Being Aware of Inadequacy Feelings and Asking Questions From Your Heart, Episode 129

Awareness that heals episode 129.

A very warm welcome to season three of awareness that heals where we have progressed to be able to focus on one challenging emotion at a time. This will allow you to choose a specific emotion that you’ve had challenges with, and each one will have a progressive series of guided meditations that will allow you to go deeper and deeper into self-compassion. For me, it’s truly inspiring because each emotion has unique nuances for both self-care and responding to your environment at the same time. This is subtle and a rare skill as all too often we don’t stay aware of how we can care for ourselves as we are. I hope that you’ll not only find it helpful, but also give you deep resources that you can internalize when the emotion is most emerging.

(01:07)
So allow yourself to be attentive to where your awareness is focused on right now. Maybe you’re fully listening to me, that would be great, or maybe you’re distracted by a body sensation or sound or some kind of issue you have in your life, but allow yourself to just be as present as possible. And as you’re doing that, let yourself envision that you’re going into a cave and you’re closing your eyes and you’re going into an experiment where you want to discover what is awareness itself. When it’s not focused on anything, it’s only focused on being aware of awareness itself. So it may be something like, gee, I’m aware of being aware. I’ve never done that before, and I’m not thinking about anything else except for being aware of being aware. And the reason why it’s so important, as we’ve described in the prior meditations, is because when you’re aware of being aware and you’re not taken over by a thought or a feeling, you get to be your own guide.

(02:35)
It is such an advantage. So again, don’t be discouraged if you don’t fully get this, but even getting glimpses of it is empowering. So let yourself move to being aware of any area that you felt during your life or that you feel right now, feelings of inadequacy, and see if you can look at that without suppressing it, running away from it quickly or judging yourself. Or if you judge yourself, let it be a short-term judgment. And then move right back to, okay, I’m aware of feelings of inadequacy. And see if you can have that. And you’ll see by your tone of voice, your inner tone of voice, whether you’re feeling it as a welcoming, a tolerating, and accepting what’s the quality of you? Noticing your feelings of inadequacy. Because if you can notice them with more and more tolerance, acceptance, and welcoming, that’s going to move you further and further along the path of being encouraged to face it and to actually see it paradoxically as a sign of tremendous adequacy and potential fulfillment.

(03:57)
And now, let yourself add to this by asking yourself questions. How can I care for my feelings of inadequacy specifically? And let’s say you have an example of you’re dealing with issues at work that you feel inadequate because you’re not good enough at what you do, or you don’t feel good about your relationship to money, or there’s an issue that you’re dealing with with your partner sexually, or maybe you don’t like certain things and you feel inadequate in your inability to talk about it. And as you focus on that instead of, oh, damn, oh, good, I can see this without getting lost in judging myself, and now I can ask myself the question, how can I communicate? So it may be, how do I care for myself with this feeling of inadequacy? It may be How do I communicate? It may be what messages do I want to send to myself?

(05:05)
It may be what thoughts are most helpful? So let yourself pause with any of these questions and let yourself keep doing it during this moment and beyond this moment where you recognize when you see your feelings of inadequacy, you can add this element of asking questions from your heart. They’re all aimed at caring for yourself, so they’re caring questions. And as you add this to your repertoire, you’re moving more and more in the direction of not only caring for your feelings of inadequacy, but really starting to work with it and looking for the guidance as to how you can move in a direction that’s going to be more adequate, satisfying, fulfilling, and bring you to a greater peace. I hope you’ll join us as we continue to explore deeper and deeper levels of caring for your feelings, all of our feelings of inadequacy. Thank you very much.