Dumping the Doubt

Dumping the Doubt

I had the joy and privilege of working with a woman last night who is brilliant, and hilarious, hugely talented, charming and lovely. And who is changing. She works two jobs, as do many of us, is raising a family of delightful children, and contending a bit with her mom.

The reason I bring her up today is that, with all her occupations, she makes time to attend to her own evolution. She knows that she’s going to be enjoying a life even more fun than the one she is living now, which is already pretty fun, by spending a little time from time to time to work on herself. (And she has the presence of mind to know that Creative Questions is a very efficient way to do that.)

In our study group, of which she’s a member) we’ve been working on our Personal Doubt; that first bit of mislearning, that first moment of doubting our perfection, that colors everything we do. Oy oy oy. It tends to be a topic like self-worth, deserving, being right, mattering, and so on; those fundamental building blocks of a healthy personal esteem. It is often painful to look at, and address, and yet, when we get it and flip it into a good Creative Question, the relief is beyond worth it.

One of the reasons we feel challenged is because we are ashamed of having that doubt. The shame shoves us headlong into an icky spiral. We feel unworthy, we feel ashamed of feeling unworthy, and that feeling of shame makes us feel more unworthy and down we go, into a place where, not only do we doubt our perfection, some of us feel convinced that our personal perfection is impossible. Poor little, sweet we.

We respond in one of two ways: We buy it, and shut down, believing that our Doubt is true. . Or we fight it tooth and nail, trying to prove that our Doubt about ourselves is false. Both choices are exhausting. Both choices are swimming upstream. And neither choice repairs the damages caused by that first moment of doubt.

This is the essential bump, that infected pimple on our self-esteem that needs to be healed. Until we hit this, things will improve, but they won’t quite sparkle.

So what do we do? How do we break out of this pattern, and get stuff moving in the direction we want?

Well first we need to identify our Personal Doubt. It’s our primary bad creative question, the one we ask the most, and usually something we are ashamed of. We can look at what we do for clues, we can listen to what we think. Remember, it’s a big, icky question that leaves us feels bad.

Once we’ve got it, we flip it into a good Creative Question. Sometimes it’s simple, Why am I not worthy? becomes Why am I worthy? But sometimes, we need to mess around with nuances. That first bad question has had a lot of time to create sub-questions, and sometimes we need to root those out in order that we might get to the tap root. So to speak.

However it goes, we are perfection in this moment, yes, and in this one, and this one. Our evolution takes us out of the loops of bad creative questions, and liberates us from judgement. As we evolve, we recognize that most of what we think not only isn’t Truth, but it’s also not even true. Phew!

How do I feel when I feel my perfection?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 03122013