Rebuilding from Within: How Integrating Pleasure, Power, and Purpose Heals Your Worth
Dismissing and diminishing yourself from a place of wounded certainty blinds you to your truth and leads to soul-shrinking conformity.
Poem: Lost
stuck, immobile, confused, and lost
on this sea of misery, i am turbulently tossed
i can no longer remember who i once was
and have no sense of direction, purpose or cause
consumed by the echos of shattered hopes and dreams
forever to be forgotten in the grand scheme of things
making decisions on autopilot lacking luster and life
desperately trying to figure out how to make it right
my mood ebbs and flows in cycles of extremes
but settles in despair over the memory of what used to be me
i don't know exactly how i got here or why feel this way
all i know is it's destroying me and i want it to go away
but what if i have always been here all along
waiting to be discovered in my own 'lost and found'
perhaps all the pain and hurt just buried my light
and appeasing others for acceptance became my life
maybe i witheld parts of me for the world to see
because i was scared i wouldn't be fully accepted for 'me'
the truth is i cannot be lost when i am right here in existence
i just haven't honored my needs or purpose with persistence
overtime i buried what makes me 'me' six feet under
but now it is time to dig down, unearth and rediscover
to realign my behaviors, beliefs, actions, and choices
with what my own heart desires, instead of others' voices
i know He created each of us to be exactly as we are
and will guide our steps with mercy and a loving heart
so we realize in spite of our past mistakes and pain
that we never need to feel lost ever again
The Truth of the Matter
You will always dilute your power and worth if you starve yourself of your pleasure and truth. Because what you reject within yourself, you also reject in your life—and in doing so, you weaken the very purpose you came here to fulfill.
Refusing to Receive What is Natural
Pleasure.
It sounds so simple, yet for many of us, it’s laced with shame, guilt, and unworthiness.
Some pleasures—like painting, reading, nature, and serving others—feel safe and even sanctified.
But others—money, overflow, visibility, sensuality—feel dangerous, even when they’re innocent.
For me, certain indulgent foods, abundance, investments, and sensuality triggered an old narrative: “You are disgusting.” Yes, there is that word (and identity) again.
These “pleasure pain points” are the parts of me I disowned to stay safe and accepted. But in disowning them, I diluted my power—and I see the same happening in so many others.
When we reject parts of ourselves, we create division on the inside that spills out into the world. This is how inner conflict becomes outer conflict. This is how moral injury—a guilt we believe defines us—anchors shame into our identity.
A Hard Lesson on Pleasure
Nature, painting, reading and serving others. These things bring me immense pleasure, remind me of the light and good in the world and I allow myself to feel them fully when I am engrossed in their experiences.
They not only make me feel good, but I believe I am ‘good’ when I partake in them.
Certain indulgent foods, abundance and overflow, money and investments, visibility and fame, full power expression, sensuality and feminine seduction— well these pleasures make me cringe. Remember that ‘disgusting’ name we discussed last blog post that I inherited as my identity long ago? Well there she is again rearing her ugly head.
You see these pleasures, even when done with innocence, generosity, purity, etc. have been ‘no-gos’ for my subconscious. When I indulge in them, I may feel fleeting pleasure but it is quickly replaced by a heavy blanket of shame.
Are you the same? Why is this?
That old “disgusting” identity—branded into my nervous system on a bus ride at 13—returns with a vengeance. My subconscious learned that enjoying those things was a ticket to betrayal, abuse, and shame. So, I exiled them. I disowned them to protect myself from the darkness I believed they carried.
These things for me have a negative association. Greed, abuse, betrayal, self distrust, etc. all surface with these parts of pleasure.
These I call my ‘pleasure pain points’, the parts of me that trigger old memories of shame, disgust and defeat.
The parts of me I wouldn’t allow to enjoy because it always meant something bad about me or that something bad was about to happen. I dissociated these parts from myself in order to be safe, accepted, non-threatening, and the like.
I didn’t want to feel like a bad person when I did these and because I never learned how to experience these things for myself in a positive context, I simply wouldn’t allow them in my life.
But here’s the truth:
What we reject within ourselves doesn’t go away—it festers in the shadows, feeding the war within. And that war leaks our power, weakens our worth, and steals our purpose.
What the Brain Convinces Us Of:
Neuroscience and trauma research show that the brain’s Reticular Activating System (RAS) filters our experiences to confirm our beliefs. If you believe pleasure equals shame, guess what? You’ll find endless evidence to reinforce that story
Your nervous system stays on high alert, interpreting every desire as dangerous. Every time you indulge in a “forbidden” pleasure, guilt and shame rush in, reinforcing the false identity that you are bad, broken, or wrong.
This is how trauma loops become identity. This is how moral injury is born:
A mistake you made becomes who you are.
An external judgment becomes your internal truth.
But here’s the thing— that’s not the truth of who you are. It is merely, and I say that lightly, the story trauma told you in order to survive.
I have my Chiron in gate 2 in human design and a yod in taurus, neptune and pluto. These themes literally are mine to learn how to receive and not feel it is tied to my worth.
But how often do we define our worth by what we do, or more importantly, by who we believe we are if we do?
This wound identification seals in how we identify ourselves to be. And our perspective on ourselves is our reality.
Your Worth Awakened
You are not your trauma. You are not your mistakes. You are not the shame you’ve carried.
You are the light and the shadow—the full spectrum of humanity.
The pleasures that scare you? They are part of your wholeness. Money, overflow, sensuality, fame—these are not inherently bad. They only carry the shadows we project onto them.
When we reclaim these pleasures, we reclaim the parts of ourselves that hold power, passion, and purpose. This is how we dismantle trauma:
We witness the stories trauma wrote.
We challenge the moral injury that says, “I am what I did.”
We integrate the parts we exiled.
This division on the inside not only wreaks havoc on our inner world, but it is often reflected in our outer world. Much of the fighting going on today is stemming directly from inner wounds gone wild. We couldn’t figure out how to resolve that war within, so we seek from the outside world to change in order to heal and feel safe, but this simply isn’t the way out— it’s actually counterintuitive to what we have come to know.
This is the work we do in the WORTH Mini-Course + Quest—where you learn to unify your fragmented self, rebuild from the truth of who you are, and embody your worth despite your wounds.
Imagine feeling safe to embrace every form of pleasure that calls to you.
Imagine no longer diluting your worth by exiling your desires.
Imagine standing in your full power—money, love, visibility, creativity—without guilt or shame.
Imagine knowing your worth is not tied to what you do, but to who you’ve always been.
If those phrases are making you cringe, like I once did, if they are making you think ‘that is only for others, not for me’, then you must still learn and live the lesson.
This is your birthright.
This is your invitation.
This is the transformation waiting for you inside your truth.
No longer be blocked by shame, blame, confusion, and silence. We dismantle the fictional tale lurking in our trauma story. Instead we find the freedom, detachment, our voice, and self-trust. Dissolving the old ways we learned long ago that block our true value becomes a natural process and conjuring what will give you that ‘smile at yourself while standing tall glance in the mirror’— well that becomes your new identity, or infact, your true identity finally given permission to be shown.
No more fragmenting. No more shunning your soul in the name of shame. Pure, simple knowing of who you are and what you were put on this earth to do.
But that safety needs to come from within. And each time we partake in another battle in the inner war, we weaken our worth and leak our power and purpose here. Although this is often so inaccurate, it becomes our embodied truth.
So how do we begin to dismantle trauma, detach from shame, and rebuild from the truth of who we are and what we came here to do?
Three Things You Can Do to Start This Journey Today:
Name Your Pleasure Pain Points:
List the desires that trigger guilt or shame. Where did those beliefs come from? Are they yours? Past lives? Parents or caregivers? Your younger, you just trying to make sense of the world with little faculties to do so?Challenge the Story:
For each one, ask: “What if this is actually safe and sacred for me to experience?” Think of times or situations where it could be safe, or where you were safe enjoying even just a litte bit of that pleasure. This is not black or white thinking at play anymore, it needs to be from curiosity of the ‘gray’.Feed All Parts with Love:
Invite your inner critic and your desires to the table. Ask them what they need to feel safe, seen, and loved. Thank them for the job they have done, but graduate them with grace and ask them how they would like to integrate themselves into your being now. Odds are, they will be more than happy to be free of the weight of that burden-ridden role.
If Your Soul is Stirring Inside, Eager to Feel Joy
Join me inside the WORTH Mini-Course + Quest and learn to integrate the parts of you you’ve been taught to hide. Or begin your journey with the SHIFT Spell—the first step in rewriting the story of who you are.
Because you are not here to be small. You are here to be whole. And the world is waiting for all of you.
I Leave You With Your WORTH to Ponder
What part of your pleasure do you most fear—and what would happen if you chose to love it instead? What would that mean about you and what could it mean for your future— and all of ours?
Remember, there is no ‘you’ unless you are in totality, otherwise, you are just lost pieces searching for your identity. You are more than that, love. Come home.
Till next time, with love and gratitude,
-m