Meeting Our Shame

MEETING OUR SHAME

Shame is ‘sticky’. It can bind to any thought, any emotion, any desire, any sensation, any feeling at all. We can be as ashamed of our joy and creativity as we are of our pain, grief, loneliness.

We can be ashamed of our failures. Our successes. We can be ashamed of our smallness or our bigness. Our voices or our silence. Our deepest longings or our most seemingly superficial desires.

We can even be ashamed of our shame.

Shame is not healed through thinking. Only through presence. Only through love.

We invite the “darkness” into the light. This is the core of all healing, this sacred meeting, this divine encounter.

In the light of awareness, of love, of deep mysterious connection, the scared, hurt, contracted regions can remember their true nature, can expand into their rightful places as beloved parts of us - not enemies or aberrations or mistakes to be fixed or destroyed, but movements of life to be fully embraced, understood, uncovered, shared freely.

Don’t be ashamed of your shame. Share it. Speak it. Dance it. Sing it. Sit with it. Eat and cry with it. Run with it. Be silent with it. Explore it. It doesn’t make you weak, to feel small, to admit shame, to want to hide. Shame is a lost child of the great Kingdom of You, just waiting to be met in an infinitely loving way.

And who knows, the very thing you are scared of, the very thing you want to run from, may just be trying to save your life.

- Jeff Foster