You Can Never Be Good Enough ~ By Proving
You Are
Weekly Word #15 ~ October, 2007
I often ponder with fascination how each of us popped up in a family
somewhere on this planet. Although there are many beliefs and mythologies
about how that choice is made (karma, astrology, a celestial committee
and life lessons, the grinning cosmic choreographer, akashic records,
punishment, reward), there is a good chance that where and when we
arrive is totally arbitrary.
You popped up in a family, in whatever form that took. It might have
been a nice middle-class family in a comfortable and safe neighborhood,
or ganglord drug runners in the bad part of a big city. You could
have been born in a bucolic tropical jungle, or a war-torn city in
the Middle East. You could have been any color, any ethnicity, and
learned one of more than 5,000 languages in the world. . . while learning
to worship one of the thousands of gods that apparently all inhabit
heaven together.
Why we popped up into life in the circumstances we did may remain
a mystery, however, there was one thing common to all of our experiences:
We learned to dream the way our caregivers were dreaming, and we learned
to be afraid of being rejected if we refused. Ultimately, we could
not refuse, because as little people, it meant expulsion and annihilation
( = death). And the essential leverage used by our caregivers to domesticate
us into their particular dream of what was right and wrong, and good
and bad, was that we were not good enough until we fulfilled their
expectations of us.
We had to be good enough to belong, and we had to prove it with our
behavior. Do you recognize this? You had to be ____________ enough.
Perhaps your inner Judge is still telling you that you are not ____________
enough. That is the Judge’s job, and he does it well. The inner
and outer Judges insist you must prove you are good enough so you
can earn love, approval, acceptance, money, a mate, and the other
rewards of life.
The unfortunate downside of all this, no matter what the standards
of those in charge of wherever you popped into Life, and wherever
you are now, is that you can never prove you are ___________ enough.
The standards and expectations change, and escalate with your every
success or failure.
You can never be good enough by proving you are (the bad news).
You are already good enough just as you are (the good news).
The entire idea that the dream your caregivers believed when you
arrived in their care has anything to do with you is so clearly arbitrary
that it becomes nonsense. Imagine who you would be if you had popped
up somewhere else! Six billion possibilities! All dreaming, all dreams.
To try to prove you are good enough based on the arbitrary standards
produced by the random accident of your birth circumstances is useless,
a waste of precious personal power, and impossible. On the other hand,
since it was probably random, and therefore there is no standard or
expectations you need to meet from God or man, perhaps you are perfect
and enough just the way you are.
And if you are enough just the way you are, then you are free to
be that You that you came here to be, free to enjoy yourself, your
life, and your nature as a unique expression of the Life Force that
created you here. You are free to love, free to shine, and free to
be YOU. That is the goal of the Artist of the Spirit, the goal the
modern Toltec-- who remembers the truth of who he or she is, and falls
INTO love with their own perfection and enough-ness.
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