A common theme that’s coming up for my clients today is the idea that something is not available to us now, not because it isn’t meant for us, but because it isn’t ready – and that if we try to move forward on it, we’re more likely to ruin it than manifest it.
Some common teaching metaphors are that you wouldn’t pull a sprout from the ground before it grew into a harvest, you wouldn’t take a cake out of the oven too early just because you’re hungry, and that some fruits are not only bitter but poisonous before they ripen (credit to Dion Wright for that last one). When I draw cards for my clients that tell them that something is off-limits to them in the near future, it’s easy to spiral into feelings of rejection, as in “I’m not good enough to have this.” These are common stories we tell ourselves after lifetimes of hearing them from others who tried to put us down for their own reasons, abusers who tried to keep us under their thumbs in order to convince us that nobody else would ever love us, parents who projected their own desires onto us and tried to make us feel small if we didn’t match them. But they’re not true.
Those of us with low self-worth, even (especially!) the unconscious kind that resides not in our cognitive opinions of ourselves but in our emotional bodies as fear and anxiety, may often try to lawyer or logic our way into having what we want right now by controlling our external circumstances. I know many smart coaches who have confessed to this behavior in the past: “It’s fine, I know you’re not emotionally healthy and you have no idea how to have a relationship, but I’ll just do all the work for both of us and it’ll work out.” (In fact, neophyte coaches are even more prone to this behavior since they have studied so many formulas and techniques for making relationships work that they think they can control a relationship’s
outcome just by applying them!) But you wouldn’t go on vacation without packing a suitcase. You wouldn’t go to meet the Queen wearing the sweatpants you had on when you got the invitation.
Consider that the energy of needing to have something that clearly isn’t ready for you yet is a sign that you are still searching for peace outside yourself, so you may not be as far ahead as you think you are. Most importantly though, it’s critical that we lose the frame of “rejection” just because something is not available to us in the present moment, and start allowing for the possibility instead that what we want is growing and preparing for us because we deserve to bite into that apple when it’s juiciest.
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