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For Inner Peace, Stop Trying to Prove Your Worth

Not good enough: most of us have felt that way at some point in our lives. For many, it is an ongoing undercurrent in their moment-to-moment thinking and day-to-day experience. Like a weed whose roots reach underground to choke our garden of confidence and courage, it impedes our ability to grow into a sincere sense of fulfillment and happiness. Why do we feel not good enough? Where does it come from? What can we do about it?

At first glance, we may think that we only display feeling not good enough through the choices we make that seem less than ourselves. For example, perhaps we do not feel worthy of submitting our resume for our dream job, or asking the person we have been crushing on for months out on a date, or going for that little extra to polish ourselves up so that we feel at ease about the way we interact with the world. Feeling unworthy and choosing to hold back from life as a result, are indeed expressions of feeling not good enough.

However, I believe that most people feel not good enough at some level, even those who display a strong sense of self-fortitude. That is because sometimes we develop an opposite outward tendency to mask what we feel beneath the surface. If we are in high positions of power, we may be dressed in the sharpest suits, have the most expensive wallets and seem to garner the strongest influence. But beyond that veneer, perhaps the appearance of having it all together is driven by a deep feeling of lack. We may be using the big job and fancy items to boost our sense of self. External strength becomes a mask, a way to try to prove ourselves as good enough, because in our heart and soul we don’t feel that way. This is a kind of poverty.

Whether you are holding back or charging forward because of a sense of low self-worth, feeling not good enough always reflects a deep mistrust in the universe’s abundance. Somewhere in your psyche, you doubt that there is enough love and support for you. Maybe this feeling has been with you for as long as you can remember, and you can pinpoint no particular circumstance that prompted it. Perhaps a hurtful incident triggered the feeling and it has been lingering in you ever since. Either way, you feel separate from the whole.

When we live in disconnect, we feel we need to either push our agenda forward, rather than be in balanced flow, or hold it back and not express our authentic self. Both cases are based on feeling that our needs will not be met, and that we will neither be loved nor supported in being naturally who we are. Living this way is painful, for ourselves and others. It sabotages the roots of our inner peace.

I have met people who had very few material possessions yet embodied a powerful sense of abundance. I have also met multi-millionaires who were so poor in spirit that without their dripping material abundance, I wondered if they would even have the inner strength to walk out of their house. The physical materials—or lack thereof—that surround us are no reflection of feeling good enough. Feeling good enough revolves around feeling worthy of love and worthy of being alive. It is deeply linked to feeling anchored in the goodness of life and our place in it. When we feel that we belong and are deserving of love, we tap into the fabric of life that is inherently loving and abundant.

Feeling good enough cannot come from pumping ourselves up. That kind of strength will not weather any storm, because it is not built on a strong foundation of interconnection. True confidence arises when we feel tapped into the support and love of a compassionate universe. Then our actions are rooted, vital and expansive, in harmony with nature and in balance within the whole. We are no longer trying to “make” ourselves feel good enough because we do not give the idea any more power. The question of being good enough does not even exist. We are enough by simply being alive. In that state of mind, we flower into the fullness of the moment, as an expression of our most natural self, ready to share our hearts with the world. Our innate talents thrive, not because we want to prove ourselves to anyone, but because we enjoy them and therefore, we give them energy, like a garden we love to tend. They make us, and as a result, others happy.

When we feel not good enough, we need to understand, witness, and release. We understand that to perceive ourselves as fundamentally not good enough is to believe we are separate from nature and the universe, which will only cause suffering. The natural world and the universe, in which we are born and grow, are each bountiful and compassionate. In this light, feeling not enough is understood as a lose-lose and a self-fulfilling prophecy. We block ourselves from the love and support of the universe, and the abundance it can bring. Remembering this makes the choice to tap into the true source of confidence much easier. Then we can witness our attachment to feeling not good enough and eventually choose to give the illusion no more power, so that we let it go.

In each moment, we are given exactly what we need to evolve. In that thought alone, we find that we are enough and rest into a deep sense of inner peace. From this perspective, the garden of our lives finds rich nourishment to grow into full fruition, because it is tapped into the abundance of the universe. When we do so, we become beacons of light to illuminate the world.

In this coronavirus pandemic, it is more important than ever to know the truth: you are good enough. Do not let anything quell your inner light. That light is the hope for humanity, shining the way to inner and outer peace and wellness in a world based on indisputable interconnection.

Now, breathe this into your heart, into your bones, into your every cell as often as you can:

I am loved. I am love.
I am welcomed. I am supported.
I am part of it all. I am good enough.
I am. I am. I am.

 

Parvati is an award-winning musician, author, yogini, and Founder and CEO of the international charity Parvati Foundation. Parvati serves the reawakening of our inherent interconnection to catalyze a global shift for a healthy world. Her work is dedicated to protecting all life on Earth by establishing the Marine Arctic Peace Sanctuary (MAPS).

 

Dedicated to MAPS