Enough-ness
What defines your worth? Is it your career, your relationships, your social circle, your body, your car? Is your value based on external circumstances or things or is it broader than that? Is your worth determined by items that can be taken away or is it the unshakable foundation from which all else flows?
It's useful to examine the patterns that you keep playing out to catch a glimpse of where so much of this is derived.
In my own life, I repeated the same story over and over for a very long time. Unconsciously choosing partners that needed "saving" or as I now refer to it the "broken bird syndrome." Attracted to or attracting those whom I hoped to mend and ultimately "save" in the same way I did with the injured birds of my childhood. Scooping up these seemingly frail creatures and lovingly nursing them back to health. Hoping that if I poured enough time, love and energy into them the bones would heal and they would once again be willing and ready to fly. What I didn't know as a little girl is that each creature must have the willingness to heal from within. Regardless of the outside help and nurturing this is an inside job. I have come to understand that I also tied much of my worth to my ability to "heal." The questions I now see I was asking were, am I enough for you rise above the pain, darkness, and injuries of your life to see how beautiful all of this can be? Am I enough for you to choose love, choose fidelity, choose sobriety, choose life? Am I enough for you to heal and fly? The result of such tethered worth was an expected emptiness and devastation if the bird choose to succumb to the pain rather than to heal. It was not until I was able to step back with a degree of distance and observe somewhat impartially, that I realized the flaws in that logic. I would love to tell you that I no longer try to help heal those around me, or that I now only choose partners that have done this incredibly important work, but that is not the case. What I can tell you is that I have taken so much time, years, in fact, to sit with these questions and to build what is now the unshakable foundation of worth. That isn't to say I don't have moments of doubt or twinges of past fears. It is to say that when that question arises, am I enough, I know where the answers can be found. It is not in anything external that I find my validation it is only when I return to the quite space within that I know. These days if someone in my life is in need of guidance, love, or healing I offer all that I know freely, without it being tethered to my worth. The success or the failure of another person's work isn't a reflection of my own divine worth. What I do now, is not to be loved but to share a love that is endless, eternal and my own.