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The Path Principles ultimately lead us home to ourselves — to a felt sense of belonging, worth, and our place in the flow of life.

Belonging and Inherent Worth

Practising trust in ourselves often brings us to one of the deepest challenges many of us face: coming to live with a felt sense of belonging, and with a recognition of our inherent worth.

As humans, we are profoundly social beings. We rely on one another for love, support, cooperation, and for sharing in the experience of being alive. And yet, many of us also feel deeply alone in our inner worlds. We can carry a sense — sometimes subtle, sometimes very loud — that we don’t quite make the grade, that we are somehow outside or not enough.

The Ways We Learn to Measure Our Worth

One way of understanding this experience is to notice the different ways we come to measure our value.

Social worth is the value we feel we are assigned in comparison to others, based on what is prized in our culture. We all recognise this territory: wondering whether we are clever enough, attractive enough, successful enough, or ‘normal’ enough to belong. These ideas are shaped by powerful systems such as race, gender, class, ability, and sexuality. We are born into this landscape and learn, often unconsciously, how to navigate it. Whether we internalise these messages or push back against them, their emotional impact is hard to escape.

Self-worth is the way we evaluate ourselves from the inside. This is shaped partly by those social messages, and partly by our own beliefs about what matters. Self-worth can bring pride and motivation when we feel things are going well, and pain or shame when we feel we are falling short.

Inherent Worth: Value That Doesn’t Need to Be Earned

The third form of value — and often the most unfamiliar — is inherent worth. This is the sense of being valuable simply because you exist, because you are part of life. We recognise this instinctively in children, whose worth feels obvious without any need for achievement or proof. Learning to extend this same understanding toward ourselves can feel much harder, yet it is possible with care and practice.

Many people worry that if they truly allow themselves to feel inherently worthy, they will lose motivation — that striving, growth, or achievement will fall away. Therapy offers a space to explore this with curiosity. What often emerges is that when worth no longer has to be earned, motivation becomes more sustainable. Action begins to arise from care, purpose and meaning, rather than fear of inadequacy.

Coming Home to Yourself

This process invites a radical and compassionate honesty: noticing how you actually feel, what you truly want, and how you may have learned to adapt yourself in order to belong. It also involves learning to value yourself even when you encounter parts of yourself you are unsure about or would rather hide. As Carl Rogers once said, “It is only when I accept myself as I am that I then change.” Change arises not because our value increases, but because we are no longer in conflict with ourselves.

An important part of coming home is also becoming more aware of how we show up in relationships — the patterns we repeat, the ways we protect ourselves, and the expectations we carry. Therapy offers a place to see these patterns with kindness rather than judgement, allowing new ways of relating to emerge.

In the Path Practice approach, Home is not something you have to earn or arrive at in the future. It is the ongoing practice of remembering your belonging — to yourself, to others, and to life — and learning to live from that place with greater freedom, integrity, and ease.