A Travel Essay from the Inner Journey

This is the second essay from my contemplations on the Shadow of my Purpose Gene Key. You can read the first part here, in The Shadow of the Purpose Sphere.

The Gene Keys teachings tell us that we are here to learn from the challenges of our Shadows. I am working with my Purpose Gene Key as part of The Sage’s Golden Path Retreat. My Purpose Gene Key is 48.3, and the Shadow is Inadequacy. Inadequacy is the fear of not having enough, it is the fear of not being worthy enough, and, according to Richard Rudd, it is rooted in uncertainty about the future.

This Shadow of Inadequacy is the most familiar of all my Shadows. Even though I can see all of my Shadows in my personality and in my life’s story, Inadequacy is the one that sits around me, like a shroud, tightly bound and never far away.

Although I now believe that I have done so much inner work over the last three or more years of travelling with my Gene Keys, that I have fundamentally shifted my attitude, and I now wear the Gift of Resourcefulness like a Cloak of Power, I know that this Shadow of Inadequacy is so familiar to me that it is like a twin, walking beside me. I may not be operating from that place of fear as a default any more, but it is always there. And I lived in that place for so long that I understand intimately the feelings it brings up in me.

At this point, I must just say a huge thank you to my friend and Guide, Hayley Curtis. Yes, we all have to do our inner work ourselves, and I am proud of how much I’ve done; but having a Guide like Hayley walk beside me has made me braver, and she has given me so much love and support, that I will be forever grateful to her.

The Fear of Not Having Enough Time

The fear of not having enough was my constant companion from the day my dad died when I was 10 years old. We were not that well off before he died, but he worked hard and we always had enough. When he died, we were plunged into poverty and my mum never let me forget that. I grew up with the knowledge I was poor … born poor, live poor was my mum’s attitude. And I carried that financial lack into adulthood. I lived on or below the poverty line for many years. I’ve struggled financially for most of my life. I even attracted people into my life who would take from me what little money I did have , from intimate relationships to businesses, from people I trusted to people I thought would like me, if I gave them what they wanted.

It’s only in the last few years that I have not been poor. But that fear of not having enough money lurks in the back of my mind, and while it’s not the reality I live in any more, it is never forgotten, and it’s never far away.

In the past few years, especially in the years since my beloved came back into my life after a twenty-five-year absence, the biggest “not enough” fear is around time. There is not enough time to live and love with him. There is not enough time to do all the things I want to do.

There is not enough time to fully live, and to have all the adventures I want to have. I feel the weight of how much time I wasted in my life on people who didn’t deserve my love, and how little time there is left in my life. I want to live to be really, really old, to make up for all that “lost” time.

The Fear of Not Having Enough Energy

And of course, walking hand in hand with the fear of not having enough time is the fear that I will not have enough energy or vitality in my ageing body to be able to suck the marrow out of this life.

The fear of not having the energy or strength to fully participate in life scares me so much. There is so much I want to do. There is so much I need to do in this world, and I am afraid that I won’t have enough energy to do it.

Learning from this Challenge of “Not-Enoughness”

So, what is it that I can learn from this challenge of fearing I won’t have enough, whether that’s time or money or energy?

Well, when it comes to this fear of not having enough time, the answer is pretty obvious really. It is to be present in my life. When it comes to that fear of running out of time, the crystal clear lesson, and the only antidote to that fear, is to live fully in every single precious moment.

To feel the joy of being alive.

To feel the pain and suffering too.

To feel all of it, because if I can feel it, all of it, then I know I am fully alive in this moment, and this moment is all there really is.

If I immerse myself in every single moment, even if that moment is one of stillness and not one of action, especially if it is a moment of stillness, then I get to stretch that moment, to savour it. I get to relish the understanding that I am alive in this moment; I get to savour it; I get to revel in the joy of understanding that I am alive in this wonderful world. Presence is what stretches time. If I can be deeply present in each moment, then I am truly alive. And life becomes a string of delicious, deeply alive, moments.

Learning from the Challenge of Not Enough Energy

What can I learn from the challenge of not having enough energy? That too is simple. It is that my worth is not connected to how much energy I have. My worth is not connected to how much I physically do in the world, nor how productive I am. If I am feeling low in energy and need to simply rest then that is what I do, without feeling guilty, without thinking there is something wrong with me.

This has been a huge challenge for me to surmount; my worth was entirely bound to how much I did in the outer world. I had very little sense of my own innate worth, which in truth, I didn’t even believe existed at all. So, I created an edifice of worth around me in the external world that required me to be constantly DOING … Working hard. Doing housework, cleaning, laundry, shopping, like some over-wound automaton who got more frantic in her doing, the more exhausted she got! As the lone parent to my son, I had to be both mother and father and both roles had to be in constant action, to prove that I was good enough.

It was exhausting. There were years of exhaustion, when I just kept pushing through. The impact on my body was chronic fatigue, joint pain, digestion problems, which all went on for years, and which took a massive toll on me.

And even then, when sickness was layered on top of the exhaustion, I wouldn’t stop until my body physically collapsed. And even then I wouldn’t truly let myself rest, because I was in a state of constant self-flagellation for not doing enough.

I have learned much from that particular challenge. I have learned that a lack of energy absolutely does not equate to a lack of worth. (Again, I must thank my Guide, Hayley! I learned so much from her about not attaching my worth to my energy levels!).

I Am Just as Worthy When I Rest

When my energy is low, then I am gentle with myself. I allow myself to rest. When my energy is low, I know that I am just as worthy as when my energy is high and I am being creative and active. My worth is no longer connected to what I do in the external world.

My worth is in me; a white-hot orb of light that sits at my centre and can never be dimmed by something as prosaic as tiredness. It is my internal sun. My worth is a source of perpetual energy. But it doesn’t need to be doing anything to prove itself. It simply is.

Uncertainty About the Future

So, are these challenges of Inadequacy all rooted in uncertainty about the future, as suggested in the Sage teachings? A wholehearted and resounding YES! is the answer to that.

The fear of the lack of time is really a fear of dying, a fear that my final day may be closer than I want it to be.

The fear of lack of energy is all tied up in the fear of this ageing body losing its faculties, and that is pure future-based fear. And that is also, ultimately, the fear of death.

The fear of lack of money is rooted in the uncertain present, with its unstable geopolitical landscape and its precarious economy. I have enough now, but what about in the future?!? Where are my guarantees?!

I have been working with this Gene Key 48 for years now. It is the holder of the deep unknown, of the Void, and I have come to love it. I have come to love the unknown. And yet, this fourth time working with this Key, I have just peeled back a layer to see that the uncertainty of lack in present, which makes me fearful for the future, is just another flavour of the unknown. So, I must learn to love this uncertainty too!

Emotional Immaturity

Richard Rudd says this in The Sage’s Golden Path Retreat …

This sense of Inadequacy leads to emotional immaturity and an inability to take responsibility for one's feelings, thoughts, or actions.

When I was caught in the Shadow of Inadequacy it was like being on a treadmill. I would go round and round, yoked to my Inadequacy, completely unable to take responsibility for anything. Not my feelings, not my thoughts, not my actions. I would feel inadequate, bad things would happen, and I’d think, this is happening because I am bad. Then I would fall deeper into the feelings of failure, and so the feeling Inadequacy would grow. I felt like I was powerless to break free, so I would just keep walking the same worn path of “I’m bad so bad things happen”, never feeling good enough to take any action that might have broken the cycle, unable and unwilling to take responsibility for changing anything.

A deep emptiness and sense of insecurity develops into a crippling fear of the unknown.

I didn’t realise, until I started doing this Gene Keys work and putting a name to the unknown, and using the language of my Gene Keys, just how deep the fear of the unknown was, in those days when I was living from this place of Inadequacy and the emptiness and insecurity that came along with it. My life felt like it was built on shaky ground that could, at any moment, open up and send me into the chasm below. I was scared of everything. My life felt unstable, yet I clung to it, I clung to the known even though it hurt me and caused me so much suffering. For to step away, to break free would mean stepping into the unknown, which felt even more frightening. It is not that I liked the suffering, but at least I knew what to expect … more suffering! The unknown of breaking the chains of Inadequacy, oh, the fear of that was crippling.

Blocking the Natural Flow of Life Vitality

This fear halts the natural flow of life vitality in the body, creating mental or emotional disorders to compensate.
The Sage’s Golden Path Retreat

For years, as I steeped myself in the victimhood that comes along with my Shadow of Inadequacy, all I could feel was stress and anxiety. There was insomnia. There were years of exhaustion. There was depression. There was sadness. There were blockages in every aspect of my life.

There was no natural flow of life vitality in my body. What there was instead was an attempt to “maintain the illusion of safety through the enforcement of rules and expectations”, as Richard Rudd says.

Drum roll please …. Enter my Programming Partner of Control! I used to think that my control freakery was a reaction to getting free from being controlled. But I think it was more than that. Even though I had freed myself from a dysfunctional relationship, where every aspect of my life was controlled, I was still caught in the web of Inadequacy. I was terrified all the time that something would go wrong. And of course it did! If you spend your every waking moment waiting for the next bad thing to happen, you are going to attract bad things into your life.

So, I was trying to control everything, trying to keep myself safe by making sure my life was battened down tight. I was terrified all the time that I was going to be found out as an inadequate fraud. I tried to control as many aspects of my life as I could because in truth, I felt utterly out of control.

Fear is the Biggest Blocker

In the Sage teachings for this Shadow of Inadequacy, it says that “Some repress the fear of Inadequacy, living out a bland lifestyle as a means of creating a false sense of security.” And that was me; I was caught in the repressive aspect of this Shadow for years. When I was in those dysfunctional relationships that dominated my 20s and 30s, the blandness was an attempt to stay hidden and silent so as not to rock the boat and garner painful, abusive attention. Later, when I had decided that I was better off alone, I wrapped the blandness around me like a shield, calling it “simplicity”, but in truth it was just fear.

Fear of failure, fear of being in a relationship and fear of being alone. Fear of not being able to cope with life on my own.

Fear of life.

Fear of living in case I screwed it up. Fear of taking risks in case I failed. Fear of just being myself in case I was simply not enough. I was blocked in every avenue of life.

For you see, this Shadow of Inadequacy is, at its root, simply a fear of life, and a deep fear of living. All those years I spent believing that my greatest fear was of death, I never realised that the real fear was of life.

Crazy! I spent so long in that Inadequacy trap, believing I was nothing, believing I was inadequate; when all the time I was something.

I was stronger than I thought I was. I was way more adequate than I ever gave myself credit for!

I was resourceful, I just couldn’t see it. And in realising this, in seeing the Gift of Resourcefulness was there all along, then I truly GOT IT!! 🤯💡 Light dawned, breakthrough happened!

I understood at a deep cellular level what the Gene Keys teachings are telling me … that I am here to learn from the challenges of my Shadows. And oh, I have learned so much from this Shadow of Inadequacy. By allowing, accepting and embracing it, I see that it is just a part of the story; it is a stepping stone on the path. It is not me. It is just a part of the great tapestry that is me and my life and my journey.

My attitude to this Shadow has changed beyond measure. It has taught me so much. It has taught me that I need fear neither death nor fully living. It has taught me that I am enough, just the way I am, living this ordinary life of mine.

It has taught me how to be me.

For this essay, I felt inspired to share a selection of my black and white photographs of trees. I love trees. I particularly love to take photographs of trees when they are bare of their leaves, and these winter and early spring trees, with their glorious structure, make perfect subjects for black and white processing.

You can see more of my photographs on my Flickr page, if you’d be interested in exploring them!