
We don’t have control over other people’s attachment to their ideas of how the world should be.
But we do have control over living by our values, and if there’s one thing you can measure, it’s how closely you are living by your values and taking action toward the things that you decide make your life meaningful and worthwhile.
At some point, we must take the responsibility for our self-worth away from the significant people in our lives and hold it squarely and firmly in our own hands. The beginnings of personal peace come when we are able to sustain our own self-worth.
No one can give worthiness to you, just as no one can take it from you. Your worthiness just is, but your wisdom around its presence depends on cultivating the intuitive practice of reminding yourself that you are enough. My wish for you is that you know the contentment of waking up and loving yourself all over again.
Self-kindness ritual: rewrite the story of not enough
I want you to think about your story of ‘not enough’. The one that you’ve heard a million times, that’s probably been playing in your head since you were at school, or since that defining event when you felt ashamed or rejected or broken (or all of these).
It plays whenever you think of following your dreams, making a significant change or getting out of your comfort zone.
And when it plays, it convinces you that you’ll never make it, you don’t deserve it, you can’t do it, you’re a failure, there’s something wrong with you and ultimately, you’re not worthy.
And now I want you to rewrite it. For real. I want you to write your story of ‘enough’, the new version that you’ll carry with you from now on that affirms your worthiness, your value, your strengths, your power, your beauty and your place in the world. This is a story of honouring.
Give it the time and space and respect it deserves and then keep it somewhere you can re-read it whenever you need to.
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