Growing up in my culture, I was taught that others were enough, but I was not.
I was definitely, definitely, not.
As a black gay man, I wasn’t taught to love myself, or value and accept myself, for who and what I am.
Instead, I was taught that who and what I am is wrong, and less than. So that was the internal narrative about myself that I adopted when I was young, and that toxified my life and my body when I became an adult.
As a consequence, I never felt good about myself internally, so I was always seeking to feel good about myself externally through other people’s approval. And to get that approval, I was constantly trying to hide or suppress or rearrange myself in some way so that I’d be thought of as enough in the eyes of others.
But this lead to me never truly being myself, and never truly feeling free.
And this suppression of myself, and the bondage I felt from it, ultimately led to the creation/manifestation of disease in my body. For wellness cannot exist inside of a body that does not feel free.
Suppression not only blocks the expression of our true self in our lives, but also blocks the expression of Life Force Energy through our bodies, which our bodies need in order to be healthy.
I didn’t know all of this back then when I was doing it, but I learned it the hard way when AIDS and kidney failure showed up in my life. They became my master teachers on how what we feel about ourselves, and the degree to which we are allowing ourselves to be all of ourselves, directly effects our health.
Only when we feel good about ourselves (when we feel truly good and enough), do we allow ourselves to be ourselves. All of ourselves. And only when when we are being ourselves do we feel free.
And it’s only when we allow ourselves to be ourselves are we truly well in our bodies.
Our bodies need the energy of our true selves to flow through them to be healthy. For that’s what they were truly created for: to house the energy of who we really are. And when we don’t give them that energy, when we suppress it and squash it down for fear of “not being enough”, we essentially rob our bodies of not only what they need to be well, but the freedom for which we were truly created for and by.
Today, I’m journeying deeper and deeper into the knowing that ALL of me is enough. My body, my sexuality, my spirituality, my bank account balance, my weight on the scale, all of it. And I’m allowing all of it to exist without shame, suppression, or editing. As is.
Feeling enough is not just a cute slogan; it’s medicine.
It’s a necessary nutrient for our lives, and our bodies.
For nothing in our lives or bodies can or will work well without it.
Much ❤️, Jerome
