4.13 | Stop Deserving and Start Deciding You Are Worthy

Welcome to Devotional Anarchy, a podcast about intimate embodied leadership that is radically human, honest AF and thereby inherently disruptive to systems of disempowerment and disconnection. I’m Isha Vela, trauma psychologists, certified somatic practitioner, wealth wizard, licensed financial professional leadership coach, and intuitive business mentor. You’re here because you know self intimacy and self knowledge is the source of everything you want to create in your life. And that building safety and trust in your bodies would allows you to fully own and stored your energy in the direction of your desires. This season, get ready for deep dives into wealth building spirituality, emotional leadership, and human centered business with an activist twist. The conversations and tools shared in this podcast are your permission slip to manifest a life and business that lights your soul on fire and supports collective liberation. 

Isha Vela 0:02
Welcome to this episode of the podcast where we explore deservingness. How we talk about it, how we think about it, and how it might be a worthiness block. So if you’re watching on YouTube, I’m Isha Vela. I’m a trauma informed financial professional, a somatic money coach, a wealth activist, a holistic business mentor, lots of different things. But before I get into the meat of this topic, I want to quickly tell you about the new money membership. Leah and I have created this incredible membership just for you the magical, creative and rebellious entrepreneur who wants to do business ethically, and build wealth in a way that is responsible to the planet. And because we know, running a profitable business is a combination of several key factors. The membership features three distinct hops. The first one is, of course, the money hub. And it focuses on ethical sales, pricing your offers, and financial foundations like choosing an entity type insurance and knowing your numbers, I’m going to be sliding in a course about setting up your business for financial like a healthy financial foundation for your business. We also address healing ancestral money wounds through somatic clearing practices, right. And then we have the marketing hub, which is full of tools and strategies for effective marketing and messaging, how to use AI for our generation and content creation that stops the scroll. And then we have of course, the manifestation hub, which focuses on mindset embodiment, making visions a reality, it includes courses on trauma resolution, as part of the manifestation process with just affirmations, reflections, anything that you can possibly imagine we stuck it in there. And there are three different tiers based on where you are in your entrepreneurial journey and the level of support you want. So the best part of the membership, in addition to all of this amazing content is that it is searchable, right? So just like you would do in Google Drive, where you have all of these different folders and courses, all you do is type in sort of what you need, like, I need something on messaging, you type it in, and you get exactly what you want, you get exactly like where you need to find it, right. So you’re not wasting any time like rifling through what you need, you get it instantaneously. And we’ve moved the launch to October, we want to build it out a little bit more. But I did include the link in the show notes to get on the waitlist for the membership. So you can be the first one to know when it opens and take advantage of the early bird rates. It’s going to be amazing. All right. So let’s go back to the topic of deserving this. So again, had been thinking a lot about this and how we even use the word deserving in the context of receiving right. And it hit me a few weeks ago, because I posted in my my workplace chat group about how I wanted to celebrate my birthday this year. And in that post, I said that I wanted to take up space that I wanted attention. And yeah, that I just really wanted to celebrate my life. And in response to my message someone wrote in, of course, the most well meaning way you deserve it. And it was it was funny the way that landed for me, it just landed for me in an odd way. So I was curious about that. Right? I said, that’s interesting. It just kind of struck me. And so I analyze that a little bit. And, and I noticed that deserving and being worthy of attention wasn’t a question for me when I made that request. Like it wasn’t even on the map. Like, it’s my birthday, it comes around but once a year. And because of COVID and solo parenting and grieving and all the other shit that was happening over the last four years. You know, and even before that, because my kids were little and I didn’t have the support. I just haven’t had the opportunity to celebrate only with adults. So when I wrote the request, I was very much in my head, I’m gonna fucking get this. I’m gonna do this, right like, I’m taking this. So I was very clearly asking for what I wanted and what I needed and how I wanted people to show up for me And I was not thinking about whether I deserved to receive my request or not. In fact, I felt very worthy of receiving it. I felt assumptive and entitled to it in in a healthy way, I think. And if somebody would have said, No, I, I believe I would have found another way to celebrate, I would have found like, Okay, well, I’m just going to create my own party somewhere. Because I felt like I really wanted to do this. And of course, like, I get it, I get that we say you deserve it. We say that to each other as a way of gassing each other up, encouraging each other to receive, I totally get that. And when it landed, oddly, for me, I, I wanted to look underneath it. And I wanted to uncover the shadow side of being deserving. So when I looked a little deeper, what I found was surprising and interesting. So I want to back up for a moment and put this into a little bit of context for you, because some of you might already know this about me. But if you’re a newer listener, you might not so I used to be a Go Go Go taskmaster, I used to override my body’s needs for rest and pleasure. In fact, pleasure was like, the last, I don’t know, 1% of my day after I’ve been like working, working tasks mastering doing doing doing, and I was obviously not good at receiving. I didn’t even know what that meant. And of course, this was before I did my somatic certification, which was like intense receiving for four years. And, yeah, I used to give myself like the pleasure of resting after a long day of tasks. And I would give to myself, only when I felt I deserved it. In other words, when I had worked hard enough for it. So there it was. Deserving is the belief that you are worthy of receiving only after you’ve either done something, or shown up in a certain way, or performed some type of task. So you have to do something for it, right? It’s a reward, you get a reward, usually, after working hard or maybe doing something that wasn’t that pleasurable. That was kind of like, well, I have to do this thing, get it out of the way and kind of push, push, push, and then ah, then I’m deserving right? And when, like that, that being deserving of receiving actually makes your worthiness something that’s conditional. So stick with me, it can only happen until you’ve done something for it. There’s an energetic exchange involved. And, you know, I get that, you know, energy exchanges are happening all the time. But in this one, there’s something that like, where you have to give in order to get it feels conditional like you won’t get it just because you have to give first so and the belief, that pattern of giving to get is actually a developmental wound. It’s a relational pattern, a template that shows up in your romantic partnerships. It can show up in friendships with your parents, or it can show up in your relationship with money. So there’s this idea right that we have to sacrifice or exchange, our lifeforce, our labor to get something in return, it can be belonging, it can be love. It can be attention. It can be like, all the things right. And money, right, exchanging or sacrificing our lifeforce and our labor for money. And what’s so interesting about all this, is that we exchange our lifeforce and our labor for money. And then in our exhaustion in our tiredness and our weariness, turn around and spend that money on treats. Whether that’s a clothing treat, or a food treat, it doesn’t matter. The point is that you are then spending that money as a reward for having given for having donated given given your lifeforce energy and labor.

Isha Vela 9:57
So you might say to yourself I’ve worked so hard today, I’m going to treat myself to that extra, like whipped cream on top coffee. I’m going to treat myself to a luxurious meal, I’m going to buy myself these shoes. And again, I’m not saying that is wrong, you certainly get to celebrate yourself and spend money on yourself. The point is to observe it from the perspective of a pattern. How often are you saying to yourself that you deserve something and then spend the money? How often do you push yourself and then over indulge as a reward? And then I want you to also think about the circulation of money and lifeforce energy for a moment. So going back to what I was saying earlier, you give your lifeforce your labor, for money, and then you put that money back into the money system as because you are spending on yourself as a reward for your effort, or to soothe your exhaustion, whatever the case is for you. And then you need to turn around and make more money. Right, then you have to donate more of your life force and your labor for money. And so can you see how that’s a vicious cycle? So that’s one piece that pattern and cycle inside of a system built on exploitation? Yes, I’m talking about capitalism. I just, I just want to sort of describe it from an energetic perspective. From a writing energy exchange perspective. The second piece of it is how deservingness can actually feed into victimhood, which is a huge cock blocker to money. All right. So imagine you’ve been working for three years on building your business. It’s been slow going. As it is, for most people starting out. You’ve invested so much time and energy and real devotion into crafting your offers into honing your messaging into improving your marketing, speaking your truth into your social media presence, authenticity, visibility, right? You name it. And you feel like you’re not getting the full return on investment that you were expecting. Right? You’ve been like, giving and giving and giving and giving. And yes, you’re making money, but not enough yet to cover your expenses. Maybe you feel impatient, maybe even frustrated, and you say to yourself, fuck, I deserve to make more money. And while in that moment, it may feel empowering to claim you’re deserving this. You being deserving of more money or having your business be successful has nothing to do with the fact that you’ve invested three years of blood, sweat and tears into your business. On an energetic and spiritual level one has nothing to do with the other. Your deservingness is not conditional, it’s not dependent on your labor. Will you bid will will your business be more successful? If you commit to it consistently? Sure, absolutely. You are much more likely to win. Following that strategy. Right? Slow and steady wins the race. But again, deserving this has nothing to do with it. My perspective is that believing you are deserving or not deserving of something or when you make deserving a condition it actually blocks your inherent worthiness that requires no performance. No action, right? No action needs to be taken no upfront labor needs to be deposited or given. deserving this is completely made up. Okay. And what undergirds it is capitalistic productivity. Again, only when you’ve put in the hours. When you’ve done the task, then you get then you get to play right then you get to spend, then you get to treat yourself, then you are worthy of rest and pleasure. That is what our school systems teach us. That is what some of our parents teach us. Right, certainly, workplace teaches us that as well. And I’m not saying not to work on your business. Of course, I work really fucking hard on my business. I love working in my business. I like working on my business and in my business. I’m just saying not to make your worthiness to receive a results of the labor invested. So how do we get out of this? What is the antidote to this deserving narrative that’s actually maintaining and reinforcing the sense of internalized oppression. It is deciding, deciding, you are worthy. Deciding is about taking control of the narrative. When you take control of the narrative, the narrative moves from an outer, systemic and culturally based narrative to one that originates from the self. Right? It’s about taking back your power and centralizing power within the Self. You are the only one that gets to decide if you’re worthy. Nobody else gets to decide that certainly not a system, not your family. And nobody’s gonna give you the permission to be worthy. Nobody’s gonna give you that permission, nobody’s going to step aside and be like, Oh, you are worthy. Now, please go ahead. Right. And I recognize that by sharing this with you, I’m not I’m not saying anything you haven’t heard before. You’ve probably heard this plenty in other coaching spaces, the power of deciding I decided, right. But what people miss about this conversation, what’s often not included or missed is the nervous system response behind deciding that makes it effective, right. Because trust me, you make decisions every day, you decide things all the time. But the decision that you are going to make your business work, reach a specific income goal, go all in on a launch, make the sale, right, the most authentic and transparent content, show up in the ways that you need to even when you’re not getting the results, that is very different on a nervous system level than other decisions you are making in your life. The kind of deciding energy you need to tap into, in order to move relentlessly towards your goals requires a healthy nervous system fight response. And when you are socialized as a girl, that healthy nervous system fight response is suppressed. It is like it is conditioned out of you. It is essentially tamed out of you. So when I talk about tapping into your desire, right, because that desire is like that first requirement to move relentlessly towards your goals to make shit happen, right to manifest. Well, when I talk about tapping into your desire, what I’m essentially doing, if I’m working with you, let’s say is I’m helping you access that healthy fight response. So that you can direct that energy, right in a channeled very clear way. towards what you want to create has to be focused right as to like, you have to sort of pull it up. And I could do a whole podcast episode on how our religious conditioning even if you didn’t grow up in a religious household. It’s all about controlling women’s desires, their sexuality, essentially part of their lifeforce energy much of which resides in your pelvis right in your route and in the legs and the thighs but I don’t want to take you in a completely different direction right now. So I’ll bring myself back maybe I will do an episode in the future about that but what I’ve seen and heard in other people’s stories people who have built six multi six and seven figure businesses is that at some point they got so sick of their circumstances that it awakened

Isha Vela 19:50
that fire right that pelvic fire let’s call it desire, right desires pelvic fire, and they fucking decided they They were just like, I’m fucking done. They got so tired of their shit, that it triggered anger and rage, part of that healthy fight response that fueled their motivation. They looked around at their life, and they were like, I’m not doing this anymore. Like, I’m done. So a fire was lit under their assets, right. And the problem I see with a lot of people is that one, their nervous system fight response fight response is dulled, or kind of like asleep or toned down, its hypo active, or they’re very comfortable in the situation that they’re in. Right? Maybe you have a job that pays your bills, things are okay, you have just enough to get by. And mobilizing the energy required to move you towards your goals. That would take quite a bit of effort. It doesn’t seem worth the trouble when you are comfortable. It seems like, ah, yeah, that would require a lot. And I don’t know if I’m willing to do that. So yes, you’re comfortable, moving towards your goal would require you to get uncomfortable. And that’s why people often have to get super uncomfortable to awaken that fire. That’s gonna, that basically like converts into rocket fuel. That moves them towards their goals, right? They get so uncomfortable that moving into other types of discomfort is better than the discomfort that they’re in. Right, that’s less uncomfortable. At some point, when it’s like, so uncomfortable here, that moving over there is less uncomfortable. And this is not convenient. Unfortunately, that’s how our meat suits work. That’s how our bodies work. And, yeah, it’s just kind of like, sometimes we need to just get really uncomfortable to push us out. That’s always been the truth for me. And I know it’s true for a lot of people. And that’s sort of like a universal human thing, not a youth thing. So I also want to say another thing about taking action. People often take action, based on whether they feel worthy or not. And I can assure you, if you’re doing that, that’s only going to delay your success. A huge mistake I see people make is waiting to feel worthy. And that’s where deciding comes in, you have to decide that you’re already worthy, and that you’re going to act accordingly. Right that you’ll be behave in alignment with that belief that you’re already worthy. And then you take action, you show up in the ways that reflect your worthiness already, even. Even if it doesn’t feel super congruent, yet completely congruent, it will over time when you’re taking the actions, it sort of has a feedback, feedback response back into the self, right? It builds trust in the body, that feeds back into yourself, you are creating, right taking action and creating in your life based on a belief. And that belief gets solidified through the actions taken. Just keep deciding and take action, deciding and take action because you’re going to decide take action, and then you might fall into a slump of like, oh, maybe I’m not worthy. I doesn’t show up that way and your thoughts. But you’ll kind of maybe you have a little bit of a contraction, then you decide again, and then you take action. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. So I feel like that is what early entrepreneurship looks like is deciding taking action deciding to action. And as you move through your journey, the decisions that you make get bigger. They get like more expansive, right, you decide bigger things, you decide to take bigger leaps. That is the process of growth. So you know that you’re buying into a deservingness narrative when you start off strong, and then you drop off when you’re not consistent. So maybe you start off that, you know, maybe you start off with the decision that Oh, I deserve this and I’m gonna go for it. And then you start you start doing the thing right that you deserve. and as you move forward, the truth or how you really feel about yourself on the unconscious level is going to start to peek through, it’s going to start to take over the wheel of the car that you’re moving forward. Maybe you’re not getting the results you want, maybe people aren’t buying what you’re selling, people aren’t responding to your posts, you’re not getting the reinforcements, right. People aren’t taking you up on the invitations to participate in your free event, whatever, right? You start to doubt yourself, you start to wonder whether this whole entrepreneurship is even for you, whether you get to have what you want. And you wonder if other people can do it. And but that you can’t, right. This is where people get caught in the trap. And part of what’s feeding this, you know, part of what’s feeding this and AI has to be acknowledged, it’s this cognitive bias called the just world fallacy. So this this bias is cognitive bias assumes that people get what they deserve. That actions will necessarily have morally fair and fitting consequences for the person. So for example, the assumptions that noble actions will eventually be rewarded, and evil actions will eventually be punished. fall under this hypothesis. So is anybody else smelling the religious teachings? So the logic here is, if you’re good, you deserve good things. And if you’re bad, you don’t deserve or you deserve bad things. So I break this down in super simple first grader thought processes like that, because unconsciously, that’s exactly how we absorb some of these cultural, religious, societal messages. Because remember, our brains are not that cognitively sophisticated. At the time we are absorbing all of this messaging we are, we’re absorbing it implicitly, not explicitly. So implicitly, it’s just kind of like, yes, no, it’s we’re living a binary, right? We’re sort of very concrete. Between the ages of zero and six, we have like a very limited cognitive capacity for complexity. And so we come to conclusions and make decisions in our childhood decisions about who we are and what we get to have, that are based on a totally false logic. So my invitation to you today, maybe even in this moment, is to fucking decide to decide that you can have whatever the fuck you want, simply because you want it, you decide, you’re worthy of it, just because you feel like it, no special reason. You get to have what you want, because you want it imagine that. And this is an aspect of healthy entitlement that femmes in particular are not sufficiently practiced in, that I believe is absolutely necessary in manifestation, whether it’s money manifestation or other types of manifestation. So deciding that you get to have whatever it is you want, as audacious as it may be, and show the fuck up for it. So when you show up for it, regardless of whether you’ll be rejected, ridiculed or judged, assume it’s already yours. And if you find yourself wobbling on that decision, or that assumption that you are inherently worthy and that you get to have what you want your inner work is to recommit is to decide again, is to recommit to the decision like circle back around right whatever the process is to circle back around whether it’s like oh my god, I’m just like, where am I like what am I doing fuck like tapping into that rage again tapping into that fire. Yes, I decide re anchoring in that assumption that this whatever this is for you, is for you. However many times it takes I hope that was helpful. I I really tried to break it down very clearly for you. And I would love nothing more to hear your feedback on this episode if what resonated for you not if because I know it will. But what It resonated for you type it in the comments tag me on social media and let me know how this transition landed for you all right I’ll see you in the next episode.