Shame is a big one. A deep one. It feeds negative thoughts and beliefs about oneself. It can keep you stuck in cycles of feelings or situations that you do not want to be in. It blocks the divine flow of life energy in our bodies. Like a dam in a stream, blocking the flow of water, forcing it to go around, creating pressure and tension that causes the water to flow at different speeds to try and keep up. Or maybe the dam is blocking the whole width of the stream, building and building until the pressure is too much and the damn breaks. However it may be for you, shame is a dam.
For me, in my life, I have always used shame to "keep me going". I believed it was keeping me safe by preventing me from messing up. It kept me at my level of perfectionism, driven by the very fear of feeling bad about myself. If I could live up to my own and other's expectations, then surely I could not feel bad about myself. But that is the tricky part about shame; even if I thought I got it beat by running from it through perfectionism or any other tactic, it was always there, eating at me, pushing me to maintain myself, creating pressure that my heart, my being, could not handle. I always broke one way or another. Then somehow rebuilding myself on the same foundation of shame, just for it to crumble again.
Not a fun cycle lol. But, this shame, I thought, was part of me. It is the version of me that others like and know. It keeps me from getting in trouble and losing support / love. It allows me to maintain my expectations without disappointing myself or anyone else. It keeps me from losing control.
Wrongo.
This inner critic that says, "If you don't do / do this, then nobody will love you, or I won't love myself". Or it can be the "If I don't do / do this, then this bad thing is going to happen to me because the world is not kind". Similar to blackmail. It's a bully, and it is ABUSIVE, and it is NOT, I repeat, *NOT* us. It is the voices we have accumulated of others who made us feel we could only receive love for being or not being a certain way. The intensity that we yearn for this love resembles the intensity of the love we hold inside us that is awaiting to be awakened by our recognition of it.
This inner critic provides conditional love, and there is no such thing. You can conditionally like something, but not love. The very idea of love is unconditional. It's like saying the sun will only rise if everyone watches. No, the sun rises because it desires to, because it is its purpose and passion to give life. And Earth lives, fulfilling the sun's purpose, each loving and expressing themselves unapologetically. No shame, only love.
Many of us have probably encountered someone who puts on an act as if they are better than everyone, putting others down, judging, judging, judging. Many of us have probably judged others ourselves. I know I have. However, there is something about judgement that is quite obvious once you really look at it, and that is that we judge others according to the way we judge ourselves. And what is judgement? It is that inner critic, it is shame. To look and dig at all the layers of how we judge ourselves is completely overwhelming. Or, maybe it's not. Whatever the case may be, just know we are all kindled held by a light in us and around us called love. Even if a stream is blocked by a damn, the source of this stream continues to flow without fault. As does the light of love, the light of life, within us. Love illuminates shame, pushing it out as light does to darkness.
Once the awareness sets in that the inner critic is not you, that shame is not you, the dam begins to unravel. Watch your thoughts of shame. Watch when you are being hard on yourself, punishing yourself, or pushing yourself passed your boundaries. Watch it all without shame. No shame for the shame lol. Each time you have a shameful thought, it is a door into letting it go. Each time you feel shame, you can pause and know that it is not true. Shame is not you.
You are love, my dear. Shine your light unapologetically, just like the sun. Allow yourself to receive love, and LIVE, just like the earth. Give yourself your own light. Be the love your little self needed and still needs. Unlock and unblock them. Validate them. And flow on. It is safe to be you. Not only safe, but it is NEEDED to be you. The universe needs you to shine, as you are a part of it. You ARE it. If there is a pie, and you separate one piece, there is an empty space in that pie. Now imagine you are that piece separated, and the rest of the pie is the universe. How beautiful it is to know that you just being you is completing the pie of the universe. Love connects us with the stream of love that flows through EVERYTHING. Our hearts desires - the things we do with pure passion, the people we love, our callings deep within us, the raw emotions, painful or blissful - are leading us to fulfilling the missing piece of our universe. We can trust in this.
Loving yourself and prioritizing your needs is not selfish. In fact, it is our duty as a hueman being in a body. Our body is loyal to us without hesitation, so it our duty to honor this magic, this art, this temple. It may feel uncomfortable at first, but know that if we all prioritized ourselves, there would be no such thing as giving up your needs for someone else's.
We have nothing to fear being fully in love within ourselves. We do not have to fear the judgement of others, nor do we have to fear looking to others like we think we are "better", nor that we are "leaving others behind". In all of those beliefs is shame manifested in many forms. Shame causes one to act like they are better to overcompensate for believing the opposite, and if you in love, there is no believing less of yourself, nor is there believing better. Shame causes one to judge others, as judging others stems from judging oneself. You conquer the shame within, you conquer the shame without. The projected shame of others does not bring you down as it used to, as you now have space to hold compassion. You know it's a reflection of the world they live in inside of their head.
We are all just children looking to be loved, searching for home. Now, we can be children who see that the love we long for is us, and the home is the rest of our pie a.k.a the entire universe around us. We can be children who know that they deserve to shine all of their light into this world.
Together we rise, and one day, the world will be ridded of shame based on the very fact that your world has now been ridded. Each world, each life, illuminated with love is one more universe completed ♡
This table gives analogies to the flow of energy from source to physical manifestation, or the divine to our bodies.
This flow gets blocked when our beliefs (channel from divine to physical) about ourselves and the world are driven by shame and fear. We release this when we allow the life to flow, seeing the magic, beauty, and love of ourselves, of our very existence ♡
Seriously like c'mon. WE ARE ALIVE FOR HEAVENS SAKE. Like one day we just spawned here through love. That is pretty magical.
If you can sit here and prove to me that you aren't magic, that you aren't a piece of artwork, please do it, because I will show you otherwise.
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A few days later after writing this, I'm coming back to say something. I just finished watching Frozen I and II and there is a great lesson and inspiration to letting go of shame that I am going to share here because I feel how right it is to do so.
So, Elsa is a girl who was born with magical ice powers. As a child, one night playing, she accidentally hurts her younger sister. This sends Elsa and her father especially into a frenzy, resorting to hiding Elsa's powers, or, as they say, "conceal, don't feel". The family shuts out the world. Elsa is locked up in fear and shame.
Nobody can live like this forever, as this is not living, it is hiding. The one day they open up the castle's gates, Elsa's sister Anna refuses to go back to hiding, and Elsa explodes in an ice storm of rage. She runs to the forest where she can finally be herself and let it all go. The shame is released, and she is free. Or so she thinks.
Anna comes and finds her to tell her that she has caused an eternal winter everywhere. Elsa sees that running away has not solved her issue. Just because she does not feel the shame by herself doesn't mean it is gone. It is being around others that truly reflects how one feels on the inside. Her purpose needs to be fulfilled, not retreated from.
In order to speed this story up, as you may guess, the fairy tale ends happily ever after with some adventures in between. Elsa is taken back to her kingdom, saved by her sister, now coming to the conclusion that the winter can be thawed by love. Elsa now has nothing to hide and no shame. Instead, she uses her powers for the magic they are, creating play all around the kingdom.
However (no we are not done), in Frozen II, although things are happy, Elsa still feels a calling into the unknown. Into the truth about her past. The kingdom's past. Following this calling, Elsa, Anna, and the rest venture into the magical forest, learning the truth. Elsa discovers her purpose: to be the bridge between the elements (physical) and love (divine). Between her people and nature.
In the beginning, to the mind of fear, Elsa's powers were thought to be dangerous, random, out of control, and too powerful. But, at the end we see that they were for a much greater purpose than any mind could fathom. These powers were the most special gift of love, beauty, play, and potency.
The cure for shame is purpose, passion, love.
Listen to your heart's calling.
That is your god given purpose.
There is no shame in that.
Only triumph.
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