Hi Deva! In this time of the human race destroying itself …I have taken a sledge hammer to my own life….busted it apart and have forever changed the paths of several people. For a year I have been in deep self inquiry and in response to this newsletter…what am I doing to make space and changes in myself, I will try to describe my experience of the past week.
Here is where I am in this moment….
I am dealing with shame. After I was called upon to face the deed that triggered this particular instance, have been through a week of unfolding revelations about the value of shame.
The first night I woke up to the berating voices yelling at me….everything from name calling, to definitive evidence as to what an awful person I am, to ways that I could physically hurt myself without leaving any marks. I lay there in bed and did my best to practice Radical Acceptance (thank you Tara Brach)…yes i hear you, you have a place here but you are not in control.
I meditated on these shame voices for a couple of days and had a vision that changed (some of) my negative thoughts about the voices in my head.
In my vision, I pictured myself in a way that used the methods that shame said I should inflict pain on myself and carried it to an extreme I had not considered before. And as I watched myself being tortured (in my vision), in actuality, I felt a lot better. The method that shame had told me to use, when carried out in a vision, NOT in physical reality, somehow it made the suffocating blanket of shame loosen.
So I wonder… we use shame to punish ourselves, and in the process protect ourselves against feeling a pain we NEED to feel, but if we listen to it with an open heart, can it actually be a source of healing instead of being debilitating?
Hi Deva! In this time of the human race destroying itself …I have taken a sledge hammer to my own life….busted it apart and have forever changed the paths of several people. For a year I have been in deep self inquiry and in response to this newsletter…what am I doing to make space and changes in myself, I will try to describe my experience of the past week.
ReplyDeleteHere is where I am in this moment….
I am dealing with shame. After I was called upon to face the deed that triggered this particular instance, have been through a week of unfolding revelations about the value of shame.
The first night I woke up to the berating voices yelling at me….everything from name calling, to definitive evidence as to what an awful person I am, to ways that I could physically hurt myself without leaving any marks. I lay there in bed and did my best to practice Radical Acceptance (thank you Tara Brach)…yes i hear you, you have a place here but you are not in control.
I meditated on these shame voices for a couple of days and had a vision that changed (some of) my negative thoughts about the voices in my head.
In my vision, I pictured myself in a way that used the methods that shame said I should inflict pain on myself and carried it to an extreme I had not considered before. And as I watched myself being tortured (in my vision), in actuality, I felt a lot better. The method that shame had told me to use, when carried out in a vision, NOT in physical reality, somehow it made the suffocating blanket of shame loosen.
So I wonder… we use shame to punish ourselves, and in the process protect ourselves against feeling a pain we NEED to feel, but if we listen to it with an open heart, can it actually be a source of healing instead of being debilitating?
:)
blessings
jenny