Whenever I talk about issues, I always like to start with the issue of shame.
Shame is so fundamental to our experience of being. An issue is anything that keeps you out of being present. It has expression in the system, meaning the physical body, energetic system, mind and personality. But it also has an identity attached to it, and keeps us in an experience of isolation. Shame is a great place to start because shame hides. Shame is inherently isolating. It hides us from the rest of the world, we go into a very guarded place with shame. It even hides from us. Our shame uses other issues to mask itself. It can be a very difficult issue to work with. In my experience, it is one of the most challenging issues to work on because it's so fundamental.
We often think of shame as the moment we've been embarrassed or we feel bad about something, but it's actually more core than that.
For people who are interested in the topic of shame, Brené Brown has done some wonderful work on shame. As a matter of fact, I think she has the most popular youtube video, ever, in which she talks about the topic of shame. She offered something very profound: guilt is about something you've done, but shame is about something you are.
Our core shame is that place in us that doesn't feel worthy of being loved. It's really that deep. That pain creates its own kind of reaction in order to manage and hide that pain. We compensate. We compensate in all sorts of ways: we get angry, we try to be better, we try to be perfect, we try to deflect. It's an issue that holds a lot of other issues together, it's that place in us that just doesn't feel worthy of being loved, by anyone else, by ourselves, or by the divine. That's a very hard place to meet. It takes a lot of picking apart to figure out that's what's going on.
Another reason I like to open with shame is that it's universal. We all experience issues in different ways, but something in all of us knows that place where we don't feel worthy of being loved. To take a safe space to explore that in ourselves, we can ask ourselves about our coping mechanisms. How do we manage this issues? How do we compensate for these beliefs? That can be very profound.
Shame looks different to everybody.
That's the thing about issues. On some level, they are universal, but how they express themselves is unique for every individual. I'll start with my own. When I think about my own shame, I think about a moment when I was getting certified to teach yoga. Before I found VortexHealingⓇ, I was a personal trainer and yoga instructor. It was during a practice session for my practical exam. I was asked to lead part of a class and then the instructors for the certification program were going to offer feedback.
To be honest, I was going into this feeling pretty good about myself. With my personal training background, I felt like I really knew my stuff. So I led the class and awaited the feedback from the instructors. And I'll never forget it. There was kind of this uncomfortable silence, and one of them said that I was clearly technically very good at what I was doing, but that I just didn't seem very interested in the people I was working with. I actually seemed more interested in showing off what I knew, and demonstrating my knowledge, than helping the people in the class. It really hit me hard. It felt like a slap across the face, because I knew that it was true. I had to really go home and think about why it was true, though. I refer to this moment as The Day I Realized I Was Full of Shit.
What I realized after sitting with this feedback, was that I did care very deeply, and I did want to help the people I was instructing. But I felt so incompetent in a particular way, that I learned to manage myself by putting on this air of being an "expert". I had created a mask, and when I was working with people I was working through this mask. So it was coming from a place of deep insecurity and shame. I really believed that I didn't know what I was doing, and that I wasn't the one to be able to bring love and healing to this. It was like armor for me. I would love to tell you that I just did that because I was nervous and that was how I compensated for it. To be quite honest, when I really thought about it, I realized that it was something I was doing in every single aspect of my life. Why am I telling this story here? It's not just that I was embarrassed about my behavior, or that I feel bad about how I handled myself in the moment. It was an example of pure shame. That issue had caused me to go into a behavioral mechanism, a mask, that was actually keeping me separate from the very people I was trying to help.
I didn't have any tools at the time -- this was before I had found VortexHealingⓇ. I just remember crying all the way home, and all I could do was promise myself that I wouldn't be like that anymore. That's not who I want to be, that's not who I am. And I decided that the next day when I went in to work, I would meet my client and listen. One person at a time, one moment at a time, I would just listen to what they needed, and then I would offer whatever I had. Moment to moment, I just tried to break that down. It was an ongoing realization about how that issue affected me in all of my relationships. How I compensated in intimate relationships, with my parents, with my friends. In every situation, I had something going on, and it was really keeping me out of being present with people. So that's why we work on our issues. Slowly over time, you learn, you manage, and heal.
It's hard to meet shame, because shame wants to hide from itself.
So it disguises itself as other issues. In my example, I had created this kind of competence. One one level, I am competent, so it's easy to work that angle. But if you follow that 'competence' through, where does it come from? It comes from a level of insecurity. Where does the insecurity come from? It comes from that place that doesn't believe it's worthy.
What I do, especially if I don't know what's going on with me, is I follow the tension.
I follow the mask. What do we portray to the world? What is important for us to get out there, and how do we want to be seen? Is there any information in that? Are we afraid to be seen in a certain way? Is it important for us to be seen as competent or intelligent or creative? Follow that, because we all create our masks. They come from somewhere.
The thing about masks is that we create this way of interacting with the world, crafting this persona on some level. It's either effective or it's not. If it's not effective, you just come off poorly. If it's effective, and you craft a persona that people respond well to, then part of you feels like a fraud. On some level you recognize that the persona people are responding to is your projection of how you want to be (or how you think you should be), not who you really are. So when it works, there can be this fraud effect, and that's another way that shame can manifest. If you follow that thread, you can ask, "Where am I not feeling my authentic self? Why not?" We start with where and how we feel uncomfortable, and we dig a little. If we have enough courage and self love, it will lead us to the truth.
I don't know if we learn a lot from the issue of shame itself. If anything, we can embrace the process of bringing compassion to it. In VortexHealingⓇ, we talk a lot about bringing love to issues. If we meet something in judgment, it's just another way of perpetuating that feeling of separation. But if we can find the place in us that is hurt and feeling unworthy, and be willing to bring love to that, it's transformative. When teaching, I often say that we're learning a process not a product. If we can learn the process of bringing love to the parts of us that we don't feel are worthy of being loved, that's the deepest transformation. We can just recognize it for what it is. It's not true, it's just the issue of shame. Of course we're worthy of being loved.
The issue can always be worked with, but we have to recognize it for what it is.
That's why crafting language about issues is so important. When it's just a bad feeling, then we can't work with that. We just feel bad, hide and compensate. But when it's brought to the light, we can recognize that it's uncomfortable and extraordinarily difficult, but it's an issue and an issue can be worked with.
We do what we can in the moment, and it's an ongoing process. I don't claim to be completely free from the issue of shame. I don't claim to be completely free of masks or anything like that. It's an ongoing exploration to find the tension, to find where I'm hiding, what behavior is compensating for something, and what am I compensating for? It's an exploration of that. Then we reach freedom on a certain level, and we enjoy that and recognize the grace. Then we go a little deeper.
If we can have more of an appreciation for the process, then no given issue is so terrible. That issue that feels so terrible, that holds us so deeply, it's hard but it's just an issue. It sounds twisted, but as we continue to go, we kind of develop a new appreciation for our issues. They become the pathway to freedom. You can't be free from something you don't realize is holding you. So being able to name it, recognize it, and bring love to it, that's the healing process. The more we're willing to engage with it, the more it's willing to engage with us.
Although it can be very difficult and humbling, it can also be very exciting.
VortexHealingⓇ is extraordinary in the way that it works. It doesn't only work on an energetic level, it also works on a consciousness level. Issues are very complicated. A good issue is going to have multiple expressions. It's going to create tension and conditioning in the physical body, the energetic system, the chakras, the pathways. VortexHealingⓇ has the energetics to move the imprinting and conditioning the issue creates on the form, but the real magic (and it is a very magical lineage) comes with that consciousness component. That's the part that gets in there and recognizes the identity that gets created. That part of us that says, "I am unworthy," and believes it, rather than, "I'm experiencing an issue of feeling unworthy." There's a divine consciousness component that comes in and meets that separation consciousness, and meets it in love.
That difference between "I am unworthy" and "I have an issue which can be worked with" makes all the difference in the world. That space is everything. It's incredibly freeing. When I talk about VortexHealingⓇ, I demonstrate it as a healing modality, because when we get freedom from our issues, we feel better. But on that level, it's more about awakening. Awakening out of the story that our issues create. That belief we have that we are unworthy of being loved. That's just a story that we create out of our own experience of pain. It's not true. That experience is real and valid, but it's not true. As we begin to release conditioning, things begin to get more fluid, and that identity gets broken, and we have transformation. And then we just keep going. We target our worst pain first, and then as we get more fluid, we recognize freedom from our deeper identities.
With shame, if we're willing to meet it, which requires love and compassion, we find the ways that we hide in the shadows and see ourselves as small.
If we can bring love to our own shame, we can bring love to anything. It allows us to be more compassionate to others as well. In order to be really present with others, we really need to be able to be present with ourselves and our own issues. If we can do that with the deepest place of unworthiness that we know, we can do anything. I believe that.
I do believe that shame is modeled. We learn it from our parents, because they learned it from their parents. Times change, and it might look differently, but it is a universal issue and we all have it. Then on top of that, there's the shame of losing our shame. We're taught to keep ourselves in check, to not be egotistical by holding on to a certain amount of shame, and that is not helpful.
My parents were raised with a strict Catholic upbringing, and then they decided to raise my brother and I outside of the church. But the modeling is still in the system -- when you did something wrong, it wasn't that you made a mistake, it's that you're a bad person. I know that neither of my parents believed that, but it was modeled in their system without ever saying that. That was what was in them, and what we learned, and it takes a lot to break that pattern.
Even though we're becoming more aware, and recognizing that there shouldn't be body shaming and all of that, it still happens. Sometimes we talk the talk without walking the walk. We push ourselves through without doing the work. I don't know that there is a simple solution, we just have to acknowledge and meet our shame wherever we have it. If we can't meet it in ourselves, we can't break the cycle for anyone else. If we can, then we become a model for something new, without saying it, preaching about it, or telling people what to do. If we can meet ourselves and our own experiences of being in form and love, that will create a new way of being.
You have to feel safe enough to meet shame.
If you don't have a safe space to meet that, in whatever form that takes, it's not necessarily a therapist, it could be with a friend over coffee. A place to air that and bring it to light. If you don't have a safe space to do that, it's very hard to do anything else. In order to do this work, we have to feel safe enough to do it, and finding what that means for each of us as individuals is a very important step.
It's hard to work on an issue if you don't realize you have it, and often our deepest issues are the ones we don't know we have. We're so deeply identified with them, it's just our experience of life. What I usually suggest is to ask questions about what's taking up space in your consciousness. Where is your tension, where is your mask? Where are you not feeling like your authentic self? Follow that tension and find where it leads. Just by noticing you're uncomfortable, and being okay and feeling safe enough to feel uncomfortable, and then following that thread through to find the core of what that issue is about. It just comes with love, courage and persistence. If we really want to be free, that's the ongoing process. So long as we're in form, we're going to have issues. Sometimes it will be clear as day, and sometimes we'll just feel bad.
Survival is safety.
The thing with shame is that it ties into all of these issues. When you see shame, you're going to see some way to manage it. Some kind of control issue, some mechanism. Trying to be perfect, or anger... we're going to find some kind of mechanism to manage it. Very often we see that first, and then we follow that to the core. That's why I start with shame, because it holds a lot of other stuff together. Being willing to have a context for that is valuable. We're all works in progress.
If you want to read more about the issue of shame, you can see Lorraine’s interview on the subject on the cable access show Oneness and Wellness here.