An introduction to this series can be found here.

5. Entitlement.

• Inflated sense of self-worth.
• Expecting favorable treatment (to an unreasonable degree).
• Anger when people don’t cater to or appease them.

Entitlement.  This one feels familiar.  There is a sense of predictability and self-recognition.  I can become very decisive at times in a way that is not open to information from a different perspective.  I feel compassion and patience, surprisingly.  I would expect to want to correct it and begin to admit its failure.  But instead I’m seeing the process of needing to reach clarity before taking in other perspectives, and that has not always been a quick or easy process.  

I feel grateful for the presence of patience and understanding and compassion when identifying with such an ugly word.  “Entitlement.”

I feel the presence of humility, and immediately relief and gratitude for the presence of humility follow.  I hesitate to believe this will be easily accessible at all times or will become my default disposition in life, but I am relieved that humility is familiar without the need for humiliation to reach it, as has been the case in the past.  

As I write these words I reflect on this process and how resourceful and beneficial it is that it can so gently invite polarized and intensely conflicted parts of myself to meet each other with softness.

A deep breath comes.  I feel a space in my back and neck where entitlement has had me arched like a cat at times, and I find entitlement also bowed to the bottom of my chest with a bit of sorrow and remorse.  The imagery enters my mind of one following the other over and over in the shape of a yinyang.  Hope arises that the delay between the two has and will continue to decrease, and maybe more flow of integration can be found between the two in the future as well.

Curiosity arises for the next words and I read “inflated sense of self-worth.”  I feel a pain in the middle of my upper back where entitlement would have been.  I sit a bit longer with these words because there isn’t an immediate or clear recognition of where or how I feel my inflated sense of self-worth.  I feel a bit of pressure pushing down the front of my torso.  It feels forced and it feels like a sense of being hurt and maybe embarrassed but definitely let down and betrayed.  Nothing specific comes to mind and I have to wonder if this is a betrayal by life itself. I was reflecting recently about my relationship to life and the painful disappointments that seem to have been a result of not having a healthy understanding of how life itself works.  

A deep breath comes and I return to the words “inflated sense of self-worth.”  I believe if this was the first one on this list, my experience of embodying these words would have been very different.  Moments come to mind of inflated sense of self-worth, but they are wrapped in fighting injustice, and this already feels heavily influenced by the experiences of embodying the four previous traits.  I have a clear vision for how experiencing and reacting or responding to injustice can be a flow and can be fragmented.  I feel settled with the fact that there are many situations that do not have black or white or right or wrong solutions.  I feel a little surprise and shock with feeling settled with this concept and these words.  

I see the next words “expecting favorable treatment (to an unreasonable degree).”  I feel immediately, again, a sense that I have been let down, and the “least” that can be done to make up for it is xyz expectation.  I sit with this a minute, and feel it as a root of entitlement.  I begin to sense that even if favorable treatment would have been received, it would not have landed within me in a place that could then feel gratitude, much less express gratitude.  My head gets dizzy as if I’m trying to look at many contradictions at the same time and my vision just begins to spin.  A breath comes to comfort and I remember why and how it is so helpful to return to the body when the mind is frantic and can’t find solutions.  

I sense into my surroundings growing up, in a family that had more money than most people around me, and realizing repeatedly certain privileges I had.  I hated it and loved it at the same time.  A strong exhale comes, and the sense that I want all of the experience, positive and negative, to leave me.  A gentleness meets this experience, and I feel the words reframing to an emptying out.  It feels less like a pushing away and more of a request for space to reapproach at a later time.

“Anger when people don’t cater to or appease them.”  I feel a wall in the left side of my body thinking of situations that I have felt injustice in.  I feel this rigid blocking out that made every interaction in those situations the same, regardless of present circumstances or dynamics that may have changed or been different.  

There keeps being a very subtle awareness of how extreme and unhealthy the dynamics these words are describing can manifest in people.  I also feel that as I reflect on them, it is humanizing the experiences, the sharpness and harshness of these words, to understand what is happening at the root of them.  Surely they all originated in injustices, and we keep repeating patterns that are trying to heal.  A deep breath comes.  I feel dizzy again.  A fear is present that I am justifying bad behavior.  A gentleness reaches to it, and I’m starting to see gentleness as the image like angelic energy and movement.  It is very soothing and I feel tears rise to my eyes but they don’t come out.  A fullness is present in my chest like I could by crying.  A deep breath reaches through it and makes it less dense.  I feel gratitude for the settling of what feels like a lot of huge feeling sensations and fears that have not resolved and are not completely clear, but have found a place to rest in me for this moment.