Flipping my core belief on its head

How a Zen teaching is changing my perspective on showing up fully.

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I don’t matter moves through my body all day long.

I don’t matter rings between my ears all day long.

I don’t matter is what Charlotte Joko Beck, an American Zen teacher, would call a core belief.

I have been reading Joko Beck’s book Ordinary Wonder and it feels like home. I have been studying different facets of Buddhism for over a decade and the way she speaks about things makes sense to me, probably because she looks at things through a very psychological angle, and I like that.

The core belief it is what we find to be most wrong about us. It is formed in childhood because it is impossible for any parent to meet all their child’s needs. Children do no have the ability to realize parents can make mistakes or be flawed, so when their needs are not met they assume it is because something is wrong with them, and this is how a core belief forms.

The core belief is the thing we fear to embrace the most about ourselves. We do not want to feel our core belief, Joko Beck says we develop a basic strategy. A way of being in the world that protects us from feeling the devastation of our core belief.

I believe I do not matter and I have developed a core strategy of holding back.

Since I do not matter, you do not need to hear my opinion.

Since I do not matter, I will keep that thought to myself.

Since I do not matter, I will save the most interesting things about myself for myself.

Our basic strategy shows up everywhere, we use some version of it to approach each area of our life. I do not like to admit this but it has been showing up in my writing. And so has my fear of being inconsistent or a fraud.

I want to be a good writer, so I put myself on a schedule. I want to be a good writer, so I edit my pieces incessantly. I want to be a good writer, so I think about my topics a lot before I even sit down to write them.

I have trained the joy out my creative process. I have forgotten why I am here and what I am doing because I have been caught up in trying to protect myself from feeling I do not matter.

I have seen this core belief of mine shake loose a bit and yet like most things in life, I find it is gripping harder than ever to stay around. I feel my holding back more than I ever have and I see it in everything I do. I cannot always name exactly what I am holding back, sometimes it is my energy, sometimes it is just a part of myself.

So, each week, I try to share writing with you. I rarely write in real time anymore. I tell myself it is because of motherhood and the chaos of life, but I am scared. I have a story that a good writer takes her time with things. I scared of being messy and vulnerable. I write to you all the time about being human and I have been having a hard time being human here.

This week I hit a wall with it. We are moving and I had NO plans for anything to go out. I have another Motherhood Musings post I need to write, Unspoken Words to set up and a ton of half written drafts. So, I chose a draft and said this will do. I recorded the audio and everything.

It was not until my husband asked me how the recording went that I realized what I had done. I had scheduled a post I didn’t even feel in alignment with anymore JUST to get something out there. My first reaction was to quit Substack, then it was to take a break while we move, then I reached neutral and saw I needed to make changes about how I approach my writing.

Shifting my approach to writing

I stock pile my ideas, and when I have space I try to write whatever feels most alive in that moment. This works sometimes and other times it doesn’t. It is why I have a bunch of unfinished drafts, I lost the spark. I am not sure I need or want to be writing from that place of high excitement or inspiration.

This week I tried something different, I want to write about what is. So, I started making a list of thoughts through the week, and I am sitting and writing to you from a neutral space. It is okay, it does not feel as nice as when I am writing on a high, but I rarely can catch the highs because those seem to find me in the middle of getting my son to sleep.

I want to be in my writing, not chasing down some line or feeling I had last week that I can barely get a taste of anymore. I want to be in my body as I write and I want to share myself with you, alongside my ideas around motherhood and being. I notice I have been editing myself out of my pieces (not this one, as I am rereading it, I am keeping a lot of me in here, even though it makes me cringe slightly).

You may not notice this or even agree with me, but I can tell how I hold back a little bit, just in case this all blows up and I remember I do not matter. I am protecting myself, but I can confidently say, fuck that. Because my core belief is shaking loose, I feel more and more confident lately that I do matter. The space I take up matters and if there is somewhere I can practice not holding back, it is here, in my writing, with all of you.

I have stories about how this won’t work. I have stories about how I need to talk directly about motherhood. I have stories about how no one will read anything I have to say if I am not tying it into motherhood. But this space is about telling the truth, the women who have showed up here and shared themselves with me have shown me that.

I can tell my truth, I can share myself more in the moment than weeks later as I have been doing. What is happening now is of value in some way even if I do not understand it. And Being in Motherhood is about all of it, the details of motherhood and how we are being in general.

Because if I can practice sharing myself more fully here, it will impact my son and how I mother. It will impact other areas of my life as well.

I am tired of protecting myself. I am tired of operating in ways that keep me wrapped up in a narrative from years ago. The life I have created, the space I am holding and taking up now, is built directly out of the belief that I do matter and what I am doing with my life matters.

I find it easy to slip into performance. Like I said above, I have all these stories of a good writer. But I do not want to be good. I say this often about motherhood, I do not want to be a good mother, I want to be a human mother. I want to be a human writer.

To me, this means I infuse all aspects of my humanity into what I am doing. This means I do not hold back feelings. This means I share exactly where I am. This means I practice trust. This means I share more of myself.

Vulnerability and intimacy are hard work for me. A childhood of trauma will teach you there is no place for either of these things because they require trust. Trust cannot exist when people hurt you or do not protect you.

But I try, I practice, and still I find these teensy parts of myself still being held back. They aren’t even identifiable sometimes, I feel like this tiny gate around my heart holding a bit of energy back. And I cannot force it open.

And maybe, who knows, maybe a little bit of holding back isn’t a bad thing. I think a lot about how this strategy of holding back protected me at one point. I had to keep myself safe from my mother, I didn’t know who was worthy of my trust, so I held back parts of me others told me were undesirable.

I have come leaps and bounds with integrating these dismissed parts of myself and I still feel this bit of holding back. Maybe it is a part of myself I have yet to meet or maybe it is my wise self holding a sense of discernment.

A voice is chiming in to tell me I cannot write that because what if I am wrong, what if it changes. To that I say, everything changes.

I as a human am constantly evolving. I cannot write anything with one-hundred percent certainty. But this is what i feel in this moment and this is why I am here. To write, to share myself, to exist here in my body in real time with present moment discoveries.

Do you know what your core belief is? Do you have any sense of your basic strategy? If you write here, what is your approach to making it flow? Please, share with me in the comments.

Love,

Emma

Thank you for reading. If you are new here, welcome, I am Emma and in this space, I explore mothering, healing, shifting patterns, and learning what it means to be ourselves in motherhood.

I invite you to read this to learn more about Being in Motherhood and how to contribute to this space.

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• Dear reader, your guidance is desired - questions for you to answer, so we can all go deeper together.

• Motherhood Musings: Collection 1, Volume 1 & Volume 2- our expectations and our realities of motherhood.

• Unspoken Words: Volume 16 & Volume 17 - sharing mothers experiences of what is hard for them in this season of motherhood.

• The birth story I never thought I’d tell - my reflections on becoming the mother and human I was all along.

• Tending to our younger parts - how parts work can help us become the loving parents we may of never had.