The truth about shame

So many of us carry around self judgement without even knowing it. Held deep in our bodies, we may not even recognize it’s place in our daily lives. The position we hold our shoulders. The sensation in our stomach. The shudder of an exhale. Our bodies hold emotions from a lifetime, written in somatic etchings of our nervous system. Let’s take a closer look at the language of shame and the presence it may play in our lives without our knowing.

Shame is the shadow of regret worn as self punishment. 

Shame is relented disallowing. 

The refusal to accept what may or may not be self inflicted. The holding onto a personal ideal that was not met, and could have never been any different than it was. 

Shame is the attachment to an outcome in reverse. A past that was not the present we intended. A past that left such a hole in experience we were never able to fill it back in. 

Shame feels like a hollowness where the heart should be. A catching of the breath halfway in. A resistance to wholeness, where each inhale stops a beat too early. As if the heart is being clinched. Caught in a self-inflicted vice.

Not too dissimilar from grief - a loving offering. Shame feels more like a regretful payment of the heart. Handed over with a downward gaze and a trailing apology italicized by a decrescendo.

Shame can feel bottomless. A black hole that keeps taking and taking, until we can give no more. But as with all other challenging emotions, the invitation is to allow the disallowing of shame. To accept the aversion to its grip, recognize it as an echo of loss. The ripple of grief from a misplaced regret. Shame is confusion of energy misdirected at oneself - under the illusion that things could have been different. Once we realize that it could never have been different, shame relaxes. The grip softens, and makes way for that same energy redirected toward self compassion. 

Shame is nothing more than an overzealous whisper to ourselves that we forgot to love ourselves. A forgiveness that was never uttered. A whisper echoing through the years, gaining volume in the unaware canyon of our existence. A whisper that doesn’t need anything but to be heard, for the first time, the way it meant to be told, rather than the way you remember it. 

Listen out for this whisper. And follow it , like a guide to the part of you forgotten, that is still in need of love.