Why Self-Help Isn’t Working (And the Missing Piece Between Awareness and Real Change)

• Why Self-Help Isn’t Working

You have done everything you can to bring you toward the reality you want but it is still never enough. You have done the inner work but still feel defeated. You are still running into the same problems at work and in your relationships but your desires have now changed. You have allowed yourself to think of something deeper that can bring you to the awareness that you had underneath you this entire time. It has forced you to dig deeper into your awareness because you are no longer fine with surface healing.

You may notice this most in your everyday life. This may look like meditating in the morning, journaling, heading off to work, trying to survive the day and then coming home and feeling emotionally exhausted. No matter the awareness you have, you are still running into the same issues at work with your boss, the same colleagues that won’t stop gossiping about each other and the same problems that you have to fix. You come back home to a feeling that something inside still feels unresolved. You may find it difficult to express what you are feeling or ask for what you need to an emotionally unavailable partner. You feel this even though you thought set yourself up for success.

Self-help strategies are not failing you, they are bringing you to a deeper understanding of yourself. They are forcing you to go into your body, find where pain is and understand it a bit more. Now that you are more aware of your body through these introductory processes, we can get into the parts of deeper healing. You no longer need to spend hours upon hours of activities that no longer serve you, or add more onto your already full plate. You can use these strategies when you face your inner arguments and outer reality struggles and triggers.

Shadow work has been introduced in order to open your consciousness to a greater understanding of how your emotions work. Your emotions are produced by a set a circumstances in your environment that trigger them to come to the surface. For example, you may not be aware that you have been holding in the feeling of unworthiness for years, until your boss goes and tell you that you cannot get that raise yet that you have been hoping for. What happens then? That stirs something within you “I’m not feeling enough right now, I need to do better, I need to work harder”. But what you are unaware of is that this emotion was held deep within you this entire time. Your boss just showed up as the mirror to your internal state that you have been unaware of. You should be thanking them, because now you can work on it and break the cycle.

All of the strategies you have been using thus far is missing one key component. They keep you running, doing and thinking that it is enough because you are keeping yourself busy and working on yourself. Am I right? But the key component to this is love. It is self-love. How do you get to the point of self-love when you are constantly doing things for other people or constantly trying to prove to others that you are worthy of love because you are working on yourself? You are constantly judging others because you are doing the inner work and they aren’t, and yet the same challenging situations come up. But let me tell you something, you never needed to fix yourself in the first place. Your worthiness and self-love lies within you.

You never needed to pick up another hour of self-care to show someone that you were working on yourself. You thought that journaling, therapy, meditation, listening to podcasts, reading self help books served as ways to work on yourself. You never needed to work on yourself. You needed to be with yourself in its wholeness. You needed to accept the parts of you that you hid away because you were ashamed. You thought that you were working on yourself this entire time yet it never fixed anything because you didn’t need fixing. Is this landing?

• Why Awareness isn’t enough

You were never taught the need to understand yourself, but I am proud of you for making it this far. I would have never known about the person I was until I felt the need to dig deeper. Until I felt the need to become aware that I wasn’t the only person feeling this way. I couldn’t stand the fact that no one else around me was doing the work and through awareness and integration I only came to the conclusion that maybe they didn’t need to, I did. I felt this way because through a deeper understanding of yourself, you can find within that somewhere within you is another person that you have yet to know. The person that you locked away for a long time and are meeting again like old friends.

This isn’t where healing stops. It’s where healing begins. Not only can you see that awareness changes perception, but it leads the way toward actual change. Once you become aware that you are aware, that changes everything. That opens the door to actual changes in your conscious thought. By conscious, I mean aware. The parts of you that had been showing up for you until now had been your unconscious (the parts of you that you were unaware of). But now that you have the key, you have opened the door to possibilities.

This is where you find yourself standing between the known and unknown. Where your awareness takes over and allows you to see more clearly through the thoughts that have held you on the previous side of the doorway. This is where you can find the deeper emotional patterns that were hidden all along. They were uninvited at first, but inviting them in not only brings you future comfort, but peace. Peace to where you can see yourself as you are, without judgement.

• What Self Love actually is

Now that you have the awareness and the key to greater awakening, let’s work together on where we are headed, toward greater self-love. This isn’t some quick fix, it is quite a process. But we can see that the deeper we are willing to go, the deeper love we can find for ourselves and others around us. This is the goal, to see that all along, all of the work you were doing was leading somewhere, but was just taking you through loops of your own awareness. Because the awareness was here all along. You knew somewhere deep down that you never needed to fix, but to love. You needed to be open to love, for yourself and for others.

This is no ordinary love that I am speaking of, this is unconditional love. The kind of love that you don’t need to work for. The kind of love that you need for complete self-acceptance and complete acceptance of others. If it never mattered what you or anyone did or said, what would you go back to? The only answer is love. Love is where all things stem from, and it is your inherent essence. This is the space where “From Shadow Into Light” was born from. Nothing needs to be fixed, it needs to be integrated back into wholeness, which is you. If you were already whole and complete without anything outside of you, then what else would you need?

If you are ready to take the invitation into a deeper understanding of yourself, you can find my book here:

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