Hello my loves! In this blog I share an understanding I've come to about my worthiness, your worthiness, and the worthiness of humanity though the Freedom content provided by Jeremy Griffith and the World Transformation Movement. About a year ago, I was calling in more love from the universe. I felt frustrated that I wasn't receiving it. When I asked my higher self, (basically my 5 year old self,) she told me, "it's not that there's not enough love out there in the world for you, it's that you are blocked to receiving it."
As soon as I heard it, I knew it to be true.
All of a sudden, on the outside of my personal bubble, I could feel ... SO MUCH LOVE ... it astonished me. I could feel the love from all of the strangers praying for humanity, the love from everyone in my life I've made a positive impact on, the love from all of my ancestors, the love from my higher self, the love from my guides... And it was...overwhelming...heart expanding...a humbling relief!!!
And I could feel a BLOCK. A bubble between me and this love. When I tuned into it, I heard it say, "I am not worthy of all of this love. I will only allow in as much as I am worthy of."
I knew where this block came from. It came from my treatment of my sister, and to a lesser extent my mother, when I was a child. I was very violent, manipulative, verbally abusive and generally unkind as a youth. Thankfully, my relationships with sister and mother have very much improved. Despite the healing we've had, I knew this block to be there because I was still punishing myself for the ways I had behaved so atrociously in my youth. I vowed to work on this block and to open up to the love that was waiting for me to let it in.
My go to forgiveness practice, the ancient Hawaiian tradition of Ho'oponopono, had provided some relief. I spoke the phrases, "I love you, I am sorry, please forgive me, thank you," over and over again to myself. Though I was feeling more worthy of love, there remained a block, one which I felt I could never truly remove. The truth was, I was unworthy and I didn't see how anything could change that.
Then, about 6 months ago, I came across the book Freedom by Jeremy Griffith. In this book, he presents a biological explanation of the development of humanity which explains not only our pervading symptoms of unworthiness, but scientifically evidences that we are, in fact, all worthy.
Here's how it goes: Humanity developed from our ape-like ancestors who fostered altruism through extended nurturing made possible by ideal nursery conditions. The humans we developed from had moved beyond adaptation through the genetic impulses of "survival of the fittest." Our genetic inheritance is that of altruism, not competition.
After 10 million years of developing our altruistic genes through nurturing, a development occurred which changed everything for our species. You see, gene based adaptation, even when altruistically oriented, is limited in how quickly adaptations can take place. Adjustments to the environment take generations to unfold. This slow adaptation is a threat to our species survival. And so, a new way of adapting came online, nerve-based adaptation. Our nerve based learning system began to develop around 2 million years ago. This ability enabled our nerves to store memory, thus facilitating a comparison of present moment choices with past choices and their outcomes.
Essentially, an intellectual system of learning through cause and effect began to develop and override our instinctual gene-based nature. Every time our intellect veered away from altruism, an inner conflict with our instincts occurred. Our intellect felt unjustly condemned, and our instinct felt unjustly betrayed. Having nothing but feedback to learn from, our intellect has been questioning it's worth since it began developing 2 million years ago, all the while trying to adapt through trial and error.
When I understood this, I began to see my belief that I was unworthy in a whole new light. Our species has been undergoing a heroic quest for an adaptive advantage, which gives us the ability to respond in the moment to changes in our environment, yet in order to do so, it has had to go against the altruism of its genetic inheritance for the understanding of cause and effect to develop.
We have all been dealing with an internal struggle against our own instinctual nature which left us questioning our worth.
Not only that, but in our development as children, our instinctual natures also experienced a deep wounding that caused our intellect to question our worth throughout our lives. When we come into the world, we come in with the genetic orientation to altruism. Our genes expect unconditional love provided in ideal nursery conditions during our formative years. For many generations, this expectation has not been satisfied for the youth of humanity. Some children experienced an extreme opposite of this behavior, while others experienced relatively unconditional love and close to ideal conditions, yet none alive on this planet today experienced the upbringing of our genetic inheritance.
And what happens when we are children and we do not get the love and container we know to be our birthright? Our intellect begins to question whether we are not receiving this love because we are not worthy of it. We respond in two ways, either we affirm our worth and aggressively act out against the unloving behavior, or we begin to desperately seek for validation from outside sources. Either way, these reactions to our childhood trauma are responsible for all of the angry, upset, alienated, egocentric and competitive behavior we see in the world today.
I could see how this had contributed to my childhood relations with my sister. Before I was born, she received all of the love and attention from my parents. After I was born, their love was split between the two of us. My birth created an attention deficit for my sister, which had her questioning her worth and taking it out on me. Though my treatment toward her was deplorable, I can see now how it was a defensive reaction to her inexplicable dislike for the ways I got attention and love instead of her. In fact, I can see how all of the terrible things humanity does to each other and themselves are symptoms of this root cause.
In conclusion, my quest for more love has lead me to a profound understanding of worth.
We are a worthy species, which has been undergoing 2 million years of a very brave quest to develop nerve based adaptation. We are worthy individuals, whose condemnable behaviors can be explained through the trauma response to the absence of the nurturing and altruism of our genetic inheritance. And what a revelation of Freedom this is for us all! As Always, Namaste! ~ The universal light within me, salutes and honors the universal light within you! ~
Image credits: Breaking Free https://sweetykannoth.wordpress.com/2014/12/12/breaking-free/ License: Unknown