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This Workshop was developed through my personal experience. It was first written in 1998 but is still useful
Kerri Kannan
to people today. I hope you find it useful.
I found that my image of self was cultivated during early childhood and therefore; this workshop is centered on childhood wounds. There are some people who may not fit into this category, who later in life found that they sensed deficiencies within themselves, or in their lives. I have included a couple of articles in this workshop to show some of the success stories of some of these people and how they turned their negative feelings into positive accomplishments. If you feel that these experiences speak more clearly to you than the childhood wound experiences, just alter the time line to be later in their development of self.
God is also used frequently within this workshop and I use this generically. The word God to me represents the Universe, Jesus, Allah, Great Spirit, Consciousness as well as the many other names that are used for the One that is All. I am finding now that the word “God” and even “Spirituality” is loaded and in my more recent works, I’m moving away from that terminology but just to clarify for purposes of this workshop, to me the term has nothing to do with religion.
I truly hope that this workshop helps you find the Divine within yourself, as I have found. It focuses mostly on the recognition of the whole self who is God. Once you recognize who you are, you may feel that the life you are living seems meaningless unless you are already doing what you were sent to earth to do. There are a couple of articles included to help you to fulfill your purpose once you figure out what it is. I will be developing a workshop in the future that deals with fulfilling your Life Purpose. Thank you for your participation.
When I was a child, I used to believe that I was going to be famous. I was in love with Donny Osmond and watched Sonny and Cher every week. I can remember singing “Don’t go Breakin’ my Heart” by Elton John and Kiki Dee when I was five years old from start to finish. My mother was amazed at how I knew all the words by heart. I knew I would be a singer and told everyone that I was going to be a singer when I grew up.
One day, I was in the car with an adult relative and was asked the question of what I was going to be when I grew up, I replied, “A singer.” What followed next, changed my attitude about myself into my adult life.
My relative replied, “A singer, well you better lose some weight if you want to be a singer. Singers are skinny.” I was crushed. So young and impressionable, I believed that this was true. I tried thinking of all the singers I could and none of the ones I could think of were overweight. I remember thinking of Captain and Tenille, Marie Osmond, and Cher. Even the Magic Garden women were skinny. (I didn’t know who Ella Fitzgerald was at the time or I would have probably challenged the response.)
When I was 8 years old, I was in ballet class and had a mean old ballet teacher who probably loved ballet but obviously didn’t like kids, especially chubby kids. One day while warming up, we were doing splits, (and to this day, I can drop down and do a straight split at any moment.) This particular day, we were doing Russian splits and I couldn’t get my legs to be perfectly straight. She got frustrated with me and called me a “Fat tub o’ Lard.” I told my mom and was promptly pulled out of ballet class.
In addition to this feeling of being physically inadequate, I inherited a weak bladder from my mother. Both she and I had problems into early adolescence, (we outgrew it) of not being able to hold any liquid in our bladders. Once I had to go to the bathroom, I had to go immediately. If I didn’t get to a bathroom within seconds, I would have an accident. There was no such thing as “holding it” for me and consequently, I would have many accidents; sometimes, two in one day. I later found out that I inherited a narrow urethra which caused chronic bladder infections and my bladder was in constant spasm. Because of this condition, I was ridiculed by my peers and too often, humiliated by adults who thought that this method of humiliation would make me stop having this problem. This was something I could not control and felt ashamed and helpless every time it happened. I was beating myself up enough, I didn’t need the help of anyone to reinforce what a “baby” I was.
When I was 8, my parents got divorced. They were each going through their own pains at the time and didn’t realize how that was affecting their children. My mother who had custody at the time, I think had her first taste of freedom in her life and went a little overboard while leaving my brother, sister and myself with an aunt. She wouldn’t come to us after work, and this was a period of feeling very unloved and unimportant to me.
In my child mind, I couldn’t see that she was working overtime and doing the best she could with her situation. On the weekends, my father would take us, but he was always working and we didn’t really get to spend any quality time with him either. This made the little girl in me feel very unloved and unimportant. I was not mature enough to recognize that everyone involved was coping the best way they could with the situation at hand.
The memories of this crushing of my spirit, reinforcing feelings of inadequacy at a very young age, formed a pattern into my adulthood. I had a hard time finding a good job where I could support myself and feel I was doing well. I pushed love interests away by sabotaging anything that resembled a relationship, by either being too clingy or needy, or by being too aggressive. I often had a hard time standing up for myself in certain situations. I would just let it slide and cry about it later, as I did when I was a child every time I was humiliated by a judgmental adult.
In February 1993, I got a job in the Cayman Islands as an Interior Designer straight out of College and lived there for a year-and-a-half. I had a 2-year contract. However, when a Caymanian who had been a summer intern wanted full time employment upon graduating from college, I had to leave before the end of my contract because I no longer had my job.
On one hand, I was disappointed to have to leave and was going to try to fight it. I had finally gotten settled and made some really interesting friends through the Cayman Drama Society. I was also asked to produce the next show. Upon further contemplation, I realized that I was really not happy there and the only saving grace was the people I had recently come to meet.
Three months prior to my departure, a dear friend, whose family I had adopted as my extended family, left the island and moved to Delaware. When I really looked around, I saw that most of the people who I had come to know within the year and three months prior to my joining the drama society were leaving around the same time as me.
After I got back to the states, I moved back in with my parents and had a really hard time finding a good job. I was substitute teaching and working in my father’s restaurant during most of the year, jumping from job-to-job, in-between looking for something more fulfilling. During the summer, I would always land a really great job, but it only lasted a season. After 2 years of this pattern, I finally got kicked out of the house.
I spent the next month, November, with a dear friend who let me stay in a room for 1-month. In December, I started house sitting for my former summer boss who was going to be in the city all winter and needed someone to watch his house. During that time, I reached my rock bottom. I found a job in a trendy mall restaurant where I discovered that although I grew up in the restaurant business, I wasn’t cut out to be a waitress. I was so desperate to have a job, any job, that I was commuting an hour-and-45-minutes to get to this place and was making peanuts. I cried often and loudly and realized that there had to be something better for me.
My brother came home for Christmas 1996 and convinced me to move out of New York. I had 2 choices, move to Minneapolis and be close to my brother or move to North Carolina and be close to my sister. Although I had always been closest to my sister, I decided on Minneapolis for reasons which didn’t make sense to me at the time, however they proved to be correct. Something inside of me kept nagging that I had to move to Minnesota because my future husband was waiting there for me. I moved to Minnesota and sure enough, the day after I got there, I met my future husband.
During my first year in Minnesota, I was still jumping from job-to-job. I found a decent job in a furniture store as an in-house Interior Designer. However, the longer I stayed there, the longer I realized this wasn’t what I wanted. But I didn’t really know what I wanted.
I was getting married in April 1998 and decided that when I left for my honeymoon, I was leaving there for good. This time, I would find something more fulfilling.
We got back from our honeymoon and I started to look into myself again to see where I was going next. I didn’t really have to worry about money anymore because my husband was making three times my earnings and encouraged me to find my dream.
During this period, I had a “spiritual awakening.” I found through retracing my patterns from childhood, that somewhere along the line, I lost faith in myself. I saw myself as inadequate. Those feelings related to my increase in weight and my lack of what I called a decent salary. This is where I needed to do my work. I first needed to love and value myself in order to be valued by others.
I found that once I recognized what it was that I must do, an immediate recognition of spirit came over me. I no longer blamed the people in the past who hurt me. Instead, I joyously thanked them out loud while dancing around my living room while a whirlwind of emotions came over me. Without their harsh words and judgments, I would not have so profoundly recognized that I am perfect, the way God made me. Without those harsh judgments, I would not have recognized that I did not love myself. I recognized that in accepting myself fully, I discovered the unlimited supply of love that I could now feel within. I could now see what I was sent to do. I needed to teach others to love themselves by showing them the methods that I used to uncover my own divine spirit within.
It is through this work with myself and the lessons that I learned through spirit, that I am meant to teach others to love themselves. This is my purpose, the contract that I signed before birth that I must fulfill in this lifetime. I pray that you find that this is a useful tool and find that your life flows more smoothly with an abundance of joy, health, wealth, and love.
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