Our Core Wound

Over the years, I've interacted with diverse groups of people: accomplished academics, endurance athletes, prison inmates, college students, service workers, recovering addicts, and meditation teachers.  Within all these groups—within me—there's a core wound: an underlying feeling of "not good enough." Our mental narratives come in different flavors, but the wound is similar. It's a soft spot of vulnerability; a place where we wonder: "If people see this part of me, will they still love me?"

To protect these soft spots, we use varied strategies: achievement, judgment, busyness, blame, and fierce independence. These strategies work for a while, but eventually they exhaust us. In our own time, we realize: it's easier to feel vulnerability than to resist it.

Though we're all connected by this core wound, we apply strategies that make us feel more alone. The healing comes when we unveil our soft spots, and this takes bravery. We live in a culture that values mental toughness and individual accomplishment. Yet our healing asks for a vulnerable team effort.

As part of our global team, I'll begin. My wound calls to me through outward signs: striving to be perfect and save the world. These actions make me feel "good enough" for a while, but they don't cover my deeper ache: what if I'm really not good enough? What if I'm unlovable? This is a painful, lonely feeling. Through practice, I've learned to stay in meditation with the pain and notice how it changes. Gradually I apply self-compassion and restore my perspective. Yet I realize this medicine, though helpful and necessary, doesn't connect me to others. It keeps my story hidden.

So, if you feel alone and caught in some version of "not enough," please know I'm beside you. Daily, I feel this same uneasiness. We're connected in far more ways than we realize. Most of us feel like we're not enough, but the truth is: we are enough, as is; we're perfectly imperfect; we're flawed and lovable.

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