How I Installed My Own Upper Limits…
I carried anger in myself for a long time, because I felt I had to be the one in my family that acknowledged a big trauma that happened.. by carrying anger about it.
No matter how happy I wanted to be, how evolved and liberated and joyful and blissed out… I could never get there, to the level that I knew was possible, because I was carrying righteous anger inside that didn’t feel that I deserved to feel truly happy in life.. How could I? I had to be the angry one.
I didn’t realize this at the time, but carrying around this anger affected how I showed up in my work, in my relationships, and with my kids.
It wasn’t until I was able to acknowledge, give a voice to, and then release this anger that I was carrying “for my family,” that I was able to tap into deeper levels of presence, peace, joy, bliss, and pleasure in my daily lived experience.
We all have our own upper limits that have been programmed into our subconsciouses and our nervous systems.
These present as unconscious problems that kick in to keep us at the habituated “carrying capacity” for how much joy, success, thriving, etc we allow ourselves to experience.
Once we exceed what our subconscious system has set as “this is how good you can feel in life, this is how much love you can experience in relationships, this is how much pleasure you can have in your day to day experience, etc,” we come into an “upper limit problem,” which brings us back down to the “safe,” habituated level of thriving, of feel-good, of enjoyment of life, of being present (or lack thereof for all of these).
This is a universal issue that everyone experiences to some degree, just by nature of our humanness.
We pretty much all have awareness of the external obstacles we are facing which are keeping us from getting what we want, BUT/AND we also have our own internalized mechanisms which are at play.
Worthiness, deservingness, shame, guilt… these are HUGE obstacles, internal programs, and nervous system channels that have been imprinted SO deeply based on our life experiences and those of our lineages, that keep us from what we truly want.
We can spend SOOO much time, money, and other energetic resources cultivating our desires and figuring out what our external obstacles to those are, and if we don’t address the fact that on an essential core level, we don’t actually feel worthy…
… or if some part of us doesn’t feel that what we desire is actually in alignment with our North Star and the highest good in life (ie. Experiencing pleasure during sex is often seen as a desire, but paradoxically there are also deeply ingrained programs that pleasure in the body isn’t in alignment with what God wants for us, due to some religious programming, etc..)..
It’s very very challenging to step into what we truly desire and then allow ourselves to have that, when we have these underlying internal blockages happening.
So many of us at first glance are like, “Of COURSE, I’m completely worthy of my goals and desires!”
Mentally, we are usually completely ready to have our desires.. but worthiness and deservingness, guilt and shame, lie much deeper than the mental realms.
I think it’s important to note: We can fall anywhere on the scale in terms of how worthy we feel we are of our true desires, and wherever we are at initially is not a judgement at all of our inherent worthiness, just a reflection of how many layers exist between our inherent complete worthiness of all desires, and our current daily lived experience of worthiness (which is based on programs and beliefs that aren’t usually in alignment with our capital T Truth).
What we bring our attention and intention to, grows. If we want to reach our desires and cultivate a greater sense of our worthiness to obtain those desires, we just need to bring our attention there.
And titrate our experience! We have to allow ourselves to feel safe enough with bite-sized expansions into more and more worthiness over time, in order to not overwhelm our system.
For my own healing journey, I know I was mind-blown when I realized I could break up my healing/expansion into bite-sized pieces as I increased my own awareness of my worthiness slowly, reassuring myself that I wouldn’t explode or die or disappear if I allowed myself to feel fully worthy of the life I desired for myself.
(I know, that may seem “dramatic” to some, but my nervous system really had some deeply ingrained patterns that I would not survive if I surpassed the worthiness of my female lineage.)
When we can do the healing and reprogram our nervous system in this way, and show ourselves that we won’t die or become outcast or explode or implode, that our body is able to handle and thrive and flourish carrying level 10+ worthiness… after a lifetime of limitation due to some part of us being TERRIFIED of being worthy of our desires… our whole life can change exponentially in every realm.
It’s so empowering.
This is monumental for those of us who carry a lot of lack, shame, unworthiness, etc, in our experience.. or those of us who can’t figure out why we “check all the boxes” but still can’t get what we want in life.
So many of us feel we need to fix ourselves or gain certain skills or knowledge before we can actually have what we desire.
In my experience working with women, worthiness — exactly as we are NOW (“warts and all”)— is actually a foundational piece to establish… NOT “bettering” ourselves to the point we are “actually worthy” of our desires, like society and current new age (and bio-hacking!) healing mindsets might advise.
Worthiness is not something we only get to experience when we’ve been “good” or “done the right things” in this way.
We think that if we do a certain thing or manipulate our external reality in a certain way, we will be worthy to receive love from the universe (aka “joy” “peace” “abundance” “pleasure” “a great life” “great sex,” whatever our desires are!).
The paradox is that Love is all there is… which means we are already all of the love in the universe. So, trying to receive it often means we don’t understand we already ARE it.
When we come to “Earth School,” we split ourselves off from Love in order to experience humanness, but the more distant we become from Love, due to various reasons including familial and societal programming, the more stories and protective mechanisms we come up with in order to justify our existence and our experience of life … “I just don’t get what I want because I’m not ______ enough.”
And we become terrified of actually receiving the love that we already are.
How many people do you know who get into an amazing relationship or life situation (an extreme example would be: winning the lottery) and then accidentally screw it up in some way?
Unworthiness and upper limiting is a protection field.
When we feel unworthy, we don’t let ourselves have the power to go for what we want.
Unworthiness and upper-limiting protects us from our power, our specialness, our uniqueness, our sacred True Expression.
Why on EARTH would be want to protect ourselves from our power?!
Background on unworthiness and upper-limiting is that usually, the more intense and sensitive and beautiful a thing is within us, the more intensely we learn to protect it when we are young, from the world around us.
And/or the more intensely the world outside tells us we are “weird” or “strange” or that we need to cut that shit (aka our normal Beingness) out so we can fit in to society.
This creates more and more layers between our True Essence and our external reality.
(Some would say “the powers that be” do this intentionally to keep us all in check and keep only certain approved people in power, but my perspective is more along the lines of “distance makes the heart grow fonder”… the longer we are aware we are disconnected from our Truth, the more precious it is when we finally land back there.)
And THEN, fast-forward to adulthood, when we first start having awareness of the unworthiness we feel, we can judge the unworthiness, we can feel shame around the intensity of our defense mechanism… of how we’ve “short-changed” ourselves over the years with our upper-limiting …
.. but what we miss is that it’s so intense because of the cosmic preciousness and beauty of what’s underneath: our true power.
Think about it this way:
If you’re trying to guard something that you don’t actually give a shit about, you’re not actually going to expend much energy protecting it.
BUT, If you have the most precious thing in the universe in your house (your child, for example), and for SOME reason you HAVE to leave them at home alone, you’re likely going to ask someone to be there protecting and guarding and caring for the safety of your precious thing, or — for the sake of this visualization and for any of you who may be royal or famous or have EXTREME protective mechanisms in place (like I did) lol — you’d hire someone with an automatic weapon to stand there to make sure no one got out or in while you were away…
That is the same way it works with our defense mechanisms.. they guard the most precious cosmic parts of us with ferocity.. because they needed to at some point.
They needed to keep us small or unseen or quiet or disconnected in order to keep us safe.
But do they need to NOW? That’s up to you.
We can’t judge the barbed wire with which we surround our own hearts or inner children or cosmic power or sense of divine worthiness…
… or, rather, we CAN.. but another perspective would be to acknowledge that at the time the defense mechanism of unworthiness or the upper limit was created, we deemed whatever we needed to protect by erecting it, to be of the utmost preciousness and value.
If that’s what we thought we had to do in order to keep some part of ourselves safe, that’s what we had to do.
This is reminding me of the movie Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio… The more precious the asset, the more dream levels they had to navigate and the more intense the protection around that asset was. (Think arctic-forts-and-machine-guns-level.)
I know if you’re anything like me, some of you on the healing journey can probably resonate with this imagery when it comes to breaking down and integrating ingrained patterns of unworthiness/shame/guilt/ancestral anger, etc…!
If we hate, judge, or shame our defense mechanisms, our defense mechanisms and upper limits will not go. And we will never feel a sense of worthiness to be able to attain the desires we crave.
So, the more unsafe we feel as a person, to those defense mechanisms, by judging them or shaming our inability to move forward… or whatever it shows up as… the more intensely they will keep protecting their precious treasures from that perceived lack of safety.
I’m saying all this as background because a lot of judgement can come up to the resistance we feel in moving toward ultimate worthiness. But this is such a universal human condition and is needed for survival. Truly.
When we make the decision to be safe to all parts of ourselves, and show up for all parts of ourselves in a safe way, our defense mechanisms can soften, show what’s underneath, and negotiate a new role for themselves…. or integrate or release themselves in their own way.
This is part of the process by which we come to know our true worthiness and remove our own upper limits.
Worthiness is actually an internal experience that we are born with.. and we can cultivate more and more of it in our experience whenever we want, given the right tools.
If you’re interested in exploring this more, please feel free to check out my free intro experience called True Essence Unearthed.
Just head to that link and dive in to the 40 minute guided meditation and accompanying PDF with journal prompts. If it asks you to log in first, just enter your email and create a password and then you’ll gain access for free.
And feel free to email me if you’d like to be witnessed in whatever comes up (or doesn’t!).
Love you all MUCHO, and I’m here for you and with you.
Let’s walk each other Home ❤️🔥
In gratitude & service,
Ash
