S2 EP228 – Birthing Yourself Every Day

Transcription:

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Dr. Bernie Siegel said, “Life is a labor pain; we are here to give birth to ourselves.”

Are you giving birth to yourself every day? Some of what giving birth to yourself means to me is:

• That you strive to stay open to learning with your inner child about what brings you joy.
• That you strive to stay connected with your feelings – wanting responsibility for learning from and managing both the wounded feelings and the existential painful feelings of life.
• That you strive to stay open to learning with your guidance about truth and loving action.
• That you take loving action for yourself throughout the day – emotionally, physically, spiritually, relationally, organizationally, and financially.
• That you offer your love and your gifts to others each day, in as many ways as you can.
• That you choose compassion rather than judgment for your feelings, mistakes, and failures, and for others feelings, mistakes and failures.
• That you choose compassion rather than judgment for your wounded self and for the woundedness of others
• That you are willing to lose others rather than lose yourself. 

It’s not so much giving birth to ourselves that causes the most pain, but rather that the pain is caused by NOT giving birth to ourselves.

It’s often because of pain that we finally embark on the journey of giving birth to ourselves. If you are not willing to experience pain, you will never be in Step One of Inner Bonding – the willingness to feel your pain and take responsibility for it by learning what it is telling you rather than avoiding it.

If you are not willing to feel the pain that comes from not giving birth to yourself, you will spend your life protecting against that pain with your various addictions. This choice is a denial of why we are here on the planet – which is to give birth to our ability to love fully, and to fully manifest the gifts we have been given.

Are you staying stuck in your wounded self because you are afraid of getting hurt – afraid of the journey of birthing yourself?

Are you making the avoidance of the pain of rejection and loss more important than supporting your soul’s reason for being on the planet? If you stay with this choice, then you need to accept the resulting pain of anxiety, fear, depression, emptiness, deadness, anger, jealousy, guilt, shame, and boredom – the pain that accompanies not being open to learning about loving yourself and giving birth to yourself.

The wounded self wants you to believe that opting for the illusion of ‘safety’ of controlling and avoiding is what life is all about, and this is a very sad thing. If this illusion of safety is what life is about, then controlling and avoiding would bring us great joy, instead of bringing us the painful wounded feelings that cause us so much suffering. 

Our inner peace and joy let us know when we are birthing ourselves. Whenever you are not feeling the deep peace and quiet joy of birthing yourself, you know you are deadening yourself. Why would you want to do this?

The main reason people choose to control and avoid pain is because they are afraid to feel the authentic existential painful feelings of living an alive life – the loneliness, heartbreak, grief, and helplessness over others and events that are an inevitable part of a life fully lived. When you allow yourself to risk – to risk loving with your whole heart and soul, and to risk following your passion and fully expressing your gifts – your heart may break over and over. This is an inherent part of an open-hearted life. And when you learn to embrace your heartbreak with compassion for yourself, you will find you can manage the heartbreak rather than avoid it with all your avoidant addictive behaviors.

I encourage you to consider choosing to birth yourself moment by moment, rather than abandoning yourself. But this can be a huge challenge if your wounded self is in charge, and you are resistant to learning to love yourself.

Lauren, a client of mine, has been practicing Inner Bonding for a number of years but she was still resistant to taking emotional responsibility for herself. She thought she was taking care of herself because she treated herself to massages, got places on time, exercised regularly, was kind to people and mostly took care of money matters. But when it came to her painful feelings, she abandoned herself by projecting on to others and blaming them when they didn’t do what she wanted and also pulling on them for attention. She also avoided responsibility for her feelings by eating junk food.

It became apparent when working with her that she was addicted to others validating her and making her feel special because she rejected and abandoned her inner child when she was in pain. She would do anything to avoid feeling her painful feelings and learning about the ways she was causing her wounded feelings. Unwilling to learn how to compassionately manage the inevitable pain of life, she stayed focused in her mind to avoid the feelings in her body. Judging her feelings as wrong, she turned to various addictions, and she made others responsible for her feelings, rejecting herself.

She came up with many reasons why she rejected herself when she was in pain, such as, “I don’t know what to do.” “I can’t do it.” “It won’t feel as good as when someone else does it.” “It’s not my job.” “I get too confused.” “It’s too hard.”

Regardless of all the reasons her wounded self gave for her self-abandonment, the bottom line was her intention. She was deeply devoted to controlling others rather than loving and birthing herself. She didn’t want her own unhappy inner child. She wanted someone else to want her.

Of course, the fact that she didn’t want her, and kept rejecting her with her various forms of self-abandonment, was exactly the reason she was often in pain. Inner rejection – not being wanted by her own loving adult – is extremely painful for the inner child.

Lauren was treating herself the way her parents had treated her and themselves. Upsetting feelings were not allowed in her family. She was judged and punished for her painful feelings rather than being embraced with kindness and compassion. Her parents, unable to lovingly manage their own painful feelings, were also unable to lovingly manage hers, so they made her feelings wrong. So of course, Lauren had learned to treat herself the way she was treated, and the way her parents had treated themselves.

Glenn, another client of mine, was doing many of the same things as Lauren. Glenn took loving care of himself in many ways – he ate healthy food, exercised daily, had a successful business and was mostly loving with his three children. But Glenn did anything he could to avoid his painful feelings. He stayed in his head, hardly aware of his feelings. Daydreaming was an ongoing addiction to avoid being present in his body. And the main way he avoided his feelings was to blame his wife or his employees when he was upset. For Lauren and Glenn, getting love, avoiding pain, and trying to feel safe was way more important than learning to love themselves and birth themselves.

Self-abandonment is handed down through families. Like Lauren, Glenn’s parents completely avoided their own feelings and judged Glenn for his. Glenn learned to be very judgmental toward his own feelings, to believe he could not manage his own pain, and to believe that others were responsible for making him feel better – all things his parents had role-modeled.

Since we cannot reject our painful feelings without making ourselves feel awful, both Lauren and Glenn felt alone, empty, and abandoned much of the time. As long as they refuse to accept, value, and learn from their feelings, they will continue to create the very pain they have been trying to avoid. And they will continue to reject and abandon themselves until they fully accept that no matter how much others might love and value them, as long as they don’t want their own inner child when they are in pain, they will continue to create their aloneness and emptiness. Their resistance to loving themselves is keeping them stuck and in pain, and as long as they are resistant, they are doing the opposite of birthing themselves.

When most people think about abandonment, they generally think about being left by someone. Many of my clients tell me that they were abandoned by their partner. But abandonment is about leaving someone we are responsible for – a child or an old or sick person who cannot take care of themselves and whom we have agreed to take care of.

As a healthy adult, another adult can leave you, but they can’t abandon you, since they likely have not agreed to be responsible for you.

It might seem strange to you, but, as a healthy adult, when you feel abandoned by someone, it is not actually about them. It is about having abandoned yourself.

Most people don’t think about how they abandon themselves because they don’t recognize that they are responsible for themselves – physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially, relationally, and organizationally.

Sometimes we abandon ourselves in one area and take responsibility for ourselves in another area. For example, you might work hard to make a good living and birth yourself in your work, and have learned how to manage your money, which means that you are taking financial responsibility. But you might be abandoning yourself physically by eating poorly, not getting exercise, and not getting enough sleep. When this is the case, you are physically abandoning yourself. Or perhaps you take organizational responsibility by being on time and keeping your environment neat and clean, but you abandon yourself relationally by giving yourself up and not speaking up for yourself.

One of the most common ways many people abandon themselves is emotionally. Most people don’t realize that they are responsible for learning to lovingly manage their feelings. Few of us had good role models for managing our painful feelings in ways that support our highest good. Instead, we learned many dysfunctional ways of avoiding our feelings, which is the opposite of birthing ourselves.

I’ve frequently spoken about the four major ways we emotionally abandon ourselves, and I want to talk about them again now because there is no way of birthing yourself into being all you can be if you are abandoning yourself.

Self-judgment is one of the major ways we abandon ourselves. How often are you aware of judging yourself? Do you tell yourself that you are not good enough, that you are a failure, that you are stupid or ugly or bad? I don’t think I’ve ever counseled a client who didn’t judge their self in some ways.

Another form of self-abandonment is staying in your head rather than being present in your body. Do you spend most of your awake time thinking, being unaware of your feelings? Is thinking a way you’ve learned to avoid feeling your feelings?

And another way you might be abandoning yourself is with addictions. Have you learned to turn to various addictions to avoid feeling your feelings? Do you indulge in substances, activities, or various forms of controlling behavior to avoid your feelings?

And the fourth major way you may be abandoning yourself is by making another or others responsible for your feelings. Do you look to others for the attention and approval you are not giving to yourself? Do you then try to control them with anger, judgment, compliance, withdrawal, or resistance, in order to get them to give you what you want?

The problem with emotionally abandoning yourself in any of these ways is that you are bypassing your entire inner guidance system. For example, do you know how you feel when you abandon yourself? Most people feel anxious, depressed, empty, alone, guilty, shamed, or angry when they abandon themselves, but they rarely connect these feelings with their self-abandonment. Instead, they believe they feel this way due to something external.

If you start to tune into how you feel when you judge yourself, or when you are in your head thinking rather than being present in your body, or you are acting out addictively or making others responsible for you, you will discover how awful you are making yourself feel. You will discover that these painful feelings are letting you know that you are abandoning yourself rather than birthing yourself by loving yourself.

If you are ready to know that you are the one causing many of your painful feelings, then make a decision to start learning from your feelings rather than avoiding them. You will discover that when you learn to take emotional responsibility, it becomes far easier to take personal responsibility in all other areas of your life. You will discover that when you start to learn from your feelings, rather than continue to avoid them, you will start birthing yourself and your entire life will change for the better.

You might want to ask yourself how willing are you to learn to love yourself?

Robert Frost said, “The world is filled with willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.”

Take a moment to think about this quote by Robert Frost. Which are you? How much work are you willing to put into learning to love yourself and taking responsibility for your feelings? How determined are you to birth yourself by manifesting who you are and offering the gifts you’ve been given?

How willing are you, or are you only willing to watch others do their inner work, hoping they will change in the way you want them to?

The word ‘willingness’ is a major part of Step One of Inner Bonding. In order to move through the Steps, we need to be willing to feel and learn from our pain rather than avoid it. We need to be willing to discover what we might be doing – what we are telling ourselves and how we are treating ourselves – that may be causing our pain. We need to be willing to feel the very painful existential feelings of life – the loneliness, heartbreak, grief, and helplessness over others and life events – that occur when others are unloving, or when we experience loss of a loved one or loss of financial security, or when we witness people hurting other people.

If you are not willing to feel and learn from the pain you cause through your own self-abandonment, and you are not willing to feel and lovingly manage the pain of life, then you fall into the second group that Robert Frost is referring to – willing to let others do the work, which means that you are not doing what you came to the planet to do – birth yourself by daily evolving in your ability to love and manifest your love in the world. 

If you are not willing, or if your willingness is not strong and solid, why not?

What are you afraid of? Are you willing to discover your fears and false beliefs that stand in the way of your willingness, or are you also unwilling to open enough to discover these?

There is nothing right or wrong about being willing or unwilling to do your inner work to birth yourself, but there are consequences to being unwilling.

The emotional consequences may be anger, anxiety, depression, shame, guilt, and a lack of joy, aliveness, and passion for life.

The physical consequences might be illness from the stress of self-abandonment, or from eating conveniently rather than lovingly.

The spiritual consequences might be feeling alone and empty, with no feeling of the fullness of love inside.

The relationship consequences might be an inability to find or create a loving relationship.

The financial consequences might be an inability to manifest meaningful work that also financially sustains you. Or there might be plenty of money but you constantly feel anxious about losing it.

The organizational consequences might be that you can’t get things done on time, or that you are always late and stressed about it, or that your home or office is a cluttered mess.

You can sit by and hope that others will give you what you want, but even if they do, it’s not going to bring you joy, aliveness, and passion for life. These are the natural results of birthing yourself through your willingness to learn to love yourself, rather than continue to abandon yourself.

The wounded self likes to think that getting away with not doing your inner work to learn to birth yourself will work for you. But it never does. How old is the little kid in you who thinks getting away with not putting forth your best effort will make you happy? How old were you when you stopped being willing to do all you can do to learn, grow, and manifest your gifts? Do you really want to allow a small, scared child to determine your level of willingness?

Take a moment to think about what is in your highest good – to be willing to do the work, or to be willing to let others do the work? Be honest with yourself!

Birthing yourself isn’t just about you. It’s also about caring about others. Are you willing to go the extra mile for yourself and others? When I read this anonymous quote, “It’s never crowded along the extra mile,” it stopped me in my tracks and made me sad.

One of the really good things I learned from my father was to always go the extra mile. He was the kind of person who would willingly show up for anyone who needed him to fix things. He could fix just about anything. And when he fixed it, you knew that it was fixed right – that he had gone the extra mile to make sure that whatever he fixed was perfectly done.

Going the extra mile is not just about helping people fix things. It’s about putting your all into learning to take responsibility for loving yourself and birthing yourself. And it’s also about being there for others, being reliable with your caring and compassion. It’s about following through on what you say you will do. It’s about aligning with the integrity of your essence and doing the next right thing rather than with the fear, apathy, and procrastination of your wounded self. It’s about doing what you want but are afraid of, rather than allowing fear to stop you. All of this is about birthing yourself.

But many people do the opposite of going the extra mile and doing the next right thing. They do as little as they can, and instead of feeling good about doing a really good job or about fully being there for themselves and others, they feel smug when they get away with as little as possible. They never learned that they would likely feel really great about themselves by putting forth full effort. Somewhere along the way, they became afraid of going the extra mile.

Why would this be? If you are a person who doesn’t go the extra mile, why is this true for you?

• Are you afraid if you put forth your all, it won’t be good enough and people will see you as inadequate, not smart enough, stupid or a failure?
• Are you afraid to find out what your limits are?
• Are you afraid if you care about going the extra mile, people will take advantage of you?
• Are you afraid you will get trapped into having to care-take others?
• Do you believe that getting away with as little as possible is what life is all about?
• Do you say to yourself, “Why should I? No one goes the extra mile for me.”
• Is getting others to do it for you what makes you feel important and one-up?
• Do you believe that there is no point in learning to go the extra mile for yourself and for others – that life is about what you can get – not what you give? 

If you identify with any of these limiting beliefs, you might want to take some time to examine whether they are true.

While it might feel safer to hold back than to learn to love yourself and birth yourself, it will never feel right or loving in your essence. It will never lead to a deep sense of self-worth.

What would our world be like if we were all devoted to going the extra mile for ourselves and for each other, for doing the next right thing, for loving ourselves and sharing our love with others and daily birthing ourselves? What if truly being there with kindness and caring for ourselves and each other were our highest priority?

I wish it were so. If we were governed by our essence and our loving, spiritually connected adult, rather than by our wounded self, going the extra mile with kindness and caring would naturally be the way we would be living. I pray for this and hold the vision of it every day.

I invite you to join me for my bi-monthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at https://innerbondinghub.com/membership.

And, I invite you to join me for my 30-Day at-home Course: “Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships.”

And you can learn so much about loving yourself and creating loving relationships from my new book, “Lonely No More: The Astonishing Power of Inner Bonding” and from our website at https://www.innerbonding.com.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.