“Are you willing to go deeper than you have ever gone, in order to rise higher than you have ever been?” Christine Kane asked from the stage at Uplevel Your Business in Atlanta, last June. Caught up in the excitement of the group, and inspired by Christine’s authenticity and personal success, I was. “I’m In!” I shouted along with the crowd. Little did I know what going deeper than you’ve ever gone would look like. Nobody warned me that I would have to be willing to confront and begin to heal every belief and behavior I held that stood in the way of my becoming a successful entrepreneur/change agent/Pleasure Evolutionary.
So what is this doing in a blog about pleasure, love, sex and relationships? Well, besides being a shameless plug for Christine Kane, who is now my Business Coach, the journey of becoming a gratified and radiant woman is exactly the same. As soon as you set your intention to get more pleasure, every reason not to will start to come up. What might you find when you go deeper than you’ve ever gone before?
Here are a few of the beliefs I’ve identified:
- If I allow myself to want things and then I don’t get them, the disappointment will too painful. Better not to desire things at all.
- I’ve been told all my life that I don’t deserve nice things. I think they’re right.
- I’ve got to earn what comes to me, and to get what I really want is going to involve painful sacrifice
- Nothing will be enough for me
- If I let people know what I want and need , they’ll reject me
- I’ve put other people first for so long, I don’t even know what I want
- I have a great life already, what more is there?
- I’ll survive where I’m at, it’s enough
- If I allow my sexual self to come out, I’ll never get anything else done.
- If I let a man get too close to me, he will hurt me
- If I get too successful/happy, other people will be jealous, or betrayed, or won’t love me
Whew. I could go on, but isn’t that enough? Do you identify with any of those? What I’ve found is that, when you uncover these self-defeating thoughts and beliefs, it is the first step in
reclaiming the truth of who you are. It can be painful. We may not like what we find. Sometimes, you have to go through all the feelings of anger, grief, and despair to get to the other side. It helps if you make the journey within community. It helped me to surround myself with people who kept reminding me of what was possible. None of those statements I listed is true. Who you really are is a golden light being, and extension of the divine, a radiant child of God that deserves every good thing possible. Not you, you say? Why not you? Every major spiritual tradition says this. This morning I had a vision of myself as a Shammas. For those of you not familiar, this is the head candle on a Hanukah Menorah. It gets lit first, and then all the other candles are lit from it. We are all a Shammas. You need to get lit-up, so that you can kindle the inner lights of everyone around you. To learn the secrets of your purpose, you must be willing to walk through the door of your very human heart. Share with us the limiting beliefs you are ready to let go of in the comments below.
