As the Paradigm Shifts | Self-Deprivation

Cracking open the door to who knows what

||| AS THE PARADIGM SHIFTS by ROSIE KUHN

Who knows what will shift when I finally stop saying, “I can’t have that.”

Manifestation is something people long for. They pay thousands of dollars for workshops, webinars, and coaches promising to teach them how to manifest. Yet, as I’ve written about in many of these posts, the ability to manifest doesn’t come from tricks or techniques. It resides in the deepest core truths of who we are.

Here’s some questions that reveal what could be boulders in the road to having what we say we want?

• Am I worthy?
• Is it dangerous to open myself up to receiving?
• Is there a part of me that believes, “I can’t have that”?
• And perhaps most poignantly: Can I give myself permission to receive what I want?

Am I willing to risk letting go of what feels like the only truth, for something more? David Hawkins, and others, tell stories of healing that sound miraculous—shifting from near-death to wholeness, vibrancy, and the freedom to savor all the pleasures of life. I have no doubt this possibility exists for all of us. The question is: to what degree are we willing to explore what stands in the way?

I recently began to notice the various ways in which I deprive myself of what feels yummy. And by yummy, I don’t just mean just food. I mean anything that nourishes and delights my soul. At times I wonder if I’ve made myself highly sensitive as a way of keeping yummy things at bay—whether people, places, or pleasures. Or maybe I really do have food sensitivities. Maybe it’s both.

But here’s what stopped me in my tracks: This morning, feeling sad about not having closeness with people I love, I heard this very young innocent voice within me ask, “Could I have toast with breakfast?” And I began to cry. The tears weren’t about bread. They revealed the depth to which I’ve been depriving myself of love.

The Four Faces of Self-Deprivation
Most of us take our sensitivities at face value. But maybe more lies beneath the surface.

• Self-Deprivation as Control
  Sometimes depriving myself feels like control. If I don’t let myself have what I want,
  then I don’t risk disappointment, rejection, or loss. I hadn’t seen how it perhaps has
  become a fortress: I can withstand. I won’t need. I won’t risk. But that control also
  isolates me from the flow of life, from spontaneity, and from the unexpected generosity
  of the moment.
• Yummy as Dangerous
  At some point, I learned that what is pleasurable or delicious can also be unsafe. Love,
  intimacy, even a simple comfort like toast, can carry hidden risks: “If I let myself enjoy
  this, something bad might happen.” So often throughout life, I internalized the rule: better
  not to have, better to go without. The problem is that this rule guards against joy as
  fiercely as it guards against pain and dis-ease.
• Sensitivity as Gatekeeper
  My sensitivities are real—my body has its limits. But I notice how quickly those
  sensitivities can become gatekeepers, quietly whispering: “You can’t have that.” Whether
  it’s a food, a place, or even a relationship, sensitivity can be both a truth and a convenient
  disguise for self-deprivation.
• The Cry for Love
  And then there are the tears. The tears at the thought of toast. The tears at the longing for
  closeness. They tell me what this is really about: not the food, not the sensitivities, not
  even the control. At its root, it’s about loneliness and experiencing the absence of love.
  Am I willing to let myself have love in all its forms—comfort, pleasure, sweetness,
  tenderness? Am I willing to risk believing that I can have the yummy?

The Knock of Loneliness
For a long time, I’ve noticed how I stop myself from everyday pleasures—cooking a yummy meal just for me, tending the yard—simple things that once brought joy. Instead, irritability rises up, and I contract. There’s a part of me that does only the bare minimum: prepare a meal that’s “enough,” or keep the yard “tidy enough.”

Beneath that, I can feel loneliness of a life lived alone—no matter how much I hail the value of such an existence. If I have guests, I’ll make something special. But I rarely invite people in.

Even the thought of having guests stirs something I avoid—loneliness. It’s as if loneliness has been tapping at my door all along. I hear it knocking but I won’t open the door. Who would?

The Knock of Self-Deprivation
Recently, I was bequeathed some money from a friend who passed away. I didn’t feel the urge to splurge or travel. What I felt was a desire make repairs to my property, and set aside a little nest egg for myself, for when and if that certain irresistible blingy-something arises.

When I told my daughter about this windfall and my plans, she said something like, “That’s very telling about your relationship with money.”

Her comment stayed with me. Because what it revealed wasn’t about money—it was about me—about the deeper relationship I have with my own beliefs regarding lack and scarcity and me. Because truly, it’s never about the money.

Money is often mistaken as the source of happiness, freedom, or well-being. But it isn’t. I am the source of happiness, freedom, and well-being. When I forget this—when I fall into amnesia about the truth of who I am, or maybe I never even knew it—this where I need to get curious. This is where the work of true manifestation begins.

I suspect that the practice of self-deprivation is the core interloper to receiving my heart’s desires. True manifestation doesn’t begin with vision boards or strategies. It begins with allowing and remembering that I am the source of happiness, freedom, and well-being. And from that remembering, everything I desire becomes possible—because I am no longer depriving myself of the very life that wants to live through me.

The Threshold Between Depriving as Control and Permission to Receive
Whether it shows up as self-deprivation around food, the irritability that keeps me from everyday pleasures, the ache of loneliness, or the way I relate to money—it’s all pointing to the same threshold. The threshold of receiving what is yummy, nourishing, loving. However, there’s a door that needs to open before I can cross that threshold.

But here’s the thing: I can’t only open the door to joy, comfort, and sweetness. To receive fully, I also have to let in the parts of me I’ve kept out for perhaps lifetimes—the lonely, the deprived, the unwanted.

Who’s Knocking at the Door?
It’s like Rumi’s poem, The Guest House. Every knock on the door, whether joy or sorrow, hunger or fullness, loneliness or love, is here to invite me deeper into my own truth. To make space for yummy also requires that I make space for all of it. ALL OF IT!

The knock of loneliness, the tears over toast, the carefulness with money—these are not problems to fix. They are invitations. They are my Soul’s way of saying: There is more love available than you are letting in. Open the door!

So, I ask myself: What would it be like to open the door today? What would it be like to welcome the lonely along with the love? How would it be to say yes to whatever is outside the door, however small, and to receive it all as part of the feast?

In Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender, David Hawkins writes about how people unconsciously suppress or repress emotions (fear, grief, anger, shame) as a way of coping. These suppressed emotions don’t disappear—they manifest as physical illness, emotional constriction, or maladaptive behaviors.

He notes that suppression can become a habitual strategy for safety: avoiding vulnerability, pain, or rejection by controlling one’s environment, diet, or relationships. This echoes the way anorexia or hypersensitivity can function as defenses. YIKES!

In his broader Map of Consciousness, lower states of consciousness, (fear, grief, apathy) correlate with constriction, deprivation, and the sense of “I can’t.” Higher states (acceptance, love, joy) open toward receiving and abundance. His point, which I take very seriously is this: moving upward requires the courage to feel what has been avoided. YUCK!!

Hawkins’ experiential and spiritual lens strongly reinforce what I’m experiencing: that self-deprivation, sensitivity and avoidance may be strategies I use to try to control life by suppressing pain—however… at the same time, ultimately blocking my access to joy and love. JEESH!

The Antidote for Self-Deprivation
You can go online and find all kinds of To-Do’s to let go of the practice of self-deprivation. My experience is that those strategies can’t be effective until I willingly have a heart-to-heart meeting with every aspect of me knocking at the door. The moment I courageously open that door, something shifts.

Here’s an example: After finishing the first draft of this post, I felt something shift. Through writing, I witnessed myself at the threshold—door closed. So, by being with all of this—through writing, the grip of
self-deprivation loosened. And instead of telling myself “Why bother” or “it’s not important,” I suddenly felt inspired to go outside and tend my yard. Wow! You don’t know how huge that is!! That’s the paradox: when I stop trying to control what feels safe and unsafe, when I stop trying not to feel what is, and allow even a crack of self-truth to be known, inspiration gently wafts in.

Unfolding happens!

So much of what I’m speaking to here, lives in the unconscious. I may have known, somewhere deep down, that eventually I’d be inspired to cut my lawn—but what surprised me was that, by engaging consciously with just a piece of what was hidden, something shifted. Truth is, it always does, when I just be present to who’s knocking at the door.

It’s in these small moments that the deeper work reveals itself. The tiniest unveiling, the smallest allowance, can release energy we didn’t know was trapped. And yet, these subtle habits—the little nuances—are often what keep us tethered to the unrevealed. Naming them, even gently, is what begins to set us free. It works for me, anyway!

The antidote isn’t indulgence, but permission—permission to welcome what knocks, to receive what is yummy, to honor what matters. It’s giving ourselves permission to allow all parts of us in, even the lonely and unwanted. From that place of self-honoring, inspiration flows naturally.

Listen for the knocks at the door.
Welcome the lonely you, the abandoned you, the hungry you,
the broken you, the ugly you, the tender you, the true you.

They come not to harm you,
They come to heal you.

They come bearing gifts
that wait only for your hands to open.

You don’t even have to ask—
only to whisper,
“Okay. Come on in.”