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Shame

Shame is an important subject.

I’m a VortexHealing® teacher, and I talk a lot about the nature of that work, and I offer demonstrations and healings. I really enjoy doing it, but I find where people really resonate is when they can relate to what we're trying to work on. When it touches us, when we realize how healing can affect us. How it can touch us where we feel hurt, where we feel in separation. When we realize that we share some common issues as just being part of the human race.

We all have shame. It manifests differently in different people, but it's an incredibly deep seated issue. It can look like anything. 

We mask what we don't want other people and ourselves to see. Often, shame can look like anger or resentment or the need to be perfect. And all of these are ways that we tend to compensate for what we don't want to see. By nature, shame hides. It hides from ourselves and redirects our focus to trying to be whatever we think we should be.

There's a lot of tension in projecting that to the world and to other people. That thing that needs love, that piece of separation consciousness that doesn't feel worthy of connection or being loved or belonging never gets what it needs. It stays hidden. 

Brene Brown does wonderful work on shame. I think she defines herself as a shame researcher and she's done a number of books. I think she has the best definition of shame that I've ever heard: Guilt is really feeling bad about something you've done, but shame is feeling bad about something you are. I think that's beautifully said.

It's a place where you shut down. You hide from the world, and then you can't connect and be present. 

Shame is a magnificent example of separation consciousness. If we felt open and we had a willingness to be vulnerable with the world, the potential would be endless. But so long as we feel the need to hide and compensate, it just grows in on itself. 

Working in my own system with my own shame, I realized that I put a lot of effort into projecting an image. I don't want to be seen for what I actually am, because I'm afraid that that's not good enough for, fill in the blank. 

So I project this image of who I want to be, and one of two things happen: either it works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work well, then you feel bad because you failed. But then if it does work, that creates a whole set of problems because then you're being met for the projection you've created and not for who you really are. I realized that part of me felt like a fraud, because I was projecting an image of who I thought I should be. And if that worked well, then part of me felt that that’s what was being loved. And of course I fall short of that.

When I talk about the system, I'm not just talking about the physical body. I'm talking about the entire package that goes with it. I'm talking about the chakra system, the body pathways, the energetic bodies, all of this comes together in a package to basically allow the divine to have an experience of separation.

It is beautifully designed. It's wonderfully intricate. It's an amazing system for the divine to experience itself as if it were something separate. Our issues show up in this. They show up in our minds, our personalities, you can see it in the chakra system. You can see it in the pathways ,and they all imprint. Our issues are all held together by this separation consciousness.

Healing is really about, not only releasing the issue from where it sits in the body and the system. It's about awakening that separation consciousness. It's about realizing that's not actually true. You are not disconnected from the world around you. That's just the experience. It doesn't diminish the experience, but it's just not true.

The realization that we never were disconnected is the awakening.

So that's why it's well worth our time to look at our issues, especially something like shame that hides. If you bring that to the light and you bring that divine consciousness to it, you don't just release it or get better, you realize that it was never the case.

VortexHealing® is a lineage about awakening. It functions as a healing modality, and people get better from physical, emotional issues, and psychological issues, but the awakening is really where the healing comes in. 

What would you be without your shame? 

We start from the experience of separation and that's what we all relate to. So then where do we go from there? How do we deal with that? And so we bring our VortexHealing® tools, our supportive loving friends and our therapy. All the wonderful things that we do for ourselves. We shine a light on that, realize it for what it is. It's just an experience— it's not the truth of what we are, and then we can move into a different way.

It takes time, and it takes some courage. You have to sit down and be willing to have the vulnerability to say, “This is what I'm really afraid of.” To have the humility to take a look at how it's held me in the past, how it feels now, what it could look like in the future, and be willing to, to make a change.

Taking a look at where we've shut down, what are we trying to hide from ourselves and from everyone else, this is the thing we're afraid to see.

Where is the point where we're afraid to be vulnerable? If we're willing to put that in the spotlight, this is the way things move. We realize that we were never actually disconnected. We realize that we're never in separation, that our issues are just an experience of being in separation. 

That's why when we use the word awakening. If you go to sleep and you have a dream that you're a kangaroo, you don’t actually transform into something else. When you wake up, you realize you were never actually that kangaroo— you just had an experience. So basically the divine is having experience being us and being us with our issues. Then we awaken out of that to realize we are never actually in. In separation. 

The juiciest part of shame is that it hides, and it really shuts the system down. It's almost a place where we stop breathing. We can put the focus on an insecurity issue, or an anger issue. We’re drawn to work on the ways that we compensate for the issue, never even realizing that shame is driving it. So many other things are compensating for the belief that we are not worthy of being connected, or being part of the group, or being loved.

Then we resent that— we get angry, we feel lost. A lot of our other stuff comes from this fundamental belief that was never actually true. Shame hides, and it takes a willingness and courage to sit down and take a look at it. 

Very often, we are willing to share the moments in life where we felt humiliated or embarrassed, because very often those are things that happened to us. They're not necessarily our fault, so we can share those because we know we'll get sympathy. It's much harder to talk about those things that we feel deep inside.

This is an issue that a lot of people don't want to talk about, so it's really an amazing experience to put shame under the microscope. 

Let's be honest. If we're drawn to healing, we have a list of issues. An issue is anything that keeps you out of being present as I’ve said, and it shows up in all sorts of different ways. It shows up in your mind, in your personality, in your body. And the thing that makes it really hard to work with. 

The thing that makes our issues hard to see is that we identify with them. They keep us in an experience of separation. For example, we don't say, “have anger impacting my system, creating tension in my shoulders and manifesting in my liver.” We say, “I am angry.” 

We don't say, “I have a depression that's affecting my relationships and making me tired and helping me lose my appetite.” We say, “I am depressed.” We experience our issues as ourselves to a certain degree. So how do you work with that? 

The first step is first and foremost to recognize an issue for what it is, which is an experience, but it's not the truth of what you are. 

If  you can recognize the issue as an experience, that tells you that you already have some space in it. Maybe it's in your face, and maybe it's very uncomfortable, but you can work with that. You can say, “I have an issue with anger, and I'm experiencing it this way, but it's not the truth of what I am.” That's a whole different relationship with the experience. That's workable. So the first step in working with issues is just calling them for what they are.

Shame is the hardest of the issues to call for what it is. It manifests in so many different ways we don't even recognize it. 

I think shame hides behind everything else. It hides behind insecurity. It hides behind loss. If you have this fundamental belief that you are separate and not worthy of being loved, which is kind of what shame is about, then you have a reaction to that: resentment, anger, hurt, loss and all of those other things. The ways that we compensate for that by trying to be perfect, to manipulate, and hide it.

All of these other behaviors come out of that fundamental thing. It's very easy to get distracted with all these other feelings, issues, concerns. It takes a lot of courage to sit down and say, “okay, what's really going on here?” 

We could follow our anger. We could follow our insecurity. We can follow our resentment. We can follow our loneliness. We can follow a lot of things to this fundamental sense that we are disconnected, which has never actually been true. But if we believe it and we don't believe that we're worthy of being connected, it’s hard.

I think it's different for different people, which is why it's so insidious. Another way that I like to look at issues is, not only how they keep me from being present in this particular moment, but how they affected me, my behavior, and my relationships in the past.

Where am I right now? Where do I feel it in my body? What is the tension that's created? What am I afraid is going to happen to me as a result of this issue? What's going to happen? 

One of the biggest regrets that people have when they're in their last moments of life, is that they didn't live their truest self.

They weren't authentically who they really wanted to be, or who they really were. They were living someone else's life. 

How can you be your true self, if you're always compensating for what you don't feel is good enough?

When we project an image that we try to put forth to meet the world, we're not actually meeting the world in an authentic way. 

I had an extraordinarily humbling experience when I was in training to get my yoga certification. I have a background as a personal trainer. I like bodies. I was doing a ‘practice practical’, which means I was sort of rehearsing the practical exam. I was leading the class in a little Asana practice, and feeling pretty good about myself because technically I kind of knew my stuff, and I like working with people.

When I got the feedback at the end of the session, the instructor basically said, “Lorraine, you really know your stuff, but you just don't seem like you care. You're not connecting. You seem more interested in showing off what you know, than actually connecting with your people.”

That really hit me hard, because she was absolutely right, but it wasn't from a place of not connecting. It was from this deep insecurity that created a wall. And so here I was trying to compensate. I realized when she said that I didn't just do that in that particular instance, I actually did that throughout all of my life.

I realized how that wall of insecurity cut me off from deeper levels of relationship and my clients.

Our issues keep us out of being present. When we're really present with everyone, then it's complete— it has all the love that you're looking for. It has caring, and the room for sharing. If you're negotiating through your issues and your separation consciousness, all of that is shut down. To me, the most important thing is being able to be present and not feel separate from all of that. That's why we work on our issues. Because issues are designed to keep us out of that and just seeing it for what it is begins the transformation.

If an issue really holds us, we don't even know we have it. That's “just the way we are, “ which means you're so identified with something you don't even see it as an issue. I'm actually not a melancholy person, but I do have an issue of loss. That's something I've worked with and continue to work on. The moment I recognized that as an issue and not who I was, my world changed. 

How do you feel safe doing that? What is the context that you can work in? You can’t share if you feel in danger of being ridiculed or dismissed or something like that. So however your system works, whatever therapy or healing modality you use, it's very important that you feel safe in it. 

Even if it's coffee with a friend, you want to be sure that friend is not going to judge you. You want to be sure that that friend is not there to criticize or belittle you. 

When we use VortexHealing® to heal an issue, it's not just working with different kinds of energies. It's working with divine consciousness. As the energy is releasing the conditioning where the issue of shame shows up in the body and the energy system this divine consciousness comes in. It addresses that place where we identify with the issue. “I am afraid. I am angry.” The divine consciousness comes in and meets that and wakes it up out of the story. There's nothing safer than divine consciousness. 

It’s divinity. If you have a friend, if you have love in your life, you have an understanding of divinity.

Whatever form that it takes for you, whatever that place that you can be met in unconditional love— be it coffee with a friend, a therapist, your cat, whatever that is, you bring your issue to it, meet it with love, and there begins the transformation.

We have tools to take it even further, but that's really where it begins. Because issues are so complicated, they show up as physical tension, they show up in all the energetic pathways. It's wonderful that we have tools with VortexHealing® to really go in and seek that out and release it from the body and the system. 

Seeing it for what it is, it is the most important part. It's the beginning of the transformation, but you can keep going. I've talked about my issue of loss, and that moment of recognizing it was the important first step, but as the years go by, I realized a different level of it.

When I became aware of the wall I created from my own insecurity, I didn't have VortexHealing® at the time. All I had was an awareness that I did that, and a willingness and a desire not to do it anymore. I really didn't want to be like that. I really cared about the people I was working with, and I had to find another way. So moment by moment, breath by breath, intention by intention, you try to meet that. Can you do better? 

There's joy in the recognition of grace.

That's very hard to do when you have an issue like shame that shuts you down. There is a joy in going after our issues. It sounds a little twisted, and maybe not everyone's into that the way that I am. But to look at something and say, “okay, it doesn't have to be that way anymore.” And it comes back to that point of safety. If you don't have some kind of environment where you can talk about that, share, shine a light on it with energy and consciousness and love, you won't feel safe enough to make the change, because you can't imagine what you would be like without shame.

We cling to what's familiar. The joy is the recognition of grace, and there's relaxation in joy and grace, and there's tension in our issues. 

Some days are very hard and all I can do is stay moment to moment. I try to put down my own insecurity, my own shame, and just listen to what's going on, and try to share this moment with my husband, with my students, with my cat, you know, just bring that presence back. I can just put this down enough for this moment of love and unconditional presence. That's how we work. If we’ve got nothing else, we can moment by moment, just have a willingness to put that down and be present.We recognize how our issues get in the way, but we always come back to it.