Insecurity and caring too much

A theme that keeps coming up these last few weeks is one of insecurity and caring too much about what others think. I’ve found myself regularly settling a hand on a client’s solar plexus and letting the Reiki bring up a whole heap of tension and knotting of feelings of insecurity, anxiety, fear and sadness too, around this.

The solar plexus holds a lot of stuff, especially the unresolved stuff that we haven’t been able to process and that eats away at us, quite literally in some cases, and causes us to adopt all sorts of behaviour patterns to attempt to numb ourselves from this uncomfortable sensation, especially the restlessness and yuckiness of the anxiety that accompanies our poor relationship with self - our inherent insecurity about who we are and how we live in this world and our imaginings about the future, or our fear of loss of safety, and out caring too much about what others think, which can feed our inherent insecurity if we let it.

What strikes me the most about this ‘caring what others think’ is how much it prevents us from living a life of true authenticity, how we might keep ourselves small and limited simply to fit in and feel accepted by others, frequently compromising our own values and way of seeing things, believing we have to act, behave and be a certain way to maintain a status quo, people please and protect our fragile self-esteem through fear of being confronted or challenged by others for the way we see things or for the gifts we have been given, and the way we feel about ourself, caring more about them and their thoughts than we do about ourselves and our inner truth.

This caring about what others think weaves its way through so many lives, almost like an external validation system; we often need others to validate us in some way and to obtain that validation we need to ensure that we accord to a certain way of being in this world, to ensure our feelings of safety and security. The opposite of this is to not care and to then be up against any feelings of insecurity and be OK regardless of the feedback we receive to the choices we make and the way we live in this world from the clothes we choose to wear, the career we choose to follow, to the way we behave around others and the feelings and opinions we share.

Often though, these choices are dictated to a certain extent not least by our conditioning and the way we have been trained to see the world (which will likely change the more we expand consciously and let go of the conditioning that prevents us from seeing through the illusion in the first place) but by our own feelings of security or lack of security, and the extent to which we can hold our centre and stand our ground regardless of what is happening around us and anyone else’s input into our lives, however well meaning they may be.

I’ve written about it before, but the pandemic really changed things for so many of us and asked us to look more deeply at the way in which we validated our worth in this world, as jobs, titles, earning potential and ways of being dropped away for so many of us. This all certainly brought me face to face with my feeling of inner security and I noticed the many ways that I lent into the external to obtain much of this, seeking external validation for my worth in this world, as I have said previously, from social media feedback to the number of students attending my classes, from my earning potential as a company secretary and the security that the title alone gave me, even if this was illusionary and meant nothing to anyone else.

The vaccination debate also highlighted to me the fear about compromising one’s reputation, simply because of holding a certain opinion that differed to the mainstream, and this because of seeing things so differently and operating from a place of intuition. Opinions are just thoughts and thoughts come and go like the wind, anyone who watches their mind for ten minutes knows this only too well, the thoughts will just keep on coming, we can literally ask ourselves, “what thought am I going to think next” and along comes another one, taking our mind in a different direction. thoughts can become tortuous though when we give them too much energy and buy into them as if they are a concrete truth. It’s the same with opinions, we can take them far too seriously, overlooking the fact that these are subject to change too.

I am frequently changing my mind, because life is frequently giving me opportunities to see things differently. I might hold a strong opinion about one thing, and then I’ll meet someone who will challenge this, or something will happen which will help me to see the other side of the coin so to speak, so that I realise that there is always another way of seeing things. This awareness stops us getting too self righteous and judgmental, too pious and stuck in our ways, although I can be all of that at times too, because I forget and consider that it’s my way or the high way so to speak. Albeit with compassion for self, I have gotten better over time at appreciating that there are may different ways and mine is only one of those, and as I’ve said, even that is constantly subject to change!

But nonetheless the whole vaccine debate did highlight to me the way in which we can be vindicated for our choices about what we put in our body, let alone our choices about a myriad of other things, such as the way we choose to live, or the way we choose to raise and/or educate our children, the clothes we choose to wear, the body art we choose to adopt, the food we choose to eat, the places we choose to holiday, the way we spend our time from resting to playing, from exercising to relaxing, we have opinions and judgements on everything and sometimes we care far too much about what other think to the extent that our choices are motivated by others, not from our inner guidance system.

Sometimes we’re the other side, the ones doing the caring too much about what others are doing. We’re the ones judging and evaluating and giving opinions, trying to control others, knowing how to manipulate and coerce them, wanting to see them live their life the way that we imagine for them, the way that we feel will best suit and work for them - we think we know what’s best for them and while we might say we come from a place of love, really we’re coming from a place of fear, fearing for their safety and so we try to direct them down a certain path that we think will keep them safe and at the same time bring out the best in them.

We should never confuse control for love. If we are trying to control someone then this is not love. This is fear - and we are fearing for our and their safety. We have no trust in the universe or in that other person’s intuition and inner guidance system. We’d be better helping them connect with this and deepen into their own truth, making decisions for themselves, allowing them to learn from their experiences, without having to label them good or bad, passing or failing. The soul is here to experience itself simple as that, it’s only us humans that have decided if something is positive or negative.

This whole security or insecurity theme sent me on a bit of an exploration to further understand the extent of it, to look more clearly at my motivation for doing certain things. This started last summer with an attempt at re-wilding myself by just letting things be, physically that is, to see how my motivation towards various things was due to conditioning and external validation of my worth in this world and how this impacted on my feelings of security. So I set off on a mission of growing all body hair and stepping away from make-up.

This was an interesting experiment. I was OK with the body hair until I found myself teaching yoga and then I became really self conscious of my hairy legs and arm pits and imagined how others may judge me for them, as I judged myself. I realised I was up against my conditioning around what is acceptable and what is not. Admittedly it has become more common place to wild the body in this way, and I had always been very happy about having hairy legs until it became socially unacceptable to have them, at school I recall boys commenting on them when I was around 15, and that was that, I started shaving so as not to stand out and be ridiculed for hairy legs.

Avoiding make-up was much easier, and didn’t concern me in the slightest, it was easier in many respects, I’ve never been someone for plastering on make-up, I’ve never been too concerned about how my face looks, and never felt the need to change it, my concern has always been more so about the size of my body, which initiated an eating disorder at the age of 17 and has caused lots of inner work over the year to try to accept myself regardless of this - so in comparison, not applying eye liner was really no big deal!

Still, towards the middle of summer I was done with the not-shaving, not because of what others thought as I had worked through this by then, but because it felt hot and uncomfortable and I longed for silky smooth legs, so I delighted in shaving and have fairly much continued ever since. The difference now is that I do it for myself, not for anyone else. It’s the same with make-up. The Tantra course changed things for me and my perspective in how I relate to my body and what I do or don’t do to it and all of a sudden I longed to adorn it in feminine clothes and make-up too, I wanted more colour, painted nails, and a bit of eye shadow. But again, I was doing it for me, not for anyone else, it wasn’t coming from a place of insecurity about my looks, for example.

This experiment highlighted to me how unconscious some of our decisions and how we do certain things to ease our feelings of insecurity and because we care more about what is expected of us by society and/or others, than how we care about ourselves. I started noticing those times when I did things I didn’t want to do simply for these reasons - caring too much about others may think if I said no or turned down an invite or whatever it might be. On the opposite side, I started to really appreciate those special friends who were truly honest about how they felt, so even if we’d arranged to meet and they felt tired maybe they were hormonal or in overwhelm, then they told me so and we made an arrangement to meet another time instead, which usually suited me better too, just I hadn’t felt to tell them so.

Mainly though, I started to notice how much my caring about what others think prevented me from living authentically, how I might hold back from saying certain things, how I might agree to certain things, how I might avoid certain situations, how I might behave around certain people, how I might make decisions about how I’m spending my time, how I might avoid writing a certain thing, how I might change what I was wearing, how I might tone myself down a bit, how I might limit myself in some way, simply because I cared what others might think and how they might judge me.

I reflected wider on it and I realised how much we might compromise on our dreams, or give up on them all together, simply because of caring what others think and considering that our creations - the book we want to write, the picture we want to paint, the remedy we want to make, the business we’d like to set up, the room we’d like to decorate - how all of this we can give up or never get going simply because we’re too concerned about what others think and how we might be judged or the options and feedback we might receive. It’s incredible really, how many lives go unlived simply because of caring about what others think!

It was a really helpful exploration. Because underneath the caring I came face to face with insecurity. This caused me to dig deep. I realised that the only person who can make us feel secure is ourself. We can spend our whole life seeking external validation for our feeling of inner security but this is extremely fragile and is dependent on constant feedback from others and the continuation of whatever it is that is giving us this false sense of security. Furthermore, I realised how much we compromise our authenticity in our quest to appease others and their expectations, opinions and judgements.

I also realised that if we are judging others then we are usually judging ourselves, because of our inherent insecurity. And if others are judging us then it is because of their inherent insecurity. At times we are simply up against ourselves, in that no one is really judging us, that too is an illusion, what’s really happening is we are simply judging ourselves based on our conditioning and the contracts we bought into and signed up to in terms of the way we see the world. When we start breaking those contracts and seeing through the illusion then we can be on rocky ground for a while because we might well judge ourselves based on what’s been, until we’ve settled into the transformed version of self.

I noticed my inherent fear of rejection, of being rejected for being myself, and my fear of confrontation, of having to stand my ground and stay in my centre when being challenged by others. I noticed the uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach that this all created, an anxiety that I hadn’t realised was there, that had been there for an awfully long time, but which I had avoided feeling through various tactics over the year from starving myself to binging, to smoking cigarettes and joints, to drinking too much wine, to keeping myself very busy, to obsessional cleaning, to overwork and even to too much yoga at times.

In short there were a whole heap of choices made and behaviour patterns created that helped me to avoid feeling my inherent insecurity that caused me to live my life caring too much about what others thought, and negating my own inner wisdom and knowing instead. At times, I couldn’t even hear this, simply because I was so used to looking to others to inform me about what I should be doing, how I should be behaving, and how I should present myself to the world. And even when I did start hearing it, my inner voice, my inner knowing, my intuition and gut instinct, I doubted all of it, because I was still so used to listening externally.

Gradually I started going deeper within, and being more honest with myself about how I might feel in any given situation, about what works for me and what doesn’t and I discovered all these lovely things, like self worth and self appreciation, healthier boundaries and the ability to say no. Over the years the unhealthy behaviour patterns have dropped away, I mean not all of them, I still have a tendency towards busyness, and I don’t like mess, but I am no where near as controlling of myself, my environment or others as I may once have been.

I care less now too about what others think of me. I’m more honest, more authentic then, more true to my essence. I can now say ‘no’ to offers of coffee and big parties and leave it at that, rather than dancing around it, saying yes but meaning no and somehow having to extricate myself from any arrangement made, rather than just being honest from the outset. I loathe small talk and am fortunate now to have a group of soul friends who talk the deep stuff, that keeps my soul nourished, I can’t be doing with situations which drain me otherwise.

I care less about whether people think me mad for the choices I make, for the way I chose to live my life, for the clothes I chose to wear, for the way my children look with their wild and unkempt hair (actually it’’s very well kept, it’s just crazy hair!), for the way I chose to raise them with less consideration of academic achievement and more focus on learning from wild living, for the way our family is finding its own way of being that doesn’t necessarily accord to societal expectations of what a ‘happy family’ is meant to look like, for my sensitivity and emotional volatility, for the opinions I have, which changes like the wind as the universe always brings in an opportunity for me to see things differently and see more of the wider perspective to things.

I have realised that the only thing which truly brings us security, is not the amount of money in our bank account, or the kind of house we own, nor the number of likes we receive on social media, let alone the feedback we receive from others about the work we do, or the make-up and plastic surgery, nor the expensive clothes and jewellery and definitely not the relationship or love we seek from others. All of these can be taken away from us and then there we are again - right bang centre in our insecurity. Security can not be bought, nor can it be given, it has to be cultivated, because our inherent feeling of security comes from deep within us, deep in our centre, in our solar plexus.

This is where we must come back to time and time again and sit deep into it, as deep as we can, and feel whatever is moving through us, really feel it, not turn away from it, or avoid it or numb from it, but truly feel the uncomfortableness of being right in it and allow it to ease, noticing what is behind it and facing it rather than running away from it. We cannot avoid it, not really, all the other stuff, the external stuff is just part of the patriarchal and commercial illusion. I repeat, we cannot buy security, we really can’t, and no amount of job title or likes on social media will give it either, not really.

When we start to pay attention, we’ll notice where we are people pleasing, where we have energetic imbalances with others and compromise our boundaries, where we are being manipulated, controlled and/or influenced by others (and therefore compromising our boundaries), where we are being inauthentic, when we are saying one thing and meaning another, when we are giving our power away, entering into victimhood and blame hood (we know then, WE have given our power away, no one can take it from us) and when we are caring far too much about what others think because some part of ourselves has not been properly owned and accepted, where we are, therefore, not yet whole.

We’ll also notice that at its core, at its very core, is the mind and the games it plays with us, the mind games as I call them. We’ll notice that it is our mind that creates our feelings of insecurity, just as it is our mind which tells us that we are not worthy enough, beautiful enough, good enough, perfect enough, that we are not enough, and never will be. It is our mind that tortures us and creates our suffering, that causes us to care too much about what others think simply because we’ve gotten very good at projecting and looking outside of ourselves for the very thing our own mind denies us - feelings of security.

I have a feeling this moon cycle has been bringing this all in and will ramp up now until the new moon, so do pay attention, do get into your centre, lay a hand, especially if you are Reiki attuned, and keep coming back to centre. Remind yourself where you are and when - ‘in your centre now, in the present’. This is the gift that the centre brings, the ability to be in the centre, not sent off balance by what has happened previously, or with imaginings of what might happen in the future, but by being truly present to what is happening in any one minute, in this secure and centred moment. This, lovely beings, is the gift of true presence.

Maintaining it is the work though. It is a moment by moment awareness. I have to stay vigilant. You will have to stay vigilant, or maybe you are already. We will all have to stay vigilant. The mind is super powerful and will easily follow tracks and pathways laid. We cannot fill these in, but we can start again. We can form more positive tracks and pathways that tell us that we are enough, that recognise that there is no such thing as perfect so just let go of that and just be all that we are, authentically, even if that means we’re totally different to everyone else, in fact celebrate that, we should all celebrate all our differences for this is what makes us us and not someone else.

We need to catch ourselves time and time again when we feel those old patterns coming in and like a mantra, we repeat “its just my mind, “it’s just my mind and it’s mind games”, “it’s just my mind”, “it’s just my mind games” over and over again until we re-programme ourselves and reclaim all those bits we keep rejecting because of our insecurity around being our true beautiful selves in this crazy world we live in. It’s the path to freedom. And its in each of us. Never outside. Never in someone else’s way or someone’s else’s words. It’s deep within each of us and freedom is our birthright…we just got to own it.

What I will add, is that if we want to go deeper into our centre and free the knots and tension and old patterns of insecurity, anxiety, paranoia and depression then we would do well to release our knees and shoulders first. It is my experience from my practice and from working with others, that the shoulders and knees take us to our centre, because these also hold our insecurity, as we shoulder too much responsibility and carry the weight of our over thinking mind, and struggle to firmly place our feet on the earth and allow movement, becoming rigid and stuck in the knees through fear of the earth dropping away or not being able to stand on our own two feet.

This is where yoga, with deep awareness, can help enormously, going into our knees and shoulders and listening to them, while simultaneously releasing tension from them, not from changing them, but from allowing more of them, more of the roundness of the joint of the knee, and the roundness of the shoulder joint, and allowing their greater freedom. You will feel how this starts to unstick you in the centre, but be aware, because the old feelings will come up to come out, this is the nature of true healing. Obviously Reiki helps with this hugely, each of these modalities worked together, yoga, Reiki and Ayurveda, compliment each other, loosening the soil and pulling out the weed, getting to the root of whatever now needs to be lifted and released.

Enjoy the waning moon!

Love Emma x