It is a commonplace in spirituality that what we feel we lack can only be found within. It’s an inside job, the saying goes, as if we were somehow a sealed, contained unit that wasn’t in a constant, osmotic relationship with the world around us. This idea often gives rise to a deep sense of inadequacy or shame. If I feel unworthy, most modern spirituality says, I need to find my own self-worth. If I haven’t found love yet, it is because I don’t yet love myself enough. I certainly shouldn’t go looking for things outside of myself. Such teachings seem almost pathologically unwilling to look without, insisting that the remedy (and somehow the blame) must lie within.

But it is hard – if not impossible – to value ourselves if we haven’t been valued by anyone else. Likewise, it is hard – if not impossible – to love ourselves when we haven’t been loved. What lies inside originally came from outside. If we lack self-worth, it is because we were rarely or not-often-enough given a reason to feel worthy. We got the message (either explicitly or implicitly) that we weren’t up to scratch, that we were useless or otherwise lacking in value. When that message is repeated, severe, or shocking, it sticks. As children, we do not have the ability to hold out indefinitely against such assaults. Eventually, we cave in; we cannot conceive ourselves as anything other than what we are being perceived as by the important others in our lives. We become – or believe ourselves to be – what they say we are.

We are also living in a wider cultural context which is constantly giving us messages about our value, or lack thereof. Even as very young children, we begin to imbibe these messages in all their complexity. We are judged, categorised and valued by our appearance, skin colour, bodily ability, height, size, intellectual ability, gender, sexuality, class, age, clothing; the list goes on. We are assigned value or not, and we cannot help but assimilate outer judgements into our inner view of ourselves. This skewing of value has profound consequences, both personally and collectively. How can it be otherwise when whole groups or nations of people are valued so blatantly over others? It is inconceivable that such valuations would or could not be internalised. And then spirituality comes along and says, it’s all an inside job, when it is obviously anything but.

So how do we find our way back to our innate value? In my experience, it is a process of discovering exactly what the messages are and where they came from. Of seeing those moments when we were told we were useless or unworthy or lacking in value, and feeling the impact of them. By becoming conscious that our beliefs about ourselves didn’t originate from within. By feeling what these beliefs have cost us, by mourning for what was taken from us, by raging at the distortions and untruths. It is in doing this deep excavation work – together with others, if we can – that we begin to sense the preciousness of ourselves, the value that resides in the very fact of our existence.

As we go through this process of reclamation, we also begin to see what we value, not only within ourselves, but in the world itself. The creativity and sensitivity we have been scorned for begins to live and breathe again, and we find ourselves sharing or connecting more freely with others. The childhood loves and passions that were shamed or buried start to resurface, tentatively at first. We begin to discover a world of value beyond the commodification of souls and natural resources that is currently costing us our health, our sanity, and our planet. As I say in The Dark Night of the Soul, we begin to discover value in unexpected places, not least within ourselves. “Value has nothing, I repeat nothing, to do with economic worth, title or status. It cannot be earned or lost. Rather, it is measured in how closely we listen to the earth and to life’s subtle whispers, in how gently we touch the lowest of the lowlies.”