What Is Core Unworthiness? The Hidden Wound We Share (And the Song that Helped Me Heal)

The older I get, the more I notice it. What I think is happening is usually not what’s happening.

A friend goes quiet. I fill in the blanks. They’re ghosting me. I said something wrong. Someone’s tone changes and my body decides it knows why. Can you relate?

Six years ago, just before lockdown, I watched this pattern take over at a ceremony in Austria. What happened that night became the story behind a song I later wrote called “Flesh and Blood.” This week, I want to show you what core unworthiness is, what it actually does, how it hides in plain sight, and what changes once you can see it for what it is.

The Night It Happened

I was in Austria for a ceremony. Simple room. Candles lit. A circle of people who had flown in from a handful of countries. That quiet had settled over the group, the kind that arrives right before something meaningful begins.

The people leading the ceremony invited me to sit at their table, to play music, to sing with them. For a few songs, I did. Guitar across my knee. Trying not to think too hard about the fact that I’d been invited there at all.

Then, gently, they invited me back to my own seat.

Nothing was said. No one was unkind. There was no scene, no dramatic moment, no public correction. But something in me came undone anyway. Fast. Completely out of proportion to what had actually happened.

That is usually the first clue that the real story isn’t about my place at the table.

The Spiral that Followed

I sat with that spiral for the rest of the night. Quietly. The way you do when you’ve gotten very good at grieving in public without anyone noticing. What did I do wrong? Was I too loud? Was my energy not what they wanted? Had I misunderstood the invitation?

I replayed the whole evening in my head. Sentence by sentence. The way you’d rewatch a security tape looking for the exact frame where you clearly did something wrong. Except there was no tape. And as it turned out, no crime. By the time I fell asleep, I had built an entire case against myself out of a chair.

If you’ve ever done that, you know how convincing it feels while it’s happening. It doesn’t feel like a story you’re telling yourself. It feels like you’re finally seeing what has been true all along.

The Boring Explanation

The next morning, nobody mentioned the night before. I was invited to breakfast, at the ceremony leader’s own table this time. I felt something I hadn’t let myself feel in a long while. Embraced. Loved, even, in that unremarkable way that doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly rearranges something in your chest while you’re eating bread and pretending everything is normal.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to learn the actual reason I’d been asked to sit at that table the first night. The person who normally sat there had excused himself. He was sick. And in a ceremony, the table must always have someone holding that space. That was the whole story.

No test. No verdict. No committee reviewing my worthiness over coffee. I had filled a seat that was temporarily empty. When its owner came back to claim it, I turned a neutral fact into proof of my own unworthiness, with the kind of confidence most people reserve for things they have actually verified.

I want you to notice how ordinary that is. I don’t think it’s rare. I don’t think I’m rare in this. I don’t think you are either.

Here’s how it tends to show up. A friend doesn’t text back as fast as usual, and by hour three you’ve decided you said something wrong. You get passed over for something, and instead of “that wasn’t for me,” it becomes “I’m not enough.” You’re mid-conversation and someone’s face does something unreadable. A yawn. A glance at their phone. Nothing really. Your whole nervous system quietly rewrites the last five minutes into evidence against you. Complete with footnotes.

What Core Unworthiness Is

Tej Steiner, one of the teachers whose work has shaped mine, has a name for this specific wound: core unworthiness.

I’ve come to experience it as a quiet belief running underneath the mind’s surface commentary. Something is wrong with me. I don’t belong. If I’m fully seen, I’ll be rejected. Those thoughts are usually too painful to hold directly, so the wound rarely speaks that plainly.

Instead, it works through interpretation. It takes whatever is ambiguous. A seat. A silence. A look. A delay. And manufactures proof from it. Proof that you don’t belong at the table, whether the table is literal or the one that’s really on your mind.

Core unworthiness isn’t just feeling bad about yourself. It’s the lens that makes ordinary moments mean something personal, something damning, something final against you. It comes, I believe, from a deep sense of separation.

Here’s what it actually does, underneath the surface. Something unclear happens. The nervous system reaches for the most painful explanation first. And it doesn’t feel like imagination while it’s happening. It feels like perception.

That’s why you can’t just talk yourself out of it in the moment. You’re not arguing with an idea. You’re trying to interrupt an involuntary reaction that already decided what the moment means before you’d had a chance to breathe. If you’ve ever looked back on a spiral and thought, how did I get from that to this, you already know the mechanism. You just didn’t have a name for it yet.

Where the Same Wound Wears Different Clothes

The wound doesn’t stay in one room. Once you know its signature, you start noticing it everywhere. In love. In money. In the expression of your own voice.

In love, someone kind comes close. Instead of relaxing, the body starts building a case for why they’ll eventually leave. Too old. Too wounded. Too intense. Too much history. Too many needs. The closer someone gets, the more the wound activates. Because the thing you want most starts to feel like the thing that will finally expose you. So you brace. You perform. You hold back what’s real. Not to manipulate anyone. Because some old part of you is trying to keep you from being abandoned again.

In money, you know your prices need to change. Your work has value. But the moment you imagine charging cleanly or letting yourself receive more, something tightens and starts whispering that people will leave, or finally see you were never worth that much. If you listen closely, it isn’t really a money fear. It’s a belonging fear. The fear of being cast out for asking for too much.

In expression of your voice, it’s the book that stays unwritten. The song that stays private. The message that keeps waiting for some future version of you who is cleaner, safer, less human. That one I know well. Core unworthiness makes you believe you’re being responsible when you’re actually hiding. You call it timing. Or humility. Or discernment. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s the wound wearing respectable clothes. “I’m not ready yet” hurts less than “I’m afraid of being seen.”

Where Core Unworthiness Does the Most Damage

Then there’s the quietest version. The one that does the most damage because it never looks like a wound at all. You stay in a relationship, a friendship, a job, or an arrangement where you’re ignored or diminished. Because some hidden part of you has made a terrible agreement with reality: this is probably what I deserve. You may know better. Knowing better still doesn’t always reach the part of the body that learned to survive by expecting less. Core unworthiness doesn’t only make you feel bad about yourself. It begins to organize your choices around the assumption that you’re already disqualified.

I’ve watched this play out in my own friendships too, from the other side of the silence. A friend in the U.S., early in our friendship, read my slow replies as proof I didn’t love her and would eventually leave. Needing constant reassurance to believe otherwise. Another friend in South Africa once decided, because I hadn’t replied to her birthday message, that I no longer wanted to be friends at all. Not knowing that I had been away on a music retreat isolated to do the deeper work. That was never the same as not caring. The reflex in both of them was the one I felt at that table in Austria. A silence filled with the story that feels most familiar, not the one that’s true.

I’ve done it myself too. Waiting two extra days for a reply to an email. Quietly rewriting an entire working relationship in my head before the real, boring explanation ever arrived.

If any of that sounds familiar, you’re not broken and you’re not alone in it. The impostor feeling that comes with it has its own logic too, worth understanding on its own terms if you want to look closer at it.

The Surface Fear

Once I stopped flinching from this downward spiral long enough to look at it instead of just surviving it, I found something I didn’t expect. The seat was never really what I was afraid of losing. I was afraid of what the story running in my mind decided it meant. Proof that I didn’t belong at the table in the first place. That I’d only been welcomed because someone more deserving happened to be elsewhere that night.

I wasn’t grieving a chair. I was grieving the old belief that I only get to belong temporarily. Until someone more worthy comes to reclaim the seat. Until I earn it and show others how much I deserve it.

The Real Fear Underneath

Underneath that was something much older. Whether I had any right to bring what was actually inside me out into the world. I’d already been quietly finding my way toward music as something more than a hobby. Songs arriving not in a neat professional way but as a form of prayer. A way of receiving something and offering it back. Some of them connected me to my own heart faster than words could.

I wanted to offer that same gift to others. Underneath that desire was one more frightening to admit. I wanted to walk the path I’d watched Jesus walk. Teaching through love instead of doctrine. Serving through the heart instead of performance. Sharing my wounds and imperfections from a place that is real. Letting the message come through my actual life instead of waiting until I’d polished it into something more acceptable. Which sounds beautiful until you’re the one who has to do it.

Why Visibility Felt Dangerous

Then the old questions come. Who am I to sing these songs, to speak of Christ and unconditional love, when I still know all the places in me that are unfinished? When I’m so imperfect and full of so many contradictions. What will happen if people attack me for it?

That question felt historically accurate, which is somehow worse. Ministers of the heart have a long track record of being mocked, dismissed, or silenced. I watched modern versions of it happen in real time during the pandemic. People demonetized and laughed at simply for saying something true out loud.

Some part of me absorbed that risk as a reason to make myself smaller, safer. Better to stay in the back of the room instead of claiming the seat at the front of the room. Watching how easily that road goes wrong in others has kept me committed to staying clear, present, and heart directed rather than positioning myself above the people I’m here to serve.

The wound doesn’t usually bother attacking a life you’ve already given up on. It saves its strongest voice for the moment you finally start to reach for the thing that matters most. Which is, in its own backwards way, almost a compliment. Almost. I still hate how it feels.

When the Healing Became a Prayer

A few days after that ceremony, back in my studio in Granada, I picked up my guitar and a song came out that I hadn’t planned on writing. I hadn’t resolved the fear. I was still afraid, still asking. “Flesh and Blood” came from that asking. Whether I had the courage to bring what had been given to me into the world without waiting to become some safer, more idealized version of a teacher first.

The words weren’t an answer so much as knowing who to ask. Master, I sit at the table and drink from your waters, to become your flesh and blood is the invitation Jesus gave the ones he loved. Come as you are. Sit down. Receive the teaching until it becomes who you are, not just what you admire. In your steps I follow, will you guard my heart and soul carries the fear underneath. That speaking truth invites attack. And asks for protection anyway.

Master, please give me the courage to bring all your teachings out into the world is the real prayer inside the song. Courage to move past my own core unworthiness regardless of what anyone else makes of it. And oh sweet master, in my heart a hummingbird is singing your praises, dancing with the sun is where the healing actually lands. The master doesn’t stay outside of me, asking from a distance. He lives inside my heart. A metaphor for what Christ Consciousness is ultimately about. The teaching itself becomes a song of worship, moving through me like sunlight that pierces through the dark.

A Seat Reserved for You Long Ago

You have a seat at the table. It has been reserved for you long ago. You don’t have to do anything to earn it. It’s there silently waiting for the day you lovingly claim it, though I know it can take a long time for the mind to believe that.

As Rumi reminds us, our deeper work is letting go of all the barriers we’ve built against love. This includes feeling worthy, because when you’re operating from a place of love, worthiness is something that feels natural. This is exactly what we’ll be exploring inside the Heart Warrior Bootcamp, an 8-week live group coaching program that starts Tuesday, September 8th.

If you’d like to learn more about the Heart Warrior Bootcamp and the transformation you’ll experience, please contact me and I’ll send you the details so we can explore whether this is the right container for you.

Final Thoughts

I still don’t know exactly where “Flesh and Blood” came from. But if I had to guess, it came from a deep place within me that is always connected to the unconditional loving presence that created me. This presence loves me no matter what. I don’t have to do anything to deserve it. And perhaps this song came as a way to remind me that whenever I’m feeling unworthy, there’s always a seat for me at the table.

That is where I believe healing our own core unworthiness begins. It begins when we realize we are not separate from the unconditionally loving presence that created us. And that your feeling heart is the pathway to that divine connection.

So before you go, here’s a question I’d like you to sit with:

In what areas of your life do you still feel unworthy — of love, of money, of success, of being fully seen?

And if you spoke a prayer from your heart to the divine, asking to let go of that sense of unworthiness, what would it say?

From my heart to yours,

PS. Enrollment for the next Heart Warrior Bootcamp is now open. If anything in this article hit close to home and you want real support turning it into an actual practice, meeting your own shame with unconditional love instead of more willpower, visit this page to get the details.