Being Aware of Inadequacy Feelings and Welcoming Them, Episode 128

Awareness That Heals, Episode 128.

A very warm welcome to Season 3 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.

So let yourself start off by being very aware of where your attention is focused. Now, what does that mean? What that means is What are you thinking about? Are you just listening to the meditation? Are you noticing your breathing, body sensations? But you're starting off just in an awareness or noticing where your attention naturally is drawn. And then allow yourself to close your eyes so you're not distracted by the environment. And in that silent place, or looking for that silent place, you're asking yourself the question, what is my awareness when it's just aware of itself? Or another way of putting it is, What's the experience like? Can I get a glimpse of what the experience is like to be aware of just being aware? And that unique human capacity that you have, that we all have, that we maybe never have even visited ever, where we're aware of awareness. Because if you're aware of awareness and it isn't taken over by anything, a thought, a feeling, then that empowers you to be able to be the director, the guide of your own awareness. So don't be discouraged if you're just barely beginning to get a feel for it. And then allow yourself to go to being aware of where in your life you have had inadequacy feelings. And, or if you're feeling them now, just be aware of the area or areas where they have occurred and see if you can be aware of those inadequacy feelings in a way where you're not judging them, or if you're judging them, just briefly, and you're not suppressing them. You're recognizing that the ability to observe them is empowering. And so you're gaining the ability to tolerate the inadequacy feelings more and more, and maybe even moving toward acceptance, where there's more of a sense of welcoming or recognizing that if I can really support myself to be feeling the inadequacy feelings and add the component of wanting to care for myself, wanting to care for yourself, that this combination of awareness, wanting to care for yourself, and welcoming or tolerating, accepting the inadequacy feelings puts you in a position where you're going to be able to not be afraid of feeling inadequate anymore. You're going to see it as a potential benefit because now you have a chance to not be frozen in this area. Because the welcoming, the accepting, and the tolerating is going to allow you to move in a direction to care for them and also to expand to develop your adequacy and to encounter it directly. So I thank you for your total attention to this, and I hope you'll continue to join us as we move on to the fourth meditation, as we accumulate a deeper and deeper understanding of how we can care for our feelings of inadequacy in a more and more profound and comprehensible way. Thanks so much.

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