Many people, especially women, struggle with feelings of unworthiness or of not being good enough. According to a study quoted in Forbes, 70 percent of Americans have suffered from imposter syndrome, an expression of unworthiness, at some point in their lives. Maybe you’ve experienced this as well and would like to change this way of thinking about yourself. To holistically address these feelings and thoughts of unworthiness try healing with chakras and their subtle energy flows. Start with your Svadhisthana, the Sanskrit word for the sacral chakra or second chakra, because this energy center is directly aligned with your emotions and self-evaluation.
A quick note. This blog post assumes you’re familiar with the chakra system, the seven chakras, and the influence subtle energy has in the determination of your health and well-being. If not, see my What Are the Chakras post and search my Mind Body Spirit blog for more posts on healing with chakras and individual energy centers. Then come back for more on the sacral chakra and worthiness.
Worthiness and Self-Esteem In the Chakra System
The meanings of emotional and self-evaluative words are frequently blurred in common usage. They’re often listed as synonyms for each other. This makes some sense because personal evaluations are typically vague felt senses and each tends to play a role in determining the status of the others.
However, when healing with the chakras the distinction between words such as self-worth and self-esteem is informative and critical. Rigid adherence to a nuanced meaning provides orientation on the location of an imbalance as well as the potential causation and treatment options. Chakra subtleties, both energetically and linguistically, can reveal the story underlying a client’s pain and healing journey Identifying the story is a significant part of overcoming these disparaging thoughts and feelings.
What Is Worthiness When Healing With Chakras
According to the University of North Carolina, “Self-worth is the internal sense of being good enough and worthy of love and belonging from others. Self-worth is often confused with self-esteem, which relies on external factors such as successes and achievements to define worth….”
This definition is consistent with the chakra framework where self-worth is inward in nature. It arises as an internal sense (felt sense) or emotional assessment of self-value, how others value you, and your attitude about your interpersonal connections. All of these personal assessments are influenced by the status of the sacral chakra.
Signs of Low Self-Worth or Unworthiness
Most people know whether they have a problem of low self-worth. If in doubt consider if the following thoughts or beliefs resonate with you. Then do the same with the list of feelings, physical states, emotions, or bodily senses.
Unworthiness Thoughts and Beliefs
- I’m worthless
- I’m unworthy
- I’m not worthy
- I can try but I know I can’t
- I’m not good enough
- I’m not that good
- It’s my fault
- You can’t trust anyone
- No one cares about me
- I should have
- I shouldn’t have
Unworthiness Feelings, Physical States, Emotions, or Bodily Senses
- low or stagnant energy
- poor body image
- limited sense or awareness of the body
- unable to hold boundaries
- overwhelm
- doubtful
- the sense of unworthiness and the lack of voice, power, or value
- emotional confusion or stress
- inability to discern what is nurturing for you
- discomfort with commitment, especially in personal or romantic relationships
Of course, most people have transitory thoughts, feelings, or senses like these occasionally. What makes them indicative of a problem with low self-worth is their frequency and duration.
What Is Self-Esteem When Healing With the Chakras
As noted above, self-esteem relies on external factors such as successes, achievements, and mental assessments. It often arises from one’s actions, behaviors, and decision-making, all of which are more outward in nature.
When healing with charkas, self-esteem is linked to the third chakra, the solar plexus or yellow chakra. This makes sense because the solar plexus is aligned with the mental layer of the aura and your thoughts, beliefs, judgments, and critical assessments of your skills and capabilities.
In other words, self-esteem is the product of the thinking mind while self-worth is the product of the embodied mind or body-mind.
How The Sacral Chakra Relates to Not Being Good Enough and Feeling Unworthy
Recall your Svadhisthana or orange chakra governs and expresses how you view yourself and your perception of how others see and value you. Its influence is formative in early childhood when you begin to see yourself as an individual, distinct from your caregivers and others. Yet, you’re still highly dependent on them for nurturing and rearing so that you mature, thrive, and survive.
As already mentioned, worthiness is experienced on an emotional level and is related to feeling valued in relationships and human connection. Parents can intentionally or unintentionally make a value assessment when they reward or chastise a child.
Girls are praised when they behave and often rebuked or insulted when they act independently and have high ambitions. In contrast, boys are expected to bend or even break the rules and they’re teased or bullied when they’re sensitive or effeminate
How you perceive your upbringing within your family of origin can shape and even rigidly determine, how you feel in your childhood and adulthood relationships as well as your overall perspective of forming connections.
How Work With Your Sacral Chakra to Address Unworthiness
Because self-worth is emotional and emotions form deeply within the chemistry, tissue, and energy of the body as well as within the subconscious, it cannot be fully addressed with logic, analysis, and thinking. It’s necessary to get out of your thinking mind or beta brain and into an alpha state so that you can draw upon your imagination, visualization, sensing, and intuition to relate to the troubled emotions you hold in your embodied mind or body-brain. In my experience, this is the reality of working with long-held emotions.
Of course, chakras act in consort with all your other physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and energetic aspects. The parts of the whole are interdependent and intradependent. Healing with the chakras is but one approach to tackling an imbalance such as negative assessments like unworthiness. Here it can act as a catalyst and a guide and the Svadhisthana has a central role to play.
Keep in mind that all chakras promote the best expression of your mind-body-spirit when they are in balance. You can achieve chakra balancing in several ways. Energy healing techniques are generally the quickest. Nonetheless, chakra balance relies on the entirety of your whole mind, body, and spirit. Moreover, considering that you and your subtle energy are dynamic and ever-changing, maintaining balance is a complex multifaceted, continuous, and unending process.
Thus, you can support good chakra functioning and your overall well-being from many entry points. For example, you can work on your emotions, limiting beliefs, or some related physical issues to reestablish balance on multiple levels and build resilience.
To Summarize
By employing a variety of strategies, you can shift from a rigid mindset of unworthiness to one that allows for both positive self-assessment and realistic anticipations for others’ perceptions and your value to them. This transition can be facilitated by chakra healing, particularly focusing on the sacral chakra.
