#ShameShare

The ceremony I did was so powerful because I finally welcomed fear into my body in a total visceral way, probably for the first time in my life, instead of resisting it or pushing it away, and in the process of accepting fear as a core human emotion and giving it space to belong, it moved through me like a thrust of wind through dense trees. When trees experience all kinds of harsh experiences – wind, storms, hails, droughts etc, they allow these storms to come through, and there is no resistance. And then the storm inevitably passes and a rainbow follows. When I became those trees in the ceremony, it was a game changing realization. All emotions pass through us, they are momentary, all consuming and then if we give them space and acknowledgement, they just move through us and it’s sunny again.

This embodied, visceral realization put me on a path to unpack all of the deeper darker seemingly unwelcome feelings in me – the hardest one being shame. We were taught to not shame our families, to not shame ourselves and if we did, we could be exiled, and in the olden days, that meant death. No, rather, stuff them way down and hope they die when our bodies do. I realized that the more I acknowledge the harder, shameful moments, the more I can release them from my body and from my spirit and get me closer to feeling fully ME.

So here goes a little #shameshare experiment where I will share a shame a day over the next little while until I feel good and done with these deep dark feelings and light as a feather. I am starting with more surface shame (but still hard to deal with) and then will keep going in deeper and deeper. Let’s see where this goes.