From the moment you are born, you begin going through a process of societal conditioning—in fact many would argue this begins before you're even born. The people who surround you from infancy to young adulthood have a strong influence on how you perceive the world and your individual roles in the world.

Some of the conditioning you receive is meant to protect you and keep you safe. For example, if your family encouraged you to work hard and prioritize work responsibilities over pleasure, it’s likely that they wanted you to be successful and financially secure. They believed that this was the best or perhaps only way to be financially secure and responsible so they encouraged you to pursue specific careers or always go above and beyond in work.

Or maybe you deeply desired to move to another state or foreign country, but felt responsible to stay close to home with your family. Maybe when you expressed your desires you were made to feel guilty about what you wanted to do.

This conditioning is then reenforced when you begin to work and establish your own life as an adult. You might have supervisors or bosses who tell you to prioritize a work meeting over your family or personal interests. On top of that, you’re told how much time off you can have and when you’re allowed to take it—or even when you're allowed to eat or go to the bathroom.

Given this pervasive conditioning, it’s not surprising that so many of us feel like we have to ignore our needs, wants and desires. Our power to follow our intuition, pursue what we desire and listen to our needs, has been chipped away over our lives. Eventually many of us wake up and realize that we don’t feel as fulfilled and happy as we’d like. Maybe we find ourselves in relationships, jobs or living situations that aren’t what we actually wanted, but what we were told is best for us (even if other options might have been available and accessible).

Your Self or your Soul knows your true power. You know deep down who you are on a Soul level and why you came to Earth. As you identify and meet different parts of yourself, you realize that there are parts of you that are afraid to let you stand in your full power.

As you gain self-awareness of this cycle you logically know that you need to listen to your needs, wants, desires, and set effective boundaries. On some level you know that you don’t need to earn rest or love or the right to exist on Earth—

but when it comes to recognizing your boundaries, taking up space with your needs, and allowing yourself to receive more it feels like you will never be able to end the cycle of ignoring yourself and settling for less than what you need.

How to End of The Cycle of Ignoring Yourself

When you’ve woken up to the cycle of your inherited programs, you just want to be done with the cycle. However, your desires and wounds reveal your purpose and the patterns you're meant to heal. The healing process you'll go through to end the cycle of ignoring yourself is the reclamation you need to experience to receive more of what you desire. These wounds disrupt the system of the Self, but they exist with a purpose.

In order to end the cycle of ignoring yourself, you must start by witnessing the pattern as it exists now.

One very instructive way to begin is to express a need, a desire, or a boundary, and then observe how you react. Do you resist receiving what you asked for? Once you receive what you desire do you immediately try to get rid of it or make an excuse for how you ended up with it? Do you feel like you don’t deserve it or you didn’t earn it?

Notice these thoughts that chain you to a negative self-image and prevent you from experiencing pleasure and nourishment. As you notice these thoughts pushing you away from what you truly desire get curious about who taught you that you couldn’t have what you want.

In last week's blog post, I shared some of the most powerful things I've learned about receiving love (and how we block ourselves from receiving love).

Similarly to the ways love and intimacy might feel threatening to different attachment styles, the vulnerability that trusting your intuition and yourself creates can also feel very threatening.

From the standpoint of human evolution and survival, we can see how it is valuable to make choices that will result in belonging, connection and safety rather than rejection. Belonging keeps us safe, whereas rejection takes resources away from us. If we believe that our own true desires will lead us away from what we perceive to be the safest option, then we will bypass our genuine desire in order to do what we perceive to be safe. We may ignore ourselves in order to protect ourselves.

When we are children, we seek protection, safety and belonging from our caregivers. Through them, we learn some behaviors make us “good” and that we will receive approval or belonging for doing this good behavior. We also learn that some behaviors make us “bad” and that we will receive disapproval or even rejection for this "bad" behavior.

A simple way this occurs might be that you say you don’t want to do something, but when you make your case, you are told no. When you ask why, you might be told that it’s because “parents know best.” If our parents know “best,” then their knowing supersedes our own—they know what’s good for us more than we do. We also might learn to listen to the needs of our parents or caregivers above our own in order to maintain peace or follow the rules.

I shared more about the many reasons it can be difficult to listen to and trust your intuition in this blog post, which includes societal conditioning, familial and cultural views on intuition, inherited intergenerational beliefs, and much more.

What’s more important here is that when you discover that you are letting your fear of losing love and belonging prevent you from trusting yourself, receiving love, and fulfillment in life—you want to change it.

5 Important Steps to End the Cycle of Ignoring Yourself and Putting Yourself Last

Let Go Of Rescuing

Beneath all resentment is a pattern of unmet needs. If you hold a core belief that your needs won’t be met, it can make it more challenging to accept help because you don’t expect to receive it. If you hold a core belief that other people’s needs are more important than your own, you might find yourself hyper-aware of other people’s needs and how you can meet them. You might be more aware of their needs than your own.

This can lead to a cycle of always being the rescuer but never being rescued, which is a way to keep us in the familiar cycle of resentment we developed when our needs weren’t met in childhood.

As you learn to express your needs and desires, notice where you resist asking for help or try to do things all by yourself and where you have a tendency to rescue other people before meeting your own needs. 

Establish Healthy Boundaries

It can be hard to say no to people and disappointment them, especially if a large part of where you find your self-worth is through rescuing and saving others (the planet, the world). You might even discover that some people were taking advantage of your lack of boundaries, which can make you rightfully angry.

But at the end of the day you are in charge of yourself and the way you lead yourself through the world. If you always prioritize other people’s needs over your own then your belief that you won’t get your needs met will be actualized repeatedly. You will blame the people around your for not getting your needs met when in reality you aren’t expressing what it is that you need.

Written out like this it can seem pretty straightforward and might come off as harsh, but I know when I realized this I felt a sense of shame that I couldn’t meet my own needs or express my boundaries. It made me feel powerless and out of control. Recognizing the role I played in my own pattern was an important first step—but rather than shaming and blaming this part of myself that felt helpless I had to learn to hold compassion for the part of myself that felt it was unsafe to set boundaries. I talk about this more inside my free class: Reading Your Inner Family.

Learn to Listen to Yourself First

In order to end the cycle of ignoring myself I had to learn to listen to myself. DUH—seems super obvious, but when you’ve been ignoring yourself you actually have to relearn how to listen to yourself.

Part of the reason so many people are drawn to divination tools like tarot and astrology is because they don’t feel secure in finding answers within themselves. They’re used to looking outside of themselves for answers and guidance and are often afraid of what they might realize when they get quiet and still.

My own self-healing journey really began with taking yoga classes because it was the first time that I allowed myself to be quiet enough to hear the deeper feelings within me. However, those feelings were terrifying! I realized that I wasn’t happy in my life and I knew that taking action to change it would upset a lot of people. Learning to listen to yourself and trust your intuition isn’t easy because of the pain you inevitably experience when you stop listening to other people over yourself. This will change the way that you connect in relationships and experience your life—and that’s exactly the healing experience you need.

Don’t avoid holding quiet space for yourself—the more you practice it, the more confident you will become in hearing your inner voice. I guide you through a fun journey to get quiet and listen to your inner voice inside my hypno-storytelling recording: The Unbirthday Party.

Release Blame, Find Forgiveness

When you get quiet and you begin to recognize that you’ve ignored yourself and put yourself into situations that feel difficult to get out of because you ignored yourself, it’s easy to want to blame. While you might blame past experiences, parents, partners, the government, and inherited family trauma for pushing you into something that wasn’t ultimately in your best interest—and that blame may be very well placed—it’s important to connect to the parts of yourself that you blame.

On some level you might be angry with yourself and blame yourself for not getting your needs met. You might blame yourself for not doing something to stand in your power or fight back. As you become aware of the cycles you are trying to break you might be angry and frustrated that you have to do this challenging work.

When you know better you can do better. Find compassion for the parts of yourself that didn’t know how to do things differently or had to follow along in order to stay safe. While it can be challenging to practice forgiveness for others for what we’ve experienced in our life, letting go of hurt and anger can be useful. Practice forgiving yourself first for what you didn’t know or weren’t able to do.

Remember You Are Inherently Worthy

You can’t feel worthless and powerful at the same time. As you shed the role of being a savior, forgive yourself for the times you ignored your needs, and practice following new pathways, you will begin to find the inherent worthiness and the inherent power you hold. The gifts and abilities you’ve inherited will shine louder than the wounds and you will understand the ways in which your wounds have made you to be the powerful Soul that you are.

Do you want to learn how to use the wisdom of the Earth to ingrate gifts and past life patterns on the way to achieving your purpose? Begin your journey with the free Earth Ancestor Reunion.

Each person on Earth has their own divine power, a destiny and their own team of spiritual guides. Your desires and wounds reveal your purpose and the patterns you're meant to heal.

The blocks you feel are in your way reveal the ancestral and past-life healing you are meant to do in your lifetime.

At the time you were born, your purpose and patterns were encoded in the stars. Your natal chart is the guide of what you need to integrate in order to actualize your purpose.

Your ancestors want to support you in integrating the patterns from the past so that you can share your gifts with other people from a deep connection to this ancestral wisdom.

Your ancestral healing is connected to the Earth and the Stars. When you open to this journey you will experience a sense of faith and oneness in yourself, the Universe, and what you came here to do.

Do you want to...

• Release inherited patterns and programs from ancestors and past lives so they no longer stop you from living your truth? 

• Heal the past in order to create a better future for the next generations?

• Identify and feel supported in pursuing the gifts you inherited?

• Feel a sense of oneness with the Universe? 

Join Ancestral Transformation Guided Journey