Today is the first day of the rest of my life. I am in pain this morning.

The little girl inside of me is sobbing uncontrollably. She has seen something within herself of which she is deeply ashamed.

It’s like I’ve lived my whole life thinking I was in the driver’s seat, and then realizing that I’ve merely been quietly suggesting things from the passenger’s seat this whole time. The thing that’s been driving is a horrible, disgusting, repulsive creature I’ve never seen before. 

I got up early, sat outside on my screened porch, drank my coffee, listened to the birds and visited with the trees, as I do every morning. Then I mined for gold in the Gene Keys and sat with my journal in quiet reflection.

This is how I like to commune with the spirit world, and the energy within me and all around me. 

This particular chapter of the Gene Keys felt very foggy and ambiguous. I usually ignore about 60% of it, because I believe the text to be a mix of mumbo jumbo, garbage and invaluable golden nuggets that have been collected from many different spiritual and scientific writings. I plow through the 60% that isn’t of value to me personally, and look for the nuggets of deeply insightful truth. 

Then I sit with the truth I have found, feel it in my body, think about how and why it resonates with me, and then I translate it into something that resonates much more deeply with me. 

This morning I was reading about the Shadow of Selfishness. This is a sore spot for me to begin with, because I was often accused of being selfish and spoiled as a child, even though we were relatively poor.

I read the chapter a couple of times, and felt like I could not discern its meaning. The author danced around the topic a bit, but never really came out with a clear definition of the term, or the human motivation behind it. He alluded to the idea that selfishness has to do with food, which really confused me at first. 

The only concrete idea he articulated in the opening paragraphs had me burst into laughter:

“Nothing exists unless it can be eaten by something else.”

-Richard Rudd

I kept picking and picking at the language and the concepts, sitting with them, feeling into them, until it snapped into my consciousness and hit me between the eyes. 

Selfishness is the belief that you will starve to death if you share your resources with others. 

The monster in the driver’s seat became clear.

Somewhere, very deep down, I have always believed that sharing what I value would be my decline and maybe even my death. 

I believe that at its most basic level, selfishness is the fear of starvation.

I grew up on the bare minimum, scraps, crumbs, left-overs and hand-me-downs, physically and metaphorically. 

We didn’t have much, and I was shamed for wanting things and asking for things throughout my childhood. The term “spoiled brat” made frequent appearances in my mother’s mouth. It cut me deep, for a very long time (well into my thirties). 

The fear of starvation has been living within me, undetected, for nearly four decades. It’s been calling the shots, bossing me around, making major life decisions, and refraining from acknowledging my Heart’s Desires (wanting things is bad, remember?).

As an adult, it’s really no wonder that I have hoarder tendencies. I hold onto things for too long. I buy new clothes and keep the old ones. I have piles of stuff, and boxes of unopened things. I have a vague idea of what’s in my closets and garage, but definitely couldn’t blindly make a list of all the things that I own.

I believe hoarding is a behavior that emerged from the experience of poverty, and marinating in a lack mindset that started as my parents’ and became my own.

If you give anything away you’ll starve to death. 

Hoarding doesn’t feel good, and I’ve been trying to treat the symptoms for a long time. I call it “purging.” I run around my house, frantically searching for things that are taking up space without providing an essential purpose or enjoyment. I put everything in bins, then I beg my husband to make a donation run.

But then inevitably, a month or two goes by and I still feel the same restlessness and dissatisfaction. I feel like my stuff is choking and suffocating my space all over again. More purging, more bins, more runs to the Goodwill. 

I believe I stumbled into the root cause of this hoarding habit. The fear that if I gave away something precious, I would never, ever have it or benefit from it again.

This is very different from how I consciously choose to live my life. On a conscious level, I believe in circulating, organizing and mobilizing resources. 

This is both part of my genius, and something that has yielded insanely good results. It’s created a vacuum for new projects, new clients, new team members, new adventures, new relationships and of course, money and material resources.

I’ve had physical proof that circulating resources and putting them to work is the best way to attract new resources and opportunities.

The reason I’m telling you this story is this:

You’ll never know what’s driving you until you run into the darkness of your emotional landscape. 

Run into the woods, find your monsters, feel horrified, and then give them love. That’s the only way to unleash your true creative and attractive power. 

Once you do that, whatever emerges within you will be pure magic.