Intention:
My intention is to be able to remain at peace when this difficult emotion/vibration comes up. To simply no longer take it personally, but rather welcome it and give it permission to be in my body without reacting to it or identifying with it. To be able to remain present as presence: holding it in impersonal awareness that remains now – while feelingly in embodied contact with the sensation of it in the present – and holding it in unconditional love. To purify personal identification with this information and all the patterns of feeling, thought, and behavior. The end goal is to be able to simply be with; to sit with it and allow it in the body without holding on to it, resisting it, or identifying with it.
Having been disassociated for a long time and only recently able to feel my emotions and my body, I simply don’t have the tools yet to be able to observe it from a distance without getting sucked into it. I also didn’t grow up with healthy models of how to self-regulate or socially express this energy in healthy ways – so with all these difficult feelings and areas I am undertaking a conscious exploration of them to ease my way into these scary places and find a way to stabilize in peace with them.
What do I live now?
When you are disassociated you can’t feel difficult feelings. I used to boast to others that I didn’t feel shame, I had transcended it. The truth is I was so totally disassociated I couldn’t feel it.
Now I am more embodied, I feel, and unfortunately am more neurotic than when I was more disassociated and frozen. I am overwhelmed with an incredible back log of unfelt feeling – most without stories – most that I can not recognize or even name.
Shame is a slippery fish. I know I feel it, but I think I need to first empty out anger or other emotions that seem to be more alarming or more primary for the nervous system before dealing with shame – which seems to be a higher socially functioning emotion or maybe a deeper existential layer rather than a reactive pattern.
I recognize shame is layer of self-judgment that really strangles my natural expression: just being joyful. It brings in self-consciousness and then unnaturalness. I am still so often duped into believing the shame – which makes things personal for me – I seem to really believe the shame: that I am small and unworthy and this is why bad things keep happening. I think I can begin to see that is the utter fear of humiliation, and embarrassment – which I refuse to let in as feelings because then I would have so much to feel humiliated and embarrassed about in my life situation – that makes self-shaming such a compulsive thought habit. I think the thought process is… if I do it, then others wont?
Reflective Conclusion
Shame is a secondary layer on top of “bad feelings”: making me feel bad for feeling bad. When jealousy, hate, anger, etc. comes up, I blame myself for feeling such ungodly egoistic emotions.
Identity with shame is unnecessary and inaccurate. When I or others attribute wrongness to phenomenal objects or happenings: be it behaviours, opinions, conduct, thoughts, feelings, body situations, sex and gender, money situations, mental health, childhood abuse, social skills etc. The subjectively projected wrongness on the targeted phenomena is not a reflection of who I am, as the core essence of non-phenomenal presence that I truly am, remains good, beautiful, and true.
When inner voice of baby-shame rises to say “I am wrong – we are wrong” remind baby-shame we are not phenomenal: that our inherent goodness is untainted and untaintable by exterior forms and happenings. Say, “Beloved baby-shame, thank you for speaking your correcting voice and trying to guide us to a better way of being. Remember we are formless loving present awareness and not any phenomenal forms or actions – so our essence is always good, never wrong.”
“Wrongness is itself a layer of conditioned persception: a filter of interpretation and mental activity projected over what is. Directly experience what is, as pure presence, we have no stakes in how outer circumstances are or will unfold. Relinquishing all expectations and ingratitude, all is perfect. Directly experiencing life like this is to walk in the Kingdom of God and see divinity everywhere. Beloved baby-shame, let us take our dark sun glasses lenses of wrongness off, and walk in the marvelous reflected brightness of the one light that we are.”
“Thank you for being an ally in our awakening. For bringing to light disgraceful actions of our psychological apparatus that function out of identity with past memory and not out of loving present awareness as pure essence of mind: pure present presence.” “Keep speaking to me beloved baby shame, and make me conscious of my unconsciousness. I hope in time, that together, we can correct every part of us that is mistakenly identified with form and memory, and awaken to be fully present as pure presence essence of mind.”
“Beloved Baby-shame, together, shall we use your correcting energy correctly? And correct in us all that loves personally conditionally and would deny love to ourselves or others for being phenomenally a certain way? Correct in that in us which focuses on the diversity of appearance and see others rather than the one presence and unity of life in all.
Conscious Re-Education:
Unshaming and Shame Meditations and exercises:
https://tarabrach.libsyn.com/meditation-healing-shame-2020-07-01