I’ve heard of a lot of ego issues and attachments.
I mean A LOT.
One of the most pernicious is a sense of worthlessness and self-hatred.
People want these feelings to go away, and on the path to ending ego suffering (including an ego that feels worthless), we don’t bombard ourselves with ineffective tools and affirmations.
We go to the root cause.
In this post, you’ll get an overview of what that looks like to help you find the appropriate help to target the root causes of your feelings of worthlessness.
Step 1: Investigate the Source of Worthlessness
It’s understandable that people want to feel better now. But true resolution of any issue that I’ve seen (and I’ve been teaching people the path out of suffering since 2010) usually means you feel worse before you feel better.
It starts with seeing the real source or sources of the issue. Here are questions to help you:
What am I specifically feeling in my body?
What and where are the strongest sensations of worthlessness?
What are the emotions?
Vagueness is a trap, and you have to learn to really look at and feel what is happening in your body.
Somehow the seeing makes it feel worse, but actually, you’re making headway. You’re beginning to understand what’s going on.
Step 2: Dig Deeper
Most people go surface deep with their investigation. Again, I get it; you want the problem gone.
As you investigate, you need to look at different aspects that impact your mental, emotional, and physical health.
Feeling worthless is a whole body experience.
That means you want to investigate the quality of your:
- relationships
- breathing
- nutrition,
- thought loops,
- sleep and rest,
- activity,
- housing situation, and
- local environment.
You are an interconnected being. The truth of oneness is that everything is interacting with everything else. Your body is interconnected within and without.
Step 3: Embrace Complexity to Simplify
Now, you’re seeing that you are a complex being with a lot of complex responses to a complex world.
That can feel daunting at first.
However, seeing complexity opens the door to simplify things.
Target one major issue and work on that.
For example, if your nutrition is poor, then learn about that and the ways you can help you gut microbiome to produce the proper biochemicals that support healthy functioning.
The gut microbiome plays a foundational and multi-layered role in shaping mood, cognitive function, and decision-making, operating through an intricate interplay of neurochemical, immune, and endocrine pathways.
The Gut Microbiome and Its Impact on Mood and Decision-Making: A Mechanistic and Therapeutic Review
If your sleep is poor, then working on improving sleep habits and/or your living situation.
If your relationships are unkind, then work on building your social skills and improving them.
If your relationships are abusive, LEAVE!
With that said, don’t do too much. You’ll overwhelm yourself, and you can set up a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. The worthless ego is looking to reinforce that it is worthless and/or a failure. Doing too much plays into that distorted way of thinking.
Step 4: Pause to Integrate
After you’ve targeted something and made lasting changes, see how you feel. I encourage you to create your own rating system to see how much of an impact it has on your emotional state.
Some changes have quicker impacts. Others take time.
This is a pause, not procrastination or stopping.
People seem to fall between the two poles of over-working and constantly doing and doing nothing/quitting when things get tough.
The middle path through embraces pauses, and then you get going with the next targeted issue.
Integrating Your Spiritual Awakening
Step 5: Celebrate Your Victories
It’s important to acknowledge when things work and go well. People with a chronic state of feeling worthless often need to heal their minds through congratulatory self talk.
If you’re feeling better, you earned it!
Positive self talk works when you have achieved things. Too many people lean on it as the fix to everything without doing the inner work. That creates a dissonance between the unresolved issues and the attempts to soothe yourself with positive thinking.
Celebrating victories doesn’t have that dissonance because you really did something for yourself worth feeling positive about.
Congratulations!
Step 6: Repeating and Learning from Failure
It won’t be all victories. There’s a lot to learn from failure, and building a new sense of self–a conscious ego–that can absorb failure and grow is critical in all of this.
As you repeat these cycles, you get better at them as you get better at everything else through practice and sincerity.
Enlightenment: Give Up the Spiritual Chase
Enlightenment Opens the Door to Transformation
As I’ve said through the years, you’ll always have an ego. Enlightenment helps you to realize that you’re not attached to any ego much less one with self-worth issues.
Enlightenment also doesn’t fix the issues or poor emotional, mental, and physical patterns.
In letting go of ego, you find that you are free to transform and to transform out of awful self-worth issues that only ever drug you down in life.
