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I have noticed that my shame had a root in the body, a mental component and also a constriction around the breath.
At the foundation of my shame was the sense of being different and excluded for that difference. My marginalised experience taught me to disregard myself, my truth and this was done in a self shaming way. Because of this I found myself in many experiences that have created more shame and this has disrupted my development in a massive way.
The under-developed version of myself that formed was an adaptation to the world. This was an entirely false expression, distorted by external influences and an self image that was almost like an inversion of who I am really meant to be. Teaching others art rather than being an artist, relying on toxic feminine behaviour rather than cultivating the divine and empowered masculine, desperately seeking connection rather than finding connection within. Looking further into this, I can see how aspects of my personality, sexuality and mindset was a survival response to living within a racialised system that was failing to reflect back to me an image of my true value. It has been my process of healing, awakening and post-trauma development has brought me to a point where I have needed to let go of everything that was keeping me from looking into the deepest parts of myself, finding the hidden shame and liberating myself from the prison of believing that ‘I don’t matter’.
Finding these parts has taken a slow and systematic practice of peeling back the layers and reclaiming all the forgotten expressions. All the things I have never said, all of the actions I never took, all of the desires that I never embraced. They can be traced from the thoughts in the mind. Underneath all of the stories that I ever told myself, I can see that I have created my entire life experience and it has all been lived from a place of deep shame.
In the acceptance of how things have unfolded, I see how everything was meant to be, there is no point resisting this truth. I also see the defining moments when I have made choices that have aligned me with different outcomes. I now know that life is a series of choices made either in alignment or out of alignment. For many, a lack of direction results in lifestyles that seem to go around in circles rather than evolve. This repetitive living can create restriction, cause constriction, and a winding down of functioning. Until we find ourselves tied up in emotional and mental knots that we have self created because of our shadow.
As we unravel the knot that we have become, we see that everything that we have been reaching out for as an attempt to avoid our own shadow has simply put off the inevitable and perpetuated the patterns that we desire to break free from.
My shame kept my consciousness anchored at a very low level. This prevented me from really opening up to the ideas of what I am really capable of and believing in the potential of what I could achieve. I was unable to truly see and believe what could be possible for me. Not only seeing what could be possible but knowing that this is what I am being guided to do. My shame has been talking me out of life. Slowly influencing my choices so that I become smaller, which would have had a very detrimental impact if it had not been for my creativity and my daily practices which I have relied on for the past 4 years. I can see how by choosing creativity and embracing my inspiration practice, I have slowly been able to rise above the lower impulses of the body.
I probably became a little obsessive about creativity and problem solving. I trained myself to align with a vision that came to me during meditation. This vision was one that helped me to believe in myself and my own success. Through my devotion to the outcome of this vision, I have proved to myself that I can commit, self-motivate and find the determination to complete a project despite facing obstacles and challenges. This has guided me to learn resilience and also supported a letting go of a purely self-centred view of life. This is the work I have committed myself to do, I am learning how to connect with the world in a new way.
What I can now see about myself:
I can see that I hold the potential to create something new and bring it into the world. If I focus on the process of aligning with what inspires me and completing my creative tasks, rather than survival needs and personal success I can support myself to evolve. If I take the time to explore what it means to me to finish the ideas that I started to create, I can feel a sense of the world I want to live in. This means using myself as my own resource to serve my own vision and my own highest good. Rather than to let myself be used within the capitalist machine. It means that I have aligned myself with the reality that began as an inspiration, in non physical form, the realm of the divine. It means that I can believe in myself and in something greater than me to guide my growth and development. It shows me that I can honour myself in an even deeper way because this life, in service, is the path, and I am walking this path because it feels good for me to be in this process.
This sense of purposefulness connects me to myself in a very deep way, it requires me to move slowly and really check in.
What are my daily intentions?
What's going well and what do I need to improve?
Am I in alignment with all that I do?
Is it serving me and my highest self?
My shame had me attached to my lowest impulses and so I was not able to discern between low value actions that were self serving and high value actions that serve the collective. My deepest sexual shame had me seeking validation and living in a reality that resonated with that shame. Now that has been cleared. I have more clarity. My mind is more open to receive the subtle stream of consciousness that wants to flow through me.
My shame created disruptions to the foundation of my sense of self which prevented me from really accepting myself and the reality I was experiencing. This led me to constantly look outside of myself for ideas of how I should be or attach onto ideas of what could save me from facing the truth about my inner experience. This fundamental truth; my life has been a process of learning what I don’t want and what doesn’t work for me. This can create stress, sadness, grief which are all too much to handle when there is no understanding of what Love is. My shame caused me to learn the hard way that I was not able to filter my choices with awareness of my needs, values or even have the ability to choose what genuinely brings me pleasure. I needed a higher level of awareness to step back and see this. I needed to know spirit to know and see the range of human experiences that I was involved in was limited and depraved. I needed to heal my heart to feel hopeful and believe that things could change for me. I needed to love myself to decide that what I value most is a life that helps me to love more. My shame created a very challenging feedback loop so that I was not able to see beyond my patterns and the voice in my head and therefore could not change. It was this feedback loop that kept leading me into situations that were not what I really wanted. Situations that didn’t really serve my interests of love, joy, flow and fulfilment. This feedback loop of fear and separation.
My shame has had me pushing away the truth of the world and this kept me in denial of what my real purpose was. Kept me out of touch with what I really truly wanted for myself. It has kept me in relationships with people who do not openly celebrate and support my lifestyle choices. This kept me in a pattern of self doubt and immaturity, and held me back from taking full responsibility for the way I want to live. Beyond shame is the permission to be happy and to live in flow.
I am now able to see the thoughts that have been keeping me contained because I fear judgement, punishment and humiliation. These self protective thoughts that kept telling me; ‘don’t do that, don’t share that, no-one will be interested, what you do is not valuable’, I had become normalised. I was so familiar with this voice of protection, that I became over-identified with it. This voice of self-protection guided me to safety but it can not lead me to emancipation. In realising that this voice was no longer serving me, that it was never my voice but the expression of my body and feelings, I can let go and begin to focus on the voice that guides me into my expansion.
There is an awareness that can be cultivated that means we can have a relationship with ourselves, our thoughts, our feelings, our inspirations. We can use our feelings as sign-posts and signals to help guide us into alignment and towards our truth but we need to listen, continually. Listening to our wholeness. When we are able to listen to all of the information being received through our bodies and our minds, we can learn about our environments, we can guide ourselves to safety, we can learn to be more open, we can trust in life in a deeper way.
When we aim to fully know ourselves and engage with aligned action, we are trusting in life. This for me is the outcome of healing shame.
Remember:
Distraction is not trusting. Taking action is trust.
