Last week, Lee wrote about “realizing our own worthiness and the profound impact that it can have on our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

To me, Aaron, realizing our own worthiness means understanding the perfection of the fact that we are what we are in this moment, right now, with all of our gifts, our wounds, and defenses—and it couldn’t and shouldn’t be any other way. All parts of ourselves, our full humanity, are totally welcome and inherently lovable.

Therefore, when we bring our worthiness into action, we simply express ourselves authentically in this moment, and in this moment, and in this moment, and we look at ourselves sincerely with an intention to see and work through our stuff to be the best person we can be. We affirm our honest self instead of acting only from defenses and strategies.

When we inevitably mess up and our defenses get the best of us, we admit it and own it. Through this practice, we cease to be so concerned with the times that we are not given our due respect or affirmation because we know that people’s responses to us, much of the time, have nothing to do with us.

However, most of us don’t act like this in relationships. Instead, we try to manage how we are seen to get what we think we want or what we think is the blueprint of a good romance. We get very caught up in people’s responses. Our love lives frustrate us greatly.

When we are single and love isn’t going our way, the maxim is: “You gotta put yourself out there!” This sentiment illustrates that the problem isn’t with us but with what’s around us. If we just keep doing what we are doing, we think that eventually these strategies will work.

However, in practice, they never really work. When we put ourselves out there and meet new people, the pressure makes us tend to forget that we are worthy of love just as we are. Therefore, we relate to those people from a foundation of unworthiness, using mostly our defenses. Then either everyone becomes right for us or no one does.

In both scenarios, there is no real discernment and no feeling of inner satisfaction or value for anyone. The relationship either never really begins, or it becomes a partnership built on falseness that is bound for a rough ending.

So really, it’s not that we need to keep putting ourselves out there. We need to put ourselves in here. We need to look at what gets in the way of realizing our own value when interacting with others.

We put ourselves in here to learn about who we are: our fears, our traumas, our relationships with our parents, and how all of these factors contribute to what type of people we attract and how we relate to them once we’ve attracted them.

When we understand ourselves in this way, it frees us up to access our own worthiness more easily, and we can interact authentically, knowing that we’re already enough. We discern whether someone is a good partner for us or not, we more easily find the right person, and from there, we create the best relationships possible with another worthy, fully human person.

So, my invitation for you this week is to go in here, whether you are in a relationship or not, as an access point to know your own inherent value.