My love- can we have a quick chat about deservedness?

I was having a chat with a beloved recently, and they said something to the effect of “I don’t believe I deserve all this suffering!”

Frustrated and heartbroken by their own pain, I so related.

I said “I don’t believe you deserve it either. No one DESERVES to suffer. And yet, suffering is incredibly human.”

The conversation broke open and inspired this blog post (and podcast episode) today.

Because my friend-

You don’t DESERVE to suffer–

yet you will.

You don’t DESERVE pain, and yet as a human- you’ll experience it.

You don’t DESERVE to die- yet, it’s the one thing guaranteed for us all.

Maybe asking if we deserve the hardships we have, or the suffering we are experiencing is missing the point of them altogether.

Maybe suffering just is and life just happens– and the stories we tell either amplify our suffering, or not.

A client of mine in Rising Sovereign recently shared the Buddhist metaphor of “the second arrow”

It goes:

Ahhh the possibility of choice.
Within that choice is not only our action - what we do next, how we wield our power and take the sacred responsibility for ourselves and our lives, but also the stories we tell about the first arrow.
Deservedness is a story…

A story rooted in a punishing paradigm.

The truth is: no, you don’t deserve to feel like shit.

No, you don’t deserve your suffering.

No, you don’t deserve your trauma, your heartache or whatever financial troubles you are facing.

Sure, we live in a world where certain choices have consequences–

But DESERVE? Don’t you feel how that’s rooted in punishment and reward?

The idea that if you’re a good little boy or girl, you get rewarded, and if you’re bad?

You deserve punishment– or goodness withheld from you?

How many of us were raised with this paradigm?

Be it in our families, our religious and spiritual myths and in a culture with a grotesque and inhumane prison system.

Where is our dignity in all this “deservedness”?

In a puritanical culture that believes good deeds when praises with God and bad deeds earn eternal hell, it makes sense that we would carry these beliefs into other areas of our lives, without even realizing it. I see it and non-religious folks, I see it in folks who are into “manifesting” and in folks to see themselves as a never ending project.

In many of the folks I coach a superstition in deeply rooted:

If good things happen, it’s because I am good.

If bad things happen, it’s because I am bad.

If I feel good, I’m doing good.

If I feel bad, I must BE bad.

Okay, yes– cause and effect.

If I shop my way into thousands of dollars of debt, there will be consequences.

If I trash my body with alcohol and non-nourishing foods, I will feel the consequences.

And vise-vera. I can and do acknowledge the real-life consequences of our choices.

But love, that is different that being DESERVING of pain or suffering.

There are things about our lives within our wheelhouse of control… this is absolutely true. but they are much smaller than we think they are. And when we start getting our hands dirty outside that wheelhouse and start trying to manage reality, others’ experience of us, the economy and the world around us, no wonder we suffer.

The great misunderstanding many of us spiritual folks have is that believing the realities of life means anything about us or our deservedness.

We mistakenly believe if we are good, we can control reality and if we are bad, we deserve to be punished.

What if life is just happening?

What if deservedness is a distraction from reality, and the truth of who you are?

What if we can control much less than we think we can?

What if the joy and beauty of life is found in how we respond to what is happening and the stories we tell about it, not in what we make it mean about us or our deservedness?

I don’t know anyone who is deserving of suffering.

When I think of the most horrific crime, my heart still leans towards abolition– which as my friend Kai Cheng Thom describes as “Rejecting a world where prisons & policing are the answer to conflict and harm.”

I reject prisons, punishment and policing– which also means I reject putting myself in the prison of shame.

I reject punishing myself for my humanness and I reject policing myself.

That isn’t to say, I don’t believe in loving justice or accountability.

These are dignified answers to the ways we harm one another.

But again, this is not the same as being DESERVING of punishment.

Loving justice and accountability are choices made from observing the consequences of my actions; they are how I am responsible to my own life– not punishment because I am deserving.

What if we started making our relationship to life the same?

What if when we feel pain, we can see it as a part of life, and choose to be longingly responsible to care for and steward the pain?

Not because we DESERVE it, but because it’s here and happening?

I have a great curiosity about what life would be like if we divested completely from the idea that we deserve anything.