Naturally High

What if the biggest thing standing between you and the life you want isn't your circumstances, but the story you've been telling yourself about your worth?

In this episode of Naturally High, Jeanne Foot continues exploring the AWAKEN Method, building on the foundation of awareness by diving into one of the most influential forces shaping our lives: worthiness. Jeanne explains how our earliest experiences and subconscious conditioning create the internal narratives that quietly determine our relationships, confidence, health, happiness, and ability to pursue our dreams.

Jeanne explores why so many of us unknowingly trade authenticity for acceptance, struggle to ask for what we truly want, and remain trapped in repetitive patterns driven by fear, self-criticism, and outdated beliefs. She explains why most of our daily thoughts are simply recycled from the day before, making conscious awareness the first step toward lasting transformation. Through thoughtful self-inquiry, listeners are invited to question the stories they've always believed and begin separating fact from the fiction of the inner critic.

Finally, Jeanne examines the connection between self-worth, addiction, perfectionism, control, and personal responsibility. She reminds us that no amount of external success can heal an internal wound, and that lasting freedom comes from awakening the inner healer, embracing radical responsibility, and recognizing that each of us has a unique spiritual curriculum designed for growth. This episode is a powerful invitation to reclaim your inherent worth, reconnect with your authentic self, and begin creating a life guided by purpose rather than fear.

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Creators and Guests

Host
Jeanne Foot

What is Naturally High?

On Naturally High you’ll receive transformational tools and hear inspirational stories that will guide you into holistically healing trauma in every corner of your life. You deserve to invoke your inner healer. I'm so glad you're here!

Jeanne: [00:00:06] Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Naturally High. And as always, I'm thrilled to be here with you guys. We're going to talk about continuing to explore the AWAKEN Method. And last week we spoke about a for awareness because without awareness there's no change, right? It's really that simple. And awareness is the catalyst to becoming more conscious and more aware in our life. And it's also the portal to transformation. As we know, most of us live our life on autopilot. We're just like kind of skimming over that. I always use the term hydroplaning as compared to drop down into it. And unless you're present in your here and now in your own life, you cannot change what you're not aware of. I've talked about how we have thousands of thoughts throughout our minds every single day. In fact, there's tens of thousands somewhere between 50 to 70,000 thoughts run through our mind every single day. And most of those thoughts are not new. They're repetitive from the day before. You probably have a short list, like we all do about yourself, whether it's not enough. Can I really do this about. Doubt about aspirations. And many of them are really not even yours. Now think about that. So whose are they? They're conditioning. They come from our early imprinting. They literally run the show. And that conditioning and imprinting becomes our programing, which then becomes everything that we're all about. So when we're asleep to these programs, it can play absolute havoc on our life so we don't reach fulfillment or true potential in any aspect. It can undermine our health. We do know that our mindset has a direct impact on our physical and mental health, and our physical health can have a direct impact on our mental health. So our physiology is our psychology. Our psychology is our physiology. And that also then undermines our dreams, our happiness and overall fulfillment in life. So if you haven't listened to the episode on awareness, I encourage you to go back and check it out. And if you're tuning in for the first time, there's lots here that can still be of value.

Jeanne: [00:02:17] So let's start with introducing worthiness and our self-esteem. So today we're going to talk about worthiness. And really what is it about worthiness and why is it so important. Well it's really how we see our world. So how we see ourselves is how we see our world. So it's like the rose colored glasses. If you put on lenses that are light, you will see the world in a different way than if you put on lenses that are very heavy and blacked out. And that's the same with our worth. I think worthiness is a quiet compass that runs your life. It kind of like dictates your current market value. Think of a house like you know, why does someone's house sell better over another? Not that we're trying to sell ourselves.

Jeanne: [00:03:05] I'm not saying that. So this is just an analogy I came up with. If you look at your worthiness as dictating your current market value, if I see myself as someone who's likable, I have something to bring to the table assets and I have value in a relationship, my value will be perceived as higher than someone who is feeling like they can't get it right. They're not feeling so good about themselves. So how we see ourselves and others is through the lens of our early imprinting, which I just spoke about before, which is really discussed a lot in episode one and our early developmental stages, but it becomes the foundation of our relationships, how we relate relationally on an identity level. It's how we see the world. So you want to probably know, why is this so important? Because it's everything. Because you can strive for everything outside of yourself. And unless you get the internal landscape in a way that you can be, understand it and be comfortable with. It's really always going to undermine you. And I know a little bit about this because I was a self loather for most of my formative years. For a long, long time, I never knew what I wanted. There's still parts of me that struggle with that, and really, it's just because I didn't know who I needed to be in order to feel accepted and loved. So I've talked about this again.

Jeanne: [00:04:27] And these when I say I talked about this before, it's because it's worth repeating. We trade our authenticity for love. What does that mean? In order to feel safe and connected to someone, whether it's a caregiver, a family member, or a partner or relationship, we will sometimes compromise our own needs and go along with things and say, yeah, we're good with something when really maybe we're not. We may not even know. We may not be aware that we're good. We're not good with something, but we're going to go along with it. And that's what I mean by trading our authenticity for connection. We lose parts of ourselves to be liked, to be loved. And so even though I felt like I didn't know what I wanted, it really undermined what was right for me. Because I believe we all have our unique spiritual curriculum here on Earth School, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. But when you don't know what you want, it will dictate how you show up in your life. And your internal self-talk and actions will dictate what you do externally. And what happens is when your internal self-talk internally doesn't match up with your external, it's that's called a cognitive dissonance. And that's where extreme tension happens, extreme discomfort happens. And so that's where we are. We're really in a painful place. So these messages that we acquire through imprinting, programing, whatever, become the blueprint for how we interact in every relationship in our lives.

Jeanne: [00:06:04] And whether, you know, it teaches us that maybe we're not safe to have needs or our voice isn't, you know, warranted, and I want you to pause for a moment and ask yourself, is there an area in your life where you hesitate to ask for what you want, or do you wait for others to make decisions and then quietly follow along as if you're on board? Do you go after what you want, or do you shrink and defer to see what everybody else is doing? Or do you even know what you want? Whatever came to you, trust that that information is correct and don't overthink it. But just I want you to sort of become more conscious of it and maybe really do something about it. I want to tell you how to do that later on in this episode. For years, I didn't know what I wanted and I didn't know how to ask, and I didn't know how to get underneath why I was having trouble being stuck. My worthiness was obviously compromised by those early messages and imprints, which will be the same for each and every one of us when we go against the grain of who we really are. Now, I talked about these tens of thousands of thoughts a day. So what the real challenge here is that research suggests that 95% of our thoughts today are a repeat of yesterday.

Jeanne: [00:07:27] That's a lot. So this is why it's very hard to break patterns and get underneath it. So most of your thoughts are being recycled and most of them are negative, self-critical, fear based. And so you can see how easily it is to be stuck and remain stuck. So this is why we want to get underneath those thoughts and create space between stimulus, thought, and response. Action, motion, and slow it down and increase the space in between, which will allow us for some understanding and process. Like when I just asked you those few questions about how do you see yourself? If we're not really in self-inquiry with ourselves because we're not conscious, we're running on autopilot, we don't really know what we think. We won't really know what we feel. We won't know what's important to us. So it's really important that we just slow that down. And it's important to know what our core beliefs are. Where are our biases? What is the lens I'm seeing in the world and narratives that I'm unconscious to? You know, the other day I was just like buzzing along doing my normal day and I thought, you actually have a lot of negative thoughts. And I was quite surprised to know that because I look at myself as an optimistic person, I do see the world as, well not the world, but I see what's possible as a glass half full and I have for most of my life.

Jeanne: [00:08:50] And maybe that's what got me here to this day. But underneath that current of optimism is a nattering that goes on of negativity. So we need to give ourselves space in order to know what we really are thinking. And I think that's one of the most important things we can say or do for ourselves. Otherwise, the adaptive you, the person who has just learned to be on the automatic pilot is the one who shows up in these in these encounters and relationships and, you know, opportunities as well. So ask yourself, what will it take for you to awaken to these patterns? What will it take for you to become more curious rather than judgmental about the stories you keep telling yourself? And what if the truth is that your thoughts are based in fiction rather than any facts? How would that change your life? I know that was a game changer for me. Um. That we, i always thought that whatever I was thinking was actually true. Absolutely not. And there's empirical evidence that what you think is not necessarily your truth, which is why you have to be so discerning and you have to be conscious about where you put your energy. Because if you believe in every single thing, your world, you're telling yourself, what would it be like to tell yourself something different? Like, I am so capable. I am worthy of this relationship. I am worthy of this job opportunity.

Jeanne: [00:10:19] And suddenly all your life fell into exactly the way you wanted it to be. Like your dreams and your realizations and everything you actually wanted and desired in life actually happened. That could happen. I think we're all addicted to something. Usually it's the next dopamine hit or relief, trying to find some sort of relief or escape from how we're feeling. And it can come in the most respectable forms. Like, you know, work is a very respectable addiction. It's practical, so people go along with it, but at some point it becomes unbalanced and dangerous. And the same with technology. The same with drugs and alcohol. And there's many different forms, especially in the 21st century. Humans have become addicted to just about anything then sitting with the present moment. So you know what you're like if you're suddenly told that you can't have your phone for an hour or you even misplace your phone for a few minutes, what does that do to you? Send alarm bells off in your system. What we're really addicted to as a form of control, which is a false sense of power. We want to feel safe. We want to feel superior, sometimes because we want to feel loved and accepted. And you simply can't hustle your way out of a wounded sense of self. So we start to get, I think, too big. Our egos get too big when we have a real sense of insecurity. So instead of just being the right size and going about our life in the right way and interacting in a healthy way, We start to feel that dominance and control, whether it's through power, through money, through sex, whatever it may be.

Jeanne: [00:11:58] And I think you just need to look at the state of our world today to know how true that really rings. But if I'm being honest, there's a part of our nature that wants to strive for more. That's part of the self-actualization as we get older. And so once you're aware that there's more, we have to either look at, am I going to be a victim or am I going to be a victor or even an author of a new story in my own life? Because there will come that moment, that moment of reckoning where we're in the fork of that road and we have to decide which way we're going. And I want to invite you to invoke your healer within yourself, because I believe there's a lot of self agency And too often I've spoken about this before, we outsource that to other professionals. And it doesn't mean that people can't fellow journey with us. And I believe that we need guides and mentors to fellow journey with us. But I also believe that we also have our our own agency in what we do with our life. We're not a passive part of our life. We are an active participant in our life and we need to be active, whether it's in our own self inquiry or self healing, our consciousness.

Jeanne: [00:13:23] Looking at the parts that some parts work really, really well and some parts need some TLC or looking at our shadow is why do we get so heightened when we see that in someone else and not in ourselves? So we all have our own spiritual path and what matters is that you be you. Only you, only me, only. I can take radical responsibility for my own healing or your healing. We, as I said, we have guides and mentors and they help close the gap for us between where we are and where we want to be. And that also gives us an additional level of accountability. And we absolutely do better when we have accountability. There's no question about that. Guides can walk beside you, but you will always have to take that first step. And so when I talk about our spiritual curriculum and what I'm really talking about here is our own unique spiritual curriculum here in earth school. It's designed for your greatest growth and personal evolution. Your curriculum is about transcending pain into purpose. You know, it's your unique lived experience. You know, there's an old saying, you put your keys on the table, you take your own ones back. And what they mean by that is everybody has different problems, some cancers, some mental health, some addiction, some, you know, tragic loss, grief, whatever.

Jeanne: [00:14:45] There's no shortage of heartache in the world today. But what we're really saying is, is that when we put our we're given our own unique curriculum for our own maximum best evolution and growth for ourselves. And that is why we're dropped into the families we are. And so the challenge is, I think for most of us is that we've been sold that life is supposed to be easy. I don't know where we got that from, but clearly it isn't. And so when we brush up against pain and adversity as anomalies, it's like something's gone wrong. What did I do to bring this on? And we start getting into self and thinking it's all about us and ego. Instead of recognizing that our lived experiences are our greatest teachers, setbacks are just inevitable. It's inevitable part of life. And when we're in them, they feel deeply, deeply personal to us. We're brought into the false belief that somehow we may have done something wrong, or we want to bend the external reality that we're being confronted with, that life should be more easy or more comfortable. But when we recognize the duality of life, I think I remember that feeling that I was just after I lost my mother, that I had a deep sense of sadness, and I could also feel happy about how I was living and navigating my life. We can have pain and we can have purpose.

Jeanne: [00:16:15] We can have growth and we can have adversity. And when we begin to see in the space in the form of contrast, we can increase our capacity for love and compassion and worthiness grows. When we get to hold both. This is hard, and this is shaping me into who I want to be. You're not being punished. None of us are. You're just being invited into a deeper truth and alignment. So I want to share something essential about worthiness and change and growth and evolution. Safety is absolutely a prerequisite for change. So people say you hear the word safety and nervous system regulation and whatever. It means we want to take ourselves from a heightened, um, adaptive, heightened, restricted sense of self and down regulate and be in the moment without the ability to run from self or self soothe or act out in any way. When I say self soothe. Of course we want to self soothe in healthy ways, but most of us have learned to act out in ways that sabotage ourselves. So in order to feel safe, we have to be able to tolerate the present moment, no matter how painful it is, and not abandon ourselves and run. And that is essential. And we can't think our way out of a situation that's painful for us. We can't heal our way out by thinking, we have to actually feel. And also, we have to be validated by someone who is a safe support for us, and that will allow us and have an emotional release.

Jeanne: [00:18:02] Now, emotional release doesn't have to be a big overt thing. Having a cry or scream or whatever, or shaking your way out, but it can be something that you just sense and shift within yourself. You can't shame, bully, or force yourself into healing. Your nervous system really needs the safety to experiment with new ways of seeing and being. And if you've always ran, hit the bypass button, as I call it. Like just hit that bypass and off you go with whatever adaptions that you've learned to do, then you're not going to be able to feel and you're not going to be able to feel safe. So it's about titrating. As I said, it's like you want to dip your toe in the water and feel safe before you put your whole foot in the water and go up to your ankle and into your calf, because I think that when we go too quick, too deep, too quick, we shock ourselves, and then we run for cover again and we don't want to come back out. So this is really an important part of it. So our rules to feel safe are really come from how we've adapted in the past. And we're saying, let's just put that away for now, and let's just be with and see if we can have 1 or 2 moments of presence without reacting.

Jeanne: [00:19:23] That would start to alchemize our trauma, our pain, our narratives, and start to evolve into this newer evolution of who we are becoming. We have to look as our adaptions as they were our friends at a time. They were brilliant solutions to very painful problems. They helped us achieve. They helped keep peace. They helped keep calm. They also took away from ourself, which is really how we end up losing ourselves. And then we're in so much pain and disconnection from self that we feel that we need to do something external in order to just get by. We tend to move through four primary states fight, flight, freeze or fawn and flight might look like anger. I'm out of here. Control, defensiveness. What are you talking about? I have no idea, that gaslighting from a nervous system perspective, we tend to act through four primary states fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, and they can all look different. And we don't always have one primary style. We can have a variety depending on what the circumstances that are challenging us. Fight might look like anger control, defensiveness. Flight can show up as busyness. Overworking, escaping such as drugs. Freeze can feel like numbness shut down, or paralysis. Fawn is a pattern of appeasing and pleasing others so we can feel safe. Yeah, that was kind of a surprising one that I used to fawn. I generally am a nice, kind person, and I used to like to see others or be complimentary, but I noticed that there was a pattern around fawning, you know, trying to make others more comfortable, I think was than myself, even though I was trying obviously to make myself feel comfortable, but I didn't even recognize it.

Jeanne: [00:21:28] And, you know, obviously there's tools like, you know, when we're looking at nervous system safety, we want to look at our adverse childhood experience questionnaire and we have Ace scores. And that's something that can show you very quickly how your lived experience can really inform your present life. So none of this is about blame. It's just really understanding that your worthiness was never the problem. Your worthiness has never been the problem. It's been your programing and your nervous system and from your programing, your nervous system then did what it needed to do with the information and the environment it had in order to feel safe. But at some point on this healing path, we have to stop looking in the rear view mirror. We must acknowledge the past that we don't live there. We begin to drive forward and we ask, who do I choose to be right now? What identity do I want to step into? And what beliefs no longer serve me? And so for me, this has been a constant, i always say it's a constant unlearning and relearning. And one of the things I just said, and I don't mean this in all aspects because this is kind of a positive statement, but it could be very jarring to someone to hear this.

Jeanne: [00:22:42] I feel like I've outgrown my life. So what do I mean by that? There's parts of my life that are really comfortable and I really love, but there's parts of me that are is really hungry for more depth, more growth, more excitement, more adventure in my life, more fun, more play. Because I built my life around work primarily because I love it. But that's not all I want to be. And so when we ask ourselves these questions, we're also giving ourselves permission to be who we really want to be rather than who we think we need to be in order to be loved. Now, remember, the qualities of your thoughts will determine the quality of your life. And there's a direct parallel between what you think and what you feel and how you behave. So you just want to upgrade those quality of thoughts to the highest level possible. As I said, it's like a frequency you want to, you know, turn on the right wifi setting so that you, you're up and running and it's and it's going well. And if the quality of your thoughts determine the quality of your life and your thoughts are primarily, I can't do this, I don't know, I don't matter. Nothing can ever be different. Then your life will organize itself around those statements.

Jeanne: [00:24:05] Everything in life is self-perpetuating. So if you think you can, favorite quote, Henry Ford, you will. And if you think you can't, that will also be your reality as well. So our worthiness is determined in large part by the message we received about ourselves as we've spoken before. And so you determine your value. No one else gets to do that for you. So how are you going to look at yourself in this new light and start to begin changing your identity. What no longer serves you in your life? What if you think, what is the whisper that nudge from your soul? What is it telling you? Because I think when we get these intuitive hits, they come in these quiet kind of whispers. And I think that the whispers eventually become a roar. If we continue to ignore them. But I feel like the ego is loud enough in my ear, and I feel like the whispers and the intuitive nudges are more quiet and subtle. So pay attention to them. Ask them what is it that they're asking of you? What is it they're trying to bring your attention to? Because once we're aware, then we can create the safety that we need to explore that, and then we can tell ourselves a different story that I matter. It's safe for me to take up space. I am going to determine my worth, not by someone else. And then we start to act in alignment and integrity with who we are.

Jeanne: [00:25:45] And that's how we become someone different. We leave the adapter, the disrupter, the peacemaker, the people pleaser at the door. And finally, we also remember that this is not a once and done. It's always a process. It's always a process. It's a practice. That's why it is a practice. We're always in inquiry with ourselves. We're always looking for where is the grain of truth in what is being presented to me? How can I give myself more space between stimulus and response before I act or think or answer? And coming back to the AWAKEN method. Worthiness. The awakened method is here to bridge the gap between what you know and what you actually do. Through accountability, environmental design, and micro habits. When we don't succeed in life, it's not because it's a worthiness issue. It's a design issue. And so if we can take the pressure off of ourselves and recognize that in order to succeed, we need better programing, we need better community and accountability and support. We need guides. So as you reflect on your worthiness today, I want to invite you to ask yourself, what were the messages I received about my worth? Which adaptions did I create to feel safe? What identity have I been living from that no longer fits who I truly am? I think that's a big one. And the most important one is what is the next small step that I can take to move towards what I truly desire? So give yourself some time to reflect on those journal prompts.

Jeanne: [00:27:45] This is your spiritual curriculum in Earth School. It is asking you to transcend your pain into purpose and reclaim your inherent worthiness, not as something you do or earn, but as something you already are. You are inherently worthy just because you are a human that is managed to be alive on this planet. So in our next episode, we're going to continue to move through the AWAKEN method. And the next letter is a for affirmation and affirming. And I want you to sit with this. Your worthiness is not up for debate. It is because of who you are innately. And it's time to live as if that's your truth. So until next time. How are you going to stay naturally high?

Jeanne: [00:28:37] Thank you for joining me for this episode of Naturally High. If this conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or reach out to me through the links in the show notes. Together, we're changing the way the world approaches mental health, addiction, and trauma. Remember to like, subscribe and leave a rating for Naturally High on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen so you never miss an episode. For more inspiration and resources, follow me on Instagram @therecovery_concierge or visit therecoveryconcierge.com. Stay empowered, keep rising, and I'll see you in the next episode.