Do you know people who are always getting in their own way?
Those who take a step towards progress, and then seem to run away?
Many people regularly get in the way of their own healing, for a variety of reasons. As we learned in Part 1 of Subconscious Blocks to Healing, this it is not due to an inherent weakness, but subconscious barriers preventing them being 100% in alignment with healing.
We need to release the subconscious barriers so that we can heal.
In this article, you’ll learn about a subconscious barrier to healing seen in many people but especially prevalent in women over 40.
This is best described with a story.
My client and her beliefs
My client desperately needed to lose weight. She had high cholesterol, was suffering from sleep apnea, shortness of breath and extraordinary knee pain all due to her being overweight.
She was mostly homebound and had to rely on her daughters to take her to appointments. The doctors had no solutions and would not operate on her until she lost some weight.
There was no question she knew she needed to eat healthily and was working with a nutritionist to optimize her diet. But she regularly made excuses for going back to her old eating habits and, of course, her weight wasn’t changing.
She kept sabotaging herself.
When she talked to me, I asked her “What do you think is getting in your way?” She told me that she didn’t feel worthy of receiving help.
Let’s learn more about why she may have felt this way.
Subconscious blocks to healing – Feeling unworthy
Tara Brach, an insight meditation teacher, and author of Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha, says the most insidious problem amongst Americans is a deep shame that we are not enough.
And, no matter how we strive to improve ourselves, our inner thoughts and feelings are governed by how we and our ancestors are treated.
For example, if others don’t have enough time for us, fail to acknowledge our pain or neglect us, we are often left with deep feelings of unworthiness and shame.
This can lead us to be critical of ourselves.
We may then neglect our needs, abuse ourselves, develop addictions or follow an endless path to strive to be more.
Putting yourself first
Some people believe that everyone else’s needs are more important than theirs and they help everyone else first. However, if we spend all our time putting oxygen masks on others before ourselves, we won’t help anyone effectively. And when you neglect your own needs, people see you giving away too much and may feel it’s OK not to respect you.
Going back to your childhood, did you have thoughts like ‘I’ll never measure up’ or ‘I’m not worthy’. These can get lodged deeply in your subconscious and prevent you from reaching your dreams.
So, let’s find out how you you break this pattern.
If you haven’t yet reached your dreams or goals, ask yourself, “Do I feel worthy of reaching this goal?”
Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being ‘completely unworthy’ and 10 being ‘of course I’m worthy’. If you rate yourself anything less than a 10 you’ll need to release feelings of unworthiness and beliefs from your past so you can move forward.
In my client’s case when we released her feelings of unworthiness, she no longer self-sabotaged. She found it much easier to engage in healthier habits and that weight finally started to come off.
The first step towards progress is understanding your barriers to success. With that knowledge comes power.
Stay tuned and share
In this series, we continue to delve deeper into the main subconscious reasons we may sabotage our healing. I am also going to offer more useful tips to help you overcome any barriers. Be sure to check out the next part, where I describe a subconscious barrier to healing many educated people and a lot of Americans struggle with.
If someone you know has tried many different things to help with healing and they complain that nothing ever works, please share this article with them.
