To Be Worthy: The Radical Realization That You Get to Be YOU

By Charlotte Eléa

RECLAIM THE REAL WORTHY YOU: Worthiness is not something that we can learn from others. Rather, it is an awakening that must come from within. Worthiness is our birthright. Each one of us knows deep inside at our core that we are worthy.

So, how do we come to this radical realization?

In To Be Worthy, Charlotte Eléa shares the inspiration, tools, and practices to reclaim your self-worth:

•Break through wounding beliefs and the root causes of your feelings of unworthiness.
•Reclaim what makes you YOU, and integrate new, powerful truths about who you really are.
•Create a new relationship with yourself based in trust, self-love and self-compassion.
•Discover a whole new way of living by following your own inner guidance.

You are invited to come on a journey of self-discovery and revelation; of deep, soul healing that will crack you wide open! Beneath the wounds of “I don’t matter” and “I am never going to be good enough” is a truth about how uniquely worthy and gifted you are. Are you ready to know it?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charlotte Eléa
• Release date: Nov 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463886748

Charlotte Eléa

Charlotte Eléa is the author of the book, To Be Worthy, and an expert in emotional self-healing. She is an intuitive guide and mentor to soulful women who are ready to know who they really are, and awaken their healing gifts. She is passionate about leading women to the discovery that they may take the painful, difficult, and wounded parts of themselves and transform them into frickin’ gold. She has a background in clinical psychotherapy, and has been a student of her intuition for over 20 years. She has developed unique approaches to self-healing and self-discovery through her own experiences of deep transformation and healing. She lives in La Crescenta, California, with her wife and dog.

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Charlotte Eléa

To Be Worthy

The Radical Realization That You Get to Be YOU

First published by Big Beautiful Breakthrough 2019

Copyright © 2019 by Charlotte Eléa

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This is a work of nonfiction. However, the author has changed the names of some people in order to protect their privacy.

First edition

Cover art by Barsha Dahal

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

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For my mother, my mother’s mother, and my mother’s grandmother.

For all the daughters of the world. May we embrace the wounds passed down to us with love, courage, and grace. May we unearth all the mother love we have always needed within ourselves.

Contents

Introduction: You Are Whole and Complete

I. I AM WORTHY OF LOVE

My Sensitivity is a Gift

When I Honor Myself, Love Finds Me

Love Is a Courageous Act

II. I AM WORTHY OF BEING MY TRUE SELF

There Is No Good or Bad—Only Truth

How I Feel Matters

I Am Worthy of Being Happy

Surrender Is the First Step to Getting There

III. I AM WORTHY OF MAKING NEW CHOICES

I Forgive Myself

I Define Myself

I Am Free to Express Myself

I Am More than My Fears

IV. I AM WORTHY OF HAPPINESS

I Am Connected to All

I Take Care of Myself First

Everything Has Prepared Me for This Moment

I Am Brave Enough to Be Happy

My Life Has Deep Meaning

V. EPILOGUE & APPENDICES

You’re Okay When You’re Not Okay

Appendix A: Six Steps to Awaken Your Intuition

Appendix B: Ten Intuition-Building Tools

Appendix C: The Seven Stages of the Healing Cycle

Acknowledgements

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About the Author

Introduction: You Are Whole and Complete

When the owner of the consignment store called, I figured it was to ask me to work an additional shift. Someone was sick, had a show, or was taking their birthday off. So, I was not prepared for what she said:

I’m so sorry to do this to you, but we have to let you go.

I was fired. For the first time in my life. From a job that paid less than any job I had held since college, and only slightly more than the jobs I held in high school at delis and frozen yogurt shops. I was 36 years old and getting fired from a job that paid minimum wage.

How the fuck did I get here? I asked myself.

I had taken the job because I thought it would be easy. And, for the most part, it was. I picked out outfits for minor celebrities who came in for the Chanel suits and Louie Vuitton bags at discount prices. I dressed window displays in brightly colored muumuus and chunky sandals for the Coachella crowd. I modeled dresses of gold fringe for their Instagram account. I thought I was an invaluable part of the LA retail fashion scene.

Except, I wasn’t. I actually knew nothing about fashion. I liked to shop at vintage stores and score awesome finds from the sixties and seventies, but that was the extent of it. I didn’t belong there.

But I didn’t know that.

At that point in my life I didn’t see myself as worthy of anything greater than this part-time minimum wage job. Despite the universe knocking me over several times in the form of wake-up calls during the two years prior, I’d fought off the harsh reality of what I believed about myself. Until that day.

I have come to understand that when we are entrenched in upholding the wounding beliefs that betray our own worth, we build lives that are so much smaller and limiting than what we are truly capable of. Thankfully, the universe will sometimes give us a stark and severe wake-up call to open our hearts and get us back on course.

I was lucky to receive that wake-up call. Since then I have come to see it as a gift. It was as if a voice beyond and bigger than myself said to me: You are meant for something so much greater than this, Charlotte. Don’t you see how remarkable you are? Now stop limiting yourself, already!

That realization only came after a brutal series of crashes and burns, when I finally woke up to the fact that nothing I had ever done to find a happy life had anything to do with who I truly was. I had been looking in all the wrong places for validation, believing that only another person could unlock the secret door to my self-worth.

But that validation never came, because no one held the key, except me. After that wake-up call, I began a journey towards discovering who I really was and what it really meant to feel and be worthy. I knew that I would need to dig deep inside myself and that the quest wouldn’t be easy, but I was ready to embrace this journey because nothing could be harder than the shame, heartache, confusion, and unhappiness I had already suffered. This would be the good challenging stuff of self-discovery that would also be full of wonder, joy, and total personal revelation.

In this book, I will share my full journey with you, from my lowest lows to my highest highs. I’ll share how I had to learn—sometimes the slow, painful way—that so much of what I believed about myself was deeply wounding and untrue.

Carl Jung was right when he said, We cannot change anything unless we accept it. The first step was to get real about the wounding beliefs that had imprisoned me for almost four decades with statements like: Everyone gets to belong but you. You are an impostor. And You are totally unworthy of love and happiness.

I had to replace these beliefs with the truth. Acceptance led me towards awakening my true voice and it stirred me to make big changes in my life. Learning to value myself essentially meant making a series of hundreds of new choices—some tiny, some huge—that over several years radically transformed my relationship to myself… But I am getting ahead of myself.

Each chapter of this book will walk you through a personal journey I undertook in order to discover a crucial piece about embracing true self-worth, and explores a wounding belief that I had to unlearn in order to arrive at the real authentic me. The biggest one of all was a whopper that takes so many of us down:

Wounding Belief: There is something wrong with me.

I can’t count how many times I had said this to myself up until that moment when I got fired. Before that day I would wake up every morning with a feeling of dread. If it was a good day, this dread would be hiding beneath the surface, beneath a busy list of to-dos. Look how important and needed you are! my list would tell me.

If it was not a good day, this dread would flood me. It would keep me hiding in bed until late morning, beneath the fuzzy reality of dreams and heavy blankets. It would follow me as I made breakfast and got ready, telling me that there was clearly something wrong about me to be dreading such a normal day. A normal day meant pretending I was okay, fearing both my thoughts and what might come out of my mouth, because I was strangled by shame.

Up until a few years ago, I spent the majority of my time hiding from myself and others. I believed I needed someone else’s love to fill and complete me; I didn’t believe my family would ever accept the real me; I didn’t think I would ever be able to find a community to truly belong to; I thought I had to prove myself by doing work that others approved of. And here’s the biggie: I thought there was no place for me in this world where I could ever truly be myself.

I believed I needed to be fixed and to change who I was to have success and happiness. This belief led me to make choices that left me feeling more empty, confused, and alone.

I considered myself incredibly lucky. I was thankful for the ground I walked on, the food I ate, and the roof over my head every single day. And yet, although this gratitude had allowed me to value my life, it did not equate to valuing myself. It’s impossible to be happy when you don’t believe you deserve it. It’s hard to live at peace with all that you do have when you believe you need to apologize for your own existence.

The playbook of life did not work for me the way it seemed to work for everyone else. It’s true: I am different. I am a highly sensitive introvert and I don’t feel like I fit in a lot of places. But instead of realizing that this made me special and remarkable, I believed there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

Before my wake-up call, I looked to others to show me how to fix me. And, of course, it never worked! I sought advice from well-meaning therapists, career coaches, friends, and colleagues. I thought that someone else would have the answer. I figured that if I am the problem and I need fixing, then I can’t trust myself to fix the problem. I thought I needed a solution outside myself to make me right again. I was an unreliable agent.

I never questioned that maybe I was searching for a solution I would never find. When I was training to be a psychotherapist, my professors told me I just needed to grow a thicker skin and I would be fine. Career books provided me with pretty, colored graphs that visually represented my personality, or lists of generic jobs that suited my type. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator validated all of my experiences of feeling different (INFJ), but only offered another seemingly random list of generic jobs as a solution to my woes. A career counselor showed me how to spin my resume to land the most practical of marketing jobs—even though I had no passion for the work. My therapist gave me no advice but told me she believed in me.

I fantasized and wished for a spirit guide to find me in my dreams—a woman with long, tangled white hair who would lead me down a dirt path through a wild mountain landscape towards the horizon. She would take my hands in hers, gaze deep into my eyes, and, as wrinkles formed around her wise dark eyes and her mouth curled into a grin, she would tell me all I needed to know.

Alas, no white-haired sage appeared to me, and eventually I exhausted all possible external resources.

Not long after I was fired, I realized the image of the white-haired sage was really my own heart trying to point me towards what I really needed: to look within and listen to what I found there. That white-haired sage actually lived deep within me as the love and wisdom of my authentic self. And she/I would guide me towards learning how to trust myself for the first time in my life.

Truth: I am already whole and complete.

What I eventually learned is that my inner voice of truth does not care what others think. My inner guidance system knows what I really want, knows who I really am, and knows what I truly need. But this voice had been muffled most of my life by the nagging, incessant voice of the wounding beliefs I had adopted when I was very young. It could not be heard through the steady stream of busy, critical thoughts running through my head. My true voice had to be heard in a different, less conventional way that took a lot of time and practice so that I could hear it again. It took intuition.

Intuition is both the pathway and the voice to the knowing, confidence, and truth that exists beyond the wounding beliefs of our minds. Each of us has intuition. And for those of us who have searched for self-worth in all the wrong places, I have come to know that intuition will help guide us back to ourselves.

After my stark wake-up call, I had nowhere else to go but within. Once I began to honestly look at myself and as my self-awareness grew, I was surprised to find that my heart began to fill with compassion for myself, and I became comfortable with the tender new places I’d found within my own heart. And in that quiet acceptance, my intuition found a way through, and began pointing me towards all the ways I was not broken, and did not and never did need fixing. My intuition guided me towards knowing I was whole and complete just as I was, just as I had always been.

I no longer woke up each day with a feeling of dread or shame. I began to allow myself to not know what would come next. I began to stop censoring myself and I began to feel more and more a part of the world around me. Most of all, I became really curious and interested in what my inner voice had to tell me.

Instead of waking up wondering what mistakes I’d inevitably make, I woke up eager to find out where my intuition would guide me next. It pointed me towards what made me feel excited, joyful, and fulfilled. I began to take risks and let myself get closer to people. I began to explore things that made me feel passionate and confident. I learned how to allow myself to make mistakes and how to forgive wholeheartedly.

In short, I began to trust myself and learn how to live my own life. Any new challenge that came my way, I now knew I had the courage to meet it.

This journey of self-discovery has enriched and enlightened me every step of the way. I shed the wounding beliefs about myself I’d clung to so desperately and I began to let my heart guide me. I had believed I was so different that I would never fit in; now I know I have a profound path to carve out and the potential to change the world. I used to feel lost; now I know this only meant there was another way for me to find. I used to get swallowed by fear and doubt; now I let it guide me towards being courageous and taking chances. I used to sacrifice my own needs because I felt a greater need to end others’ suffering; now I know I am profoundly gifted with the ability to heal myself and others.

Where this journey has led me to over and over again is love. Real honest love for myself. And real genuine love for others, too. It’s a beautiful journey to be on, and I’m thrilled to help you start your own journey to true self-worth and love! That journey begins now.

How This Book and Your Journey Unfolds

Along with one wounding belief that I released in order to heal my self-worth, each chapter of this book also contains a truth I discovered about what it truly means to be worthy. At the end of each chapter, I provide a short worthiness practice for you to do on your own so that you may release your own wounding beliefs, discover your own truth, and nurture your own healing journey and inner voice.

This book is divided into four parts in order to take you on a journey of reclaiming all of the dimensions of self-worth:

Part One, I Am Worthy of Love, takes you through an exploration of your early foundations where all the wounds of unworthiness originate. You’ll learn how your need to receive love is both the cause of these wounds and the key to healing them, and how you may now create deep, loving and meaningful relationships that help you reclaim how truly worthy you are.

Part Two, I Am Worthy of Being My True Self, takes you through the process of releasing many of the wounding beliefs that keep you and your true, worthy self in hiding. In this section I get real about some of my most difficult and painful years of struggle and low self-worth, the price I paid for denying who I really was, and the lessons I learned along the way. You’ll get real with yourself, too, and discover the profound gift of knowing you are worthy enough to accept yourself as is.

Part Three, I Am Worthy of Making New Choices, sets you up to break free of all the patterns, stories, and behaviors that have trapped you in the wounding beliefs of unworthiness. This is where you’ll learn how I stretched myself, acted courageously, and dared myself to think and live as a worthy woman, as you dare yourself to do the same.

In Part Four, I Am Worthy of Happiness, you’ll explore the dimensions of every day living that will continue to build a solid foundation of self-worth within you. I share many of the ways I gave myself permission to live a life that brought me real happiness, knowing that to be worthy means to do just that. You will be invited to do the same.

It is time to reclaim your worth. Your authentic self is needed in this world. So join me on this journey of discovering who you really are. It will be more profound than you can ever imagine!

—Charlotte Eléa, August 1, 2019, La Crescenta, California

I

I Am Worthy of Love

1

My Sensitivity is a Gift

When I was nine years old my family rented a cabin in the woods of New Hampshire on the peninsula of an idyllic lake. We spent a week taking out row boats, swimming, following a mamma duck and her six ducklings around the water’s edge, taking paths through the tall trees of this quiet and private escape. I still look back and remember the beauty of that place.

But that’s not all I remember. I remember being upset a lot of the time. I was upset that I didn’t know why I was upset. And my family was upset that I didn’t know why I was upset, so they couldn’t do anything about it. I took in all that beauty through a confusing emotional lens.

I remember pushing playing cards away in frustration during family game night and crying myself to sleep in the bunk room with my sister Laurie across the room. I remember taking day trips to nearby mountains and not wanting to get out of the car when we arrived. I remember sitting with my dad in the kitchen while I whimpered and he begged me to tell him what was bothering me. I couldn’t say because I didn’t know. I remember watching my mom and sisters laughing together in the living room while this was happening, believing they were talking about me, making fun of me, and feeling so separate and confused.

I was the youngest of three girls in a family of five, born in 1977. I grew up in Pasadena, California, a large suburb about ten miles outside Los Angeles. My mom, a fashionable high school teacher with a love for American literature and poetry, and my dad, a physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and full-blown pens-in-breast-pocket nerd, had me and my sisters in their mid and late thirties, which is the norm now but in the seventies was incredibly rare. Therefore, my parents were at least ten years older than most of my classmates. I remember drawing pictures of my mom with blue hair, because there was no silver marker.

When asked why they had us at such a late age, they told us that they did not want to bring children into a country during such an awful war. We knew this was the answer that they liked to tell people, but it wasn’t totally true. My aunt has often remarked that she didn’t think my parents would ever or even wanted to have kids, which my parents adamantly disagree with. In reality, it was a combination of factors, including my dad’s long road to his doctorate at UC Berkeley and the fact that they already had full lives without us.

As with most families, my sisters and I had defined roles and identities: Maggie was the oldest. She was the practical and crafty one. She was the leader and organizer for all of the kids in our neighborhood, putting together clubs, plays, fairs, anything she could do to lead. She loved to bake and sew, and she loved showing off her skills, talents, and achievements to the adults.

Laurie, the middle child, was the smart and sophisticated one. She got the best grades, and organized her side of the room to look like an office. She was a mini adult. She had my parents order sushi and baklava for her birthday parties, created magazines, and put together fundraisers for peace. She was always guided by an internal sense of justice.

I was the youngest and the expressive one. I was funny and entertaining. I would do impressions and make up silly dance moves to make everyone laugh. And I knew how to get my way because I was the baby.

But I was also the emotional, needy, stubborn, and sensitive one. For as long as I can remember, the way my parents described me