A few years ago, I had a terrible omen-like vision of bitterness in the distance running towards me at a breakneck speed. It was the first time in my life that I can remember worrying about becoming bitter and was sparked by an experience fostering a dog of all the things.

I had the sense that if I didn't realize my dreams soon, it was going to be too late and I would become one of those bitter, cynical people who had given up on life. I felt that if something didn't change soon, bitterness was going to seep into my bones and become a part of my physiology and that simply willing myself to "mind over matter" things was no longer enough - things were falling apart faster than they were coming together, and nothing I was doing was working anymore. It was one of the worst feelings I had ever experienced and the start of new level of depression, despair and hopelessness that lasted the next three years.

Now, up until that point, each year that had passed since my dark high school years I had actually felt like I was getting younger - more hopeful, more innocent, more connected to myself and my dreams. Inspired by my eastern philosophy (mostly buddhism) upbringing, at the age of 17, I realized that the negativity I had somehow become proud of in myself was really just an ego identity I'd copied from my mom - that I was just a shell of a person, and that there was another way to see the world - things didn't have to be so grim. It was a genuinely empowering realization, and so off I went to college determined to become a well adjusted positive person and eventually attain some form of spiritual mastery. 

And it seemed that year after year I was moving forward, becoming more well adjusted, having more positive experiences with people that counteracted my early experiences of low self worth. But, for reasons I still don't fully understand, it wasn't really the progress I had thought, and the skills I acquired over the two decades following high school were no match for the realities of life, let a lone for a creative entrepreneurship journey. 

Little did I know that how I felt in high school was perhaps not the best baselines to compare my progress in life. The despair, bitterness, negativity and anger I felt and acted out in high school was quite intense. So in a way, each year I felt myself feeling more confident was really just me digging myself out of massive disregulation and into a semi-functioning emotionally regulated "adult" state. It was not me healing some great wounds or "catching" up to people who had been born with stable regulated systems, as I delusionally thought was going on.

Little did I know, all the work I had done so far was built on the faulty premise that there was something wrong with me, that it was my fault I couldn't be mindful and in the moment. 

Little did I know that I had embarked on a healing processes without proper guidance and support, and what was really going on those two decades after high school was me swinging to another extreme - desperately willing myself to see the positive in everything, while rejecting the parts of myself that had been negative and cynical (sometimes for good reason!). I had concluded that those parts of me were all faulty and been mistaken perceptions of the world and that I could simply decide one day to see things positively and be done with it.

But I now know that true healing can't happen in an atmosphere of rejection. You don't grow up to be a suicidal 15 year old simply because you were "just being negative", or even due to some chemical imbalance in the brain. The level of emotional instability I demonstrated back then (and even onward through my 20s, though then in the context of at least trying to change) doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens from repeated experiences of being unable to get needs met over and over and over again.

Subscribing to lofty ideals of Buddhism, the prominent religious philosophy in my life growing up, without proper guidance and context, wound up taking the form of spiritual bypassing. I admit, believing I could simply will myself to be more mindful and think good thoughts, allowed me to have hope and gave me the ability to function in a world that actually is full of great tragedy.  But it only got me so far and kept me removed from reality and therefore really living. Now that I am waking up, I'm seeing veils being lifted in ways I didn't expect. 

1. Everything happens for a reason. We can make one up retrospectively, but there’s no way to know if there’s any kind of grand design and in fact you could argue there's  more proof to the contrary.

2. Everything will work out or be Ok. There’s no way to guarantee that. And what are we defining “ok” as? Not dead? Sure, everything is always OK if you want to think of it that way. Life is life. When we die we go back to oneness. I guess that’s ok too. What doesn’t kill you, doesn’t kill you, and if it does, you’re dead and at least not in pain anymore.

3. Life only gives us what we are ready for. Bullshit! One definition of trauma, (physical, mental or emotional) is “too much too soon”.  Conversely, sometimes you can handle more but, for a number reasons, do not. I never had to face the loss of a super close loved one until this year. And at first I thought life graciously waited until I could handle it. Then I realized, no, in the face of losing a loved one imminently, I rose to the occasion - because there really wasn’t an alternative, and became one who could handle it. I grew so much because of it. I feel now that I could have taken on so much more earlier and to do so would have allowed me to grow a lot more. Instead I hid away from much of life's normal challenges, further stunting an already stunted emotional system.

4. Things will work out, you’ll find someone, you’ll find peace. Actually, my family heritage shows that is not the case, and it takes immense concentration and work to steer one's self towards a course where life is going to feel safe, kind and rewarding, both intimately with friends and experientially with money to the extent where one gains true freedom, autonomy and is allowed to live with dignity with access to healthcare, healthy foods, and the therapy needed to overcome cPTSD and early childhood traumas. Any slip in focus on this path to healing can set you back decades, if not generations. There is absolutely no guarantee you will meet someone and have a good life.

5. Time heals all wounds. Time and facing the pain in the right way with the right help can heal wounds and yes, the sting of certain disappointments surely can fade over time; but with respect to deep impacts, time by itself often just serves as a boiler room for unmet needs and traumas to grow.

6. There is something that I’m meant to do and I’ll figure it out.  Millions of people die every day on their way to figuring out their purpose, many with unlived dreams that die inside them. There’s no guarantee of figuring it out or living it. Unless you were raised in a loving environment with basic human emotional survival skills, it will take every last bit of focus, energy and concentration to turn your ship in the right direction and then live long enough to see some of your dreams actually come true.

7. Slow and steady wins the race. This is another old adage that is true in certain contexts but is by no means universal and can definitely be misunderstood. The wisdom in this is basically not to erratically rush things because you can wind up making costly mistakes that set you back as a result.

But if you want to get anywhere, steady, yes, is important (though there's no rule that says major spurts of creativity can't also be helpful), AND in many contexts the pace needs to be at least a brisk walk. Because it IS possible to go so slow that you will not reap the benefits of your actions in this life time. Furthermore, there are things that require momentum to accomplish, especially big changes. A great nature analogy for this is leaping over, say a wide river or crevice. If it's a great enough distance, walking up to it and then jumping may never allow you to get over it, no matter how many times you repeat it - you may actually need a running start.

​This adage brings up another big theme for me, namely that many truth do have great wisdom, but are meant for certain contexts, not to be used as a blanked truth for every situation. For someone like me, with a mathematical/science brain looking for universal laws, it has taken awhile to grasp this.

8. The Law of Attraction (LOA) is a neutral universal force of natural (spiritual and physical) that we can easily work with at the level of thought to create the life we desire. LOA is a monstrous beast and is behind why abused children put themselves in abusive situations in their adult life that reinforce the self perception and internal map of the world and their worth in it (and/or become abusers themselves). LOA is the reason the rich get richer and the poor get poorer - it's reflected in the math behind interest rates and exponential functions.

Additionally, evidence shows that trauma and childhood conditioning lives in our bodies more than our minds, that the mind often actually serves as a defense mechanism against feeling our bodies and the wisdom stored in them, and that our thoughts are the effects of dysregulated nervous system as much if not more than the cause of it. Thus, the focus on changing our lives with thoughts alone is like trying to make a marble sculpture with a toothpick. 

9. That I am responsible for my actions.  I know, I know. this one is loaded - but it actually brings this piece full circle from where I started about going from extremes. Ever since I realized in high school that I had a choice in how to look at life, I concluded that I had created all misery in my life thus far by having a negative attitude. Now, if we get down to the cellular law of attraction level, sure, I have attracted and created everything in my life - cause and effect. But that's not the whole picture, doesn't get to the what actually caused our cells and subconscious to wire and attract the way it does in the first place - do you blame a cheetah for being born a cheetah and being a carnivore? Is it going to think itself into being a zebra?

I've been carrying this burden of everything being my fault my whole life - I felt responsible for my family disfunction even before my high school epiphany. All that high school realization about having a choice to think more positively about things did was add more weight to an already self blaming predisposition. *(OK, maybe it was an honest insight with some truth, but it just was so incomplete.)

​Past lives aside (which is a nice way to explain the injustices in this world but is NOT the way to heal personal trauma), it is NOT my fault that I was wired a certain way, that I was raised with neglect or trauma, that I developed such low self worth and then attracted low self worth situations that further perpetuated ancestral stories. It's not my fault that trying to get out of the cycle often just kept perpetuating the cycle. It's not even my fault that I had a predisposition for seeking help or educating myself - that was wired in too.

I'm starting to believe that where I am in my life could have been largely predicted within some margin of error, based on the upbringing and genes and environment I was born into. (Read The Body Keeps the Score if you don't believe me).  Is everything predetermined? I can't say for sure of course, and in many ways it really doesn't matter because we are still going to try our damnedest to heal. 

The point is, the act of "taking responsibility for all one's actions" is so much more nuanced than I took it to mean and can in fact be toxic for those who already blame themselves for everything.

So much to say about this. So many different ways to say it. So many different experiences of leaping. ​The one that comes to mind a lot is one that until recently haunted me. 

A few years ago I took an awkward leap of faith and did not land on the other side, or wherever people wind up when they tell the happy ending stories about taking that leap of faith and the net appearing. The idea behind that saying is relatively down to earth. When we take (measured) risks, we often find that things work out much better than we feared - people/opportunities come into our lives at the right time creating a smoother landing than we expected or even hoped for. I know that has happened to me, but usually with things that didn't feel like a big leap (i.e. by the time I made the "big" change, it was really just the next natural step.) And I believe that big leaps that end beautifully must happen to others - but we usually only hear about it from the people that make it because they lived to tell the tale and their success brought them into the spotlight where they could share it, where we would wind up hearing about it.

But what about the others who didn’t survive, or who are still falling?

It doesn’t always have a neat little ending - people can die in pursuit of their dreams (well, we all will die eventually on the way somewhere). Or things can get worse before they get better, which is what happened to me when I left my day job and created my first children’s book only to spend all my money producing it and winding up virtually homeless and reliving childhood nightmares for several years after.

My initial understanding of the experience was two fold. One, that I took the leap a bit prematurely, not well calculated and with a lot of anxiety. It was more than the healthy excited anxiety when one stretches outside ones comfort zone; and more like the panic and stress from being way too far out without the proper resources and support in place. 

And two, that net didn’t appear because I didn’t have enough faith. While  I whole heartedly believed that with faith it would appear, there was a part of me that didn’t believe it would appear for me, and/or that I didn’t deserve it - possibly in part due to the lack of preparation and strategy. (The strategy and planning piece ties into the faith piece so much that it's hard to untie them in way to really know what is causing what).

The frustrating part of it, was that when I wandered back to the 9-5 job world with my tail between my legs, I still felt like I was falling. Sure, I evaded homelessness and brought myself back up to being able to support myself, but still worse off in many ways than I was before I took the leap. Meanwhile, day by day, my dream of having a successful career in children’s media continued to grow and evolve while every step I took was too slow and ineffective to make a dent or get a foothold anywhere, so the gap between where I was and my dreams just kept growing. It was a literal nightmare.  

And up until a few months ago, I was still falling. A spiritual retreat to Peru in 2019 to treat trauma didn't stop the fall - it may have changed the course of my fall, but I still can't tell if it was for the better yet - as I was also re-traumatized and had things come up without the proper support to heal it.

A spiritual entrepreneurship program in 2020 was the first thing that started to slow the decent with some basic online business skills and exposure to a group of wonderful supportive women. At the end of the program I finally got it. I finally received the unequivocal message that I needed not just to get trauma therapy, but from the RIGHT people. 

When I started to get the trauma therapy I needed, I started to learn how to fly, in bits and pieces: how to navigate stress and the unknown without crumbling and falling, and how to show up outside my comfort zone consistently in baby steps. 

While I still feel like I'm falling, I'm starting to wonder whether we every really find solid ground. I'm starting to realize that wha ti need to do is learn an entirely different skill set - how to hold myself above the abyss of helplessness without a corporate job, and to learn how to fly in the creative entrepreneurship world. Let's see!

This quote really resonates:

“The bad news is, we are falling through the air without a parachute. The good news is, there is no ground."

~Chogyam Trungpa

If you are wondering “why am I not doing that thing I should/want to be doing”, it may not be laziness, lack of will power, or inertia, or stuckness, or even self sabotage. And at the very least, labeling it as such is not particularly constructive. (How useful a particular perspective is in motivating us to change depends greatly on context - what tools we currently have for navigating change, where we are on a particular transformation journey, the size and type of traumas we are dealing with, etc.).

What may be a more illuminating way to look at it is that you are not doing whatever that thing is because it does not fit in with your sense of self worth or identity. Like it literally cannot co-exist with your current sense of self.

And yes, “just doing it” is a way to develop a new identity, but it’s effectiveness depends again on where you are in the process of change, your current toolbox, the intensity of the wound you are uncovering. So just willing yourself to do something doesn’t always have staying power.

For several years I was resisting doing something I really wanted to do and surely would bring me joy and change my life for the bette. And it wasn’t even about doing something painful like running to get fit or something! I remember sitting down and literally feeling in pain as I was going to do something enjoyable! It was like oil and water. The north end of two magnets. Like two incompatible things coming together. I couldn’t make it happen, even if I did go for weeks or even month periods of “doing it” the doing it was so painful that it wasn't sustainable.

The only I have explanation in retrospect, especially now that I am doing and enjoying that thing daily, is that I literally couldn’t do it because I didn’t feel worthy of the joy and life that it could bring. It’s as simple (and twisted) as that.

But then the question is how do you build the new belief of being worthy or of holding the identity, say, of an artist or writer or dancer or athlete etc, something you know you are meant to be and will be sooo fulfilling!

It doesn’t have to take a long time, but for me it took a somewhat intensive immersion among other likeminded people, ongoing accountability and connection, deep healing from specialists in trauma, self worth, & somatic experiencing, and of course baby action steps along the way. The biggest thing though I think is the trauma therapy. Trauma goes deep into the nonverbal physical, and colors every aspect of ones life. I’d say there’s the biggest bang for your buck, but even that may not always be what’s called for and can be iffy if you can’t find the right person, or if you aren’t surrounded by the right support system while going through the therapy. (I’ve tried DIY trauma books to somewhat disastrous results, e.g. nervous breakdowns at work).

(One caveat is that the block doesn't always have to be about not having a certain level of self worth. It may be about a just having a hard time transitioning to a new identity, say from engineer to designer, writer to actor, etc. However, it's probably safe to assume that built into the identity change is the belief that this new identity is closer to your calling, to something you would love to do or simply something you want to try to bring you joy. And so if you are stuck too long in that transition, that is when I would bet that this is not just about adjusting to a new identity, this about feeling worthy of the joy involved in exploring a new thing that your gut knows will be fulfilling for you.
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All this is to inspire some more gentleness towards ourselves about maybe why we haven’t been doing that thing we know will bring joy and benefit us, or even resisting doing the work of trauma therapy itself. There is a reason why there is so much unhealed emotional pain in this world. Competent trauma healers aren’t lining our streets the way acupuncturist, chiropractors, massage therapists are (yet). And the right one may be hard to find. And on top of that, there is an elusive factor of timing that I’m truly unsure how much control we have over it (will leave the free will/destiny enigma for another day tho).

Over time, I will building a list of quality resources so that people that read my blog and are interested will have some options to explore.

Xoxoxo

This message is just a few lines long, but the journey to embody self worth can be decades. Our self worth is imprinted on us as a young age, embedded in our psyche so deeply, it's hard to know where to begin to undo the negative messaging. Of course, it's rarely intentionally put upon us, but often as a result of unresolved traumas in other people. We absorb the energies around us and then process them in our own ways, coming to conclusions about ourselves, and our place in the world. 

Understanding the messaging and beliefs we took on and replacing them with new messages; and taking action outside our comfort zone are two things that can help. It seems to be a process of daily actions, daily rephrasing, and constant vigilance in watching our thoughts. And the stakes are high and the change needs to start now!

How amazing would it be if we could just close our eyes and leap into a new version of ourself, not where all our supposed “flaws” are fixed, but simply a version where we have deep self worth!

Do you know how free and powerful we would be!!?

Well, the time is now.

What has become very clear to me, is that low self worth is very destructive, not just to ourselves, but to others. When self esteem is low, it is very difficult to be generous. We think that putting ourselves down is humble, but it actually forces us to invert into self absorption and feeling sad. We focus so much energy on proving that we ARE worthy, or on earning love (which can't actually be earned since it's unconditional!) that we can't share our inherent gifts and love with the world.

Self Worth is our birth right. Self Worth is integral to living a fully expressed life. It is the basic ingredient in being able to give to others here on earth. It is time to take a stand, for ourselves and those around us, so that the world does not miss out on the one in a trillion phenomenon that has graced this world - ourselves.

Building self-worth is serious process that usually involves digging deep to the wounds that echo the deeply embedded low self worth beliefs that run the show of our lives. These wounds are usually from traumas, early childhood ones that often later get reinforced by adult ones. 

Healing and reprogramming happen at a level deeper than thought, and much research has found that the way in is through the body, mindful awareness to it. 

​Some healing modalities that I'm finding helpful include somatic experiencing ancestral clearing meditations. The most important part is to find someone you trust to do this with you. I do NOT recommend using a book or audio and doing it alone, because reprogramming trauma beliefs requires an external regulator outside us - essentially acting as the calm parent we didn't have when our nervous system was being wired.  Some may find doing it alone works, but for me, someone with cPTSD and a child of an alcoholic, doing it alone was actually harmful. Please email me if you would like more information.

Drawn to Life I’m rebranding my art to “Drawn to Life”, which is resonating with me even more than “Amused to Life”, the working title of my poetry collection.

I so badly want my art to become a business, full time, but I’m not quite there where I have a full line of products to offer. So rather than a being a business name (like I had with D’inkling Publishing years back) it’s the name of the process I am going through to heal.

My intention above anything else is to heal from the trauma of the past 10 years since I left my day job along with the essential security and self worth I needed to function. Although not perhaps my deepest spirit's calling, that job gave me a healthy community, dignity and an amount of freedom and control in my life I have not had since starting out on my own path, (which seems both obvious and counter intuitive). Leaving my halfway prestigious career and financially secure life left me vulnerable to the defaults of my programing, attracting very scary people into my life. People who since high school had been few and far between, rushed into my life in droves.

Or maybe I just noticed the weird patterns more when I left my day job, which means apart from some really good friends from high school and college and some rare birds since, my whole life had been one long nightmare. I knew it yet I didn’t know it.
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It was addiction and quick fixes to numb the pain and fill the emptiness I had felt ever since growing out of the make believe phase of childhood.

It was an endless search to find a conceptual understanding that would solve the problem and set me free of the emptiness and feeling of unlovable ness. A

It was a life in which behind
nearly every thought and motion was the question “ok, now am I good enough?”

How does one serve others from such a broken place?

So how to I show up as myself where I am genuinely despite  being so lost.

By sharing my journey of drawing myself back to life

My only hope is that through drawing I will find healing and parts of me that have been hidden since I can remember will come to life. That I will literally and figuratively draw myself to life in every waking hour that I’m not wading through Excel docs to put food on the table.

It is my dearest desire that I stumble upon an art form or practice that resonates with others while also healing me, so I can be a living artist instead of the dying one I am now. Everyday I spend working in Excel and not doing my real work is another death - and this is no exaggeration - it’s simply how it feels. 10 years is way too long to be working on something and making no progress…

But seeing clearly now, there is opportunity for a fresh start. I am so excited for this new beginning! 

Love, 
​Amanda Ianthe

This musing was inspired by a fellow graduate of Made to Do This, who wrote:

"I want you to picture a person who, when you walk into a room, you are drawn too. A person that radiates light. A person that is full of self assurance, completely comfortable in their own skin. They don’t have to be surrounded by a crowd, but there is a quiet assurance that they are right where they should be and they are there with intention. They are honest and REAL.....What’s 1 word you would use to describe that person- just one."

I noticed two categories of answers - one was to describe the person on the inside - "loving, peaceful, self assured", and the other describing more the person’s impact on others on the outside "radiant, magnetic, attractive." The first is the cause, the second is the effect.

It made me remember something I've always deeply believed - that our inner selves are what attracts people to us - in a new way.

It's more than being a good person deep down (aren’t we all) and it’s more than thinking good thoughts about others. It’s the relationship we have with ourselves that really defines who we are inside - how we feel inside...and how aligned we are with our deepest truths. And this alignment and these feelings are what attracts our experiences.
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This really touched me. It's become clear that I am in need of a new shift in how I talk and speak to myself inside to get through some blocks that have been challenging me for the past few years. I can see a new life opening before me.

When I first heard someone associate the heart and love with action and doing, while something about it resonated, it didn't feel very intuitive to me. But when I thought of the connecting link being courage it started to make more sense. It takes courage to act, especially outside of our comfort zone, where courage isn’t necessarily the absence of fear, but the willingness to face it and go forward anyways, thus conquering it. And then there’s the idioms of “lion-hearted” or having the “heart of a lion", which means to have the courage of a lion, a courageous heart.

What’s interesting is how the heart is also associated with love, which made me explore the connection between love and courage. It doesn’t seem to be commonly taught, at least not explicitly. I think about years ago when someone told me the opposite of love isn’t hate, but fear, while the opposite of hate is more like attraction or admiration. Fear is contraction, love is expansion. Courage is the ability to face fear and go forth, and although courage isn’t exactly the opposite of fear, maybe it takes love to be courageous and face and conquer fear.

It’s also kind of funny to think that the Tin Man and the Lion in the Wizard of Oz were redundant. Maybe Dorothy needed only two friends - the scarecrow and the lion. Since the heart is what the lion needs to have the courage.