Are You Suffering From Low Self-Esteem?

I just got back from leading The Shadow Process workshop in Florida and I've been leading The Shadow Effect Online Workshop for the last two weeks. When I'm working with people, I'm always shocked by how low everybody's self esteem is, even people with great lives who feel like they have a lot and have done well. Still they suffer from these bad feelings which tell them that somehow they're not good enough.

So how do we raise our self-esteem? There is only one way -- to really learn the lessons and see how we can use our inadequacies and our perceived inadequacies to thrive. When we expose the lessons and the wisdom in our darkest shame, the world will never be the same. In Why Good People Do Bad Things, I wrote about how I'm always blown by looking at my own life and my own journey from darkness into light. I wanted to share this excerpt from the book with you.

We are born in the image of our divine creator, pure and innocent, and then the human experience (i.e., the split) begins. Our human experiences blind us from seeing the perfection in the imperfection and from mining for the gold that eagerly awaits our discovery. What if today you realized that it is not only your good self that must be loved but your wounded self as well? What if you knew for certain that it is your suffering and your pain that can lead you to living a life of goodness, virtue, and self-respect? I am here to tell you that it is the very thing that you despise and don't want to be that can help you become the person you always wanted to be.

It was my weakness and suffering from addiction that brought me to my knees and opened me to greater realities. Arrogance is what made me believe I knew more than most people, and it was ignorance that made me get down on my knees every night for years and beg God for spiritual wisdom and new ways to integrate my emotional pain. My fear of being called lazy gives me my drive. It is my vanity that dresses me in the morning and gets me to work out even when I'm tired. My fear of being a negligent mother makes sure that I go to all the flag football games (even when I'm busy) and drive my son to school (even when I'm tired and he could take the bus). It is my greed and love for fine things that drive me to work when others are out partying, and it is my denial of the evil and angry judgments of others that allows me to stand in front of group after group and tout my message -- to heal the split between the two forces that exist within each of us. And it is my depressive nature that birthed the Pollyanna in me that relentlessly tries to transform the untransformable and never gives up hope on the hopeless.

My feelings of inadequacy have me wake up in the morning and ask what I can do to make my world a better place. My need to matter, to be all used up when I die, was birthed out of the fear that I, Deborah Sue Ford, would die unnoticed, that I would be nothing more than a middle-class Jewish girl from Hollywood, Florida.

So I invite you to put away your judgments, lay down the boxing gloves that keep you fighting, and surrender to the love you are looking for. That love lives inside you. When properly dispensed, it will heal your greatest sorrow and wipe away your regrets. It will soothe your soul and nurture your aching heart. It will shine its light where there is darkness and lead you out of the darkness and into the light -- the light of love -- where the collective heart awaits your return.

Your Weekly Shadow Work

(1) Read Chapter 4 of Why Good People Do Bad Things which I'm making available for free on my website.

(2) After reading the chapter, spend at least 20 minutes journaling about what you learned and what resonated with you.

(3) Identify a quality about youself, an experience from your past or a circumstance in your life right now that you've been judging as bad or wrong. Begin to explore the gift or the wisdom that it brings you.

I promise you that once you see the patterns that are driving your behavior, if you are willing to learn the lessons that your life is delivering to you and find the gold that your darkness holds, you will finally be equipped and inspired to let go of the past and live an authentic life, a life you've only fantasized about -- a "someday" "one day" life.

With love and blessings,

Debbie Ford

Are You Trapped By Your Own Rhetoric?

Does this sound familiar? "It's all good." "I'll just think a good thought." "I'm better than I was last year." "Everything is as it should be." "It will happen next year." "It's all okay." "It's all their fault anyway."

The founder of Jungian psychology, Carl Jung, wrote, "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious." Now why would Carl Jung, one the greatest psychologists of our time, say that? Why would he want us to explore our shame, our guilt, our fear, our heartache, our envy, our incompetence, and our critical and insecure selves? Why is it that we can't just say affirmations, "imagine figures of light" and get to the place where we feel fulfilled, happy and content? I will assert it is because the gold really is hidden in our darkness. This is not just a feel-good platitude -- this is the truth. Shadow work isn't a spectator sport but an in-the-game, on-the-field, I'm-going-to-win-my-greatest-life-now kind of sport.

With the new year quickly approaching, you get to choose today. Are you going to go into 2010 with the same fears, insecurities, addictions, regrets, resentments and guilt that you carried into this year? Now is the time to use your critical self to move you forward and do some critical thinking to answer these three questions.

1. Is there something that you want that you've been wanting for over two years?

2. Is there something that you chronically complain about but yet you haven't been able to change it?

3. Are you waiting for someone to come save you or are you 100% accountable for living a phenomenal life?

If you answered yes to these, you're probably waiting but guess what? Nobody's coming -- nobody's coming to save you because they wouldn't want to rob you of the opportunity to save yourself. As my friend Brent BecVar describes in The Shadow Effect, one day you realize you're like a drowning person with someone holding your head under water. At some point, you realize that, if you want to live, you have to be the one that fights your way back to the surface. Are you ready to save yourself? Are you ready to truly live? Let me let you in on a little secret:

One way out of the trap of your own rhetoric is to join me in a one-time, exclusive Hay House Radio online workshop. I promise that if you spend eight weeks with me exploring The Shadow Effect, you will be freed from the prison of your own imaginary figures of light and empowered to win your greatest life.

With love and a not-so-gentle nudge,

Debbie Ford