Deserve
“You are sitting on the earth and you realize that this earth deserves you and you deserve this earth. You are there–fully, personally, genuinely.” — Chogyum Trungpa
Feeling Like You Don’t Deserve Good Things
Deserve: What a loaded word!
When we first come into this earth, there seems to be a general consensus that we all “deserve” the same things.
To be loved. To receive healthcare. To be cared for. To be respected. To be educated. To be invested in.
But something happens. Maybe you’re born into a family where you are treated as though you have to earn affection. Maybe a teacher tells you that you don’t “deserve” to proceed in a particular subject. Maybe a religious institution tells you that only some people “deserve” to receive blessings. Wherever the origin story comes from, as we grow older, many people start feeling like they don’t deserve good things and like something is wrong with them.
How is it that we all start out from this place of collective agreement that we are unconditionally deserving, and then somehow, 99% of us end up with neurosis around what it is that we deserve?
Questioning What You Deserve
The way to stop feeling stuck in the idea that you don’t “deserve” good things is to start deconstructing it. To deconstruct something means to ask yourself if the logic can even hold up, and so if you start asking who does and doesn’t “deserve” good things you’ll quickly find that this is hard to pinpoint.
Do angry people not “deserve” good things?
Yes! you might say—mean, angry people don’t deserve good things, because they’re so mean and angry.
But if you look a little further…what if they became the way they did, so mean and angry, because someone deprived them of good things to begin with, or told them that they were undeserving?
What if the very system of telling the world that some people “deserve” the bad things that happen to them, is what causes the majority of our suffering?
What if you are causing your own suffering by insisting that you do not “deserve” good things, or that you “deserve” for bad things to happen to you?
You’ve Been Conditioned Around “Deserving” Things
Like most people, I have been trained by society to assume that there are things I need to do to prove my worth–somewhere along the line, the messages of intrinsic value simply from life and living convert to “now earn your keep.”
Note the choice of “things I need to do.” It’s assumed, when the very concept of deservedness is even brought into the picture, that deservedness is about action, not about being. Deservedness carries with it the idea that something must be earned.
You’ve got to see that that belief system is rigged. It’ll always come back to what Dr. Brene Brown calls “hustling for your worthiness.”
You’ve got to get out from under the faulty belief system that you need to do something in order to “deserve” the goodness of life.
In reality, bad things happen to good people, and it’s not about deserving it. No mother watching her child die of malnutrition in a third-world country did something to “deserve” that, nor did her child.
You are deserving. I am deserving. We are all deserving.
If you don’t believe that, yet, be willing to invest your time into doing what it takes to get there. You deserve that much, and the world deserves to experience all of you. We’re already grateful.