Episode 009 – I AM Enough (You’re Not Broken & There’s Nothing Wrong With You)

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Note: This blog post serves as an accompaniment to the corresponding podcast episode of A Changed Mind, where we’ll distill down the core ideas of this week’s theme, along with additional distinctions and insights. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can go here to do so.  Enjoy.

If you go on YouTube and search “What To Do When You Feel Broken”, your results will consist of thousands of videos with tens of millions of combined views. Clearly, a lot of people are navigating through life and searching for an answer as to why they feel broken or like there’s something wrong with them.  And I’m sure if you took the time to go through some of them, you’d get some good advice.  You’d probably hear platitudes like “push through the pain”…“you’re not defined by your struggles, but by how you rise above them”…“mistakes are stepping stones to success”…and the like.  But if I could offer a different perspective, it would be this:

There’s nothing wrong with you.  You’re NOT broken. You’re exactly who you need to be and where you need to be right now.

So why do so many people feel otherwise?  The simple answer is that they’ve (unconsciously) allowed their minds to be hijacked by unintelligent ideas, limiting  beliefs, and resistance that’s become this ongoing self-fulling prophecy that’s manifested into the way they’re experiencing life.  We’ve unpacked how to overcome those things several times already in previous posts, so today I’m simply going to expand on the perspective above and offer a different lens through which you can view the feeling of being broken.

You’re Not Broken…You’re Simply Becoming More Self-Aware

What’s happening is that you’re becoming more aware of the things you think and feel that you don’t like.  You’re recognizing the aspects of your life that you’d like to change.  And the more you can accept and allow this understanding to unfold, rather than allow your mind to direct its focus inward in self-judgment, the more you can focus on detaching from the resistance you have toward your desires – and work towards fulfilling them.

Easier said than done, perhaps.  I know that when I was struggling with my self-worth and living with this constant, nagging feeling that there was something wrong with me, I’d try to overcome it by doing more.  I figured that if I could just produce at a higher level, achieve more, create more success, and accumulate more money, then I’d get to the point where I could justify the fact that there was, in fact, nothing wrong with me.

But I learned very quickly that for every new level of success you achieve, you’re never really satisfied.  There’s always going to be other people who have more and who are – at least by appearances – living better, more fulfilling lives.  So this “more monster” creeps in and perpetuates these beliefs that there’s something wrong with us, we’re somehow broken, and that nothing we do will ever be “enough”.

The problem with believing that there’s something wrong with us is that our brain is a goal-achieving machine.  So if you believe that there’s something wrong with you or that you’re broken, essentially you’re going to pay attention to all the evidence that supports that belief.  The relationship you don’t have or want.  The business that’s not as successful as you want it to be.  The health challenge you’re currently going through.  All of those things seem to support the belief that you must be “missing” something or that there’s something wrong with you.

So you’re going to ignore everything that you ARE doing, you ARE achieving, and you ARE good at.  When, ironically, those very things are indicators that you are, in fact, NOT BROKEN.  Stick with me here.  The fact that you got up today, you brushed your teeth, you accomplished something on your to-do list, you’re reading this now – all indicate that you’re not broken.  There’s nothing wrong with you.  You’re alive and well, right?

Even the very thoughts, perceptions, and emotions that result from the belief that you’re broken, the very things causing stress, depression, anxiety, and overwhelm in your life, are evidence that you’re alive.  So again, I’d suggest that the reason your mind is causing them to materialize is to “teach” you what it is you do and do not wish to experience.  In other words, you’re getting more and more aware of what you want less of, and what you want more of in your life.

As I’ve established many times in the content I put out, the first step to create any type of change in your life is to become aware of your desires.  For whatever reason, a higher power (God, Jesus, Allah, Infinite Intelligence, Source, Spirit – whatever you want to call it) has structured the human experience to require that we go through these ups and downs, trials and errors, satisfactions and sufferings, to help us get clearer on what we DO want our lives to look like.

There’s Nothing wrong With You…You’re Simply Going Through A Healing Process

In a previous post on the topic of overcoming anxiety, I spoke about how anxiety was actually a natural healing mechanism of the body – a process of alleviating ourselves of dissonant energy.  Anxiety is much like a fever.  When we have a fever, we allow it to take place and to pass, knowing that the body is doing its job to heal whatever bacterial, viral, or stress-induced foreign invader has disrupted our immune system. 

The same is true when we experience the overwhelm of our limiting beliefs such as feeling like we’re broken.  You had some experience as a child that led you to form this belief that something’s wrong with you.  And as we’ve established in previous posts, those beliefs were simply misunderstandings or misinterpretations of the experience at hand.  

As an adult, these beliefs rise up in the form of our thoughts and emotions that accumulate dissonant energy in your system over time.  It might feel stressful or overwhelming at times, but it’s important to recognize that a healing process is taking place.  Like a fever, you can choose to either give it all of your attention and potentially exacerbate its unfolding OR to disconnect from those feelings and allow them to pass – to allow the “fever” to break.

Most people make the mistake of giving these beliefs, thoughts and emotions a meaning (ie. there must be something wrong with me) and try to resist them, avoid them, or brute force them out of their system.  Again, I’d offer the alternative of simply accepting that these beliefs are boiling over and allow them to be released – that’s what your body is actually trying to do.

And as you begin to stop resisting these thoughts and emotions and stop buying into the misperception that you’re broken or there’s something wrong with you, what happens over time is that those patterns or habits of thought and emotion lessen and lessen.

As you allow them, rather than trying to resist them, you can start to become more thoughtful about them. You can evaluate them. You can take a look at some of these thoughts and ideas and question them. And what you’ll often find is that when you, for example, journal out the thoughts that you’re thinking and the emotions that you’re having, you have an ability to reprocess them through a more intelligent lens.

To summarize where we are so far…

Whatever you’re thinking, feeling, or (falsely) believing right now is perfectly normal.  You’re not broken, you never have been broken, you never will be broken.  There’s nothing wrong with you now, there never was, and there never will be.

You’re simply in a process of growing in self-awareness – which is a good thing!  You’re learning what you like and what you don’t like, and your body is processing the emotions that come up as a healing process.

You Are Enough, You Are Unique, and You Are NOT Alone In This Journey

I’ve worked with enough people to come to the conclusion that we’re all wired the same way.  I know how easy it is to think that we’re the only one experiencing the problems we have, but we’re definitely not. 

What can exacerbate this feeling of brokenness is comparing our lives to others.  Now, comparing isn’t an inherently bad thing – it can be a useful tool in our growth.  But our ability to comprehend the difference between “good comparison” and “bad comparison” has become distorted.  

A lot of people look to other people’s lives to justify and give context to their own.  I know I did.  Logically, it doesn’t make any sense.  But we do it anyway.  The truth is that we’re all on our own, unique journey.

I don’t know specifically what Spirit has planned for you, but I know that you and a higher power were in agreement before you incarnated on this planet.  The agreement is that you were going to be born to specific people who were going to pre-program and give you the “gift” of trauma, that you were going to navigate through life and learn some things, that were going to experience some challenges along the way…

And that all of that was divinely designed to set you up for the transformation into an extraordinary life.  I don’t know what your potential looks like, but I know that it’s limitless and you are capable of true greatness – seriously.

The mistake we make is looking at what someone else’s experience is and thinking that should be our experience.  The reality is that everybody’s on a different timeline.  Everyone’s dealing with their own batch of limiting beliefs and resistance – whether they show it on social media or not.  Everybody is born into and grows up in a different set of circumstances and situations.

At the end of the day, it’s your beliefs that dictate your destiny.  You get to control the direction of your future and you alone are the arbiter of identifying and eliminating the resistance preventing you from fulfilling your every desire.  Whatever you’re going through right now is unique to you, and it’s all the setup for whatever your greatness is going to look like.

There’s nothing wrong with you.
There’s nothing you need to “do”.
You’re not broken.
You’re doing just fine.
You’re good enough.
You’re loved.
You’re whole.