Feelings have weight. Some people talk about the different vibrational frequencies of feelings, but I want to talk about their weight. Love makes you feel expansive, light as a feather, elevated as a cloud. Anger can feel electric, but that surging circuit will either make you feel like you can fly, or else cause a sudden black out from sheer overwhelm. Grief feels like an anvil, although it can often be an anchor, too. It feels suffocating, burdensome, and could crush us, if we let it. But Shame is the heaviest of all, so murky and muddy, we automatically repress it, like a pile of clothes that no longer fit being vacuum-packed into plastic storage bags, allowing us to condense a hundred pound weight into a hairpin, hiding it away into the deepest recesses of our microscopic cells, our late-night binges of Netflix and comfort food, our YOLO-proclaimed parties with drugs and alcohol, our indulgent retail therapy and initially exciting, yet ultimately unsatisfying, hook-ups.
Shame has just as much value as Love, and yet we warp it and distort it as if to say, “You don’t belong here, Shame. We wish you never existed.”
As humans, we’re all on a journey to do two things: experience and understand ourselves. Experience intangibles like truth, love, and belief through our senses, in ways only a conscious human can. But also, understand how and why we have the ability to experience these things. Why us? Why me? The most ultimate experience of life is love. And, I believe, the deepest level of understanding we can hope to achieve comes through embracing our shame.
So what happens when we finally decide to retrieve those existential plastic storage bags and unpack all that shame?
Have you ever loved something or someone so much that you felt too ashamed to tell anyone about it? A passion that, if people knew, they’d make fun of you, at best, and recoil in shock and horror, at worst.
Perhaps you love a person who society doesn’t deem appropriate - someone of foreign ethnicity, incompatible religious views, differing socio-economic strata, too young, too old, same sex? The Romeo to your Juliet? The Hindu to your Muslim? The prince to your pauper? The Persephone to your Hades? The Shams to your Rumi?
But Love, in its deepest sense, is unconditional, isn’t it? Boundaryless. You are not just my sister or brother, my lover, my platonic friend. You are me, and I am you. We are everything and nothing. We are One. In divine love, there is no room for definitions. There is no room for shame.
Shame doesn’t just extend to our love for others, though. Perhaps you’ve hidden parts of yourself from the world, too, parts you actually deeply love, parts that make you feel uniquely “you”. Why did you hide them away in the first place? Because society didn’t reflect those same qualities back to you as being acceptable. Society is a double-edged sword, just like everything else. Being a member of society is meant to grant you belonging and community. But what happens when that same community shuns you? Or makes you feel ashamed of who you are? What positive role is society playing then, in cultivating your identity and well-being?
How often has the dividing line between love and shame felt suffocating? And yet, have you noticed how that line has begun to blur more and more?
Shame causes dissonance, internal fragmentation. But by healing that dissonance, we automatically open ourselves up to greater love. The one leads to the other. As we’re pushed into more and more severe states of dissonance, only to swing back towards integration, wholeness and love, our capacity to tap into our original source - that never ending wellspring of unconditional Love always available to us - expands.
On a global level
Could we have imagined in December of 2019 how isolated the world would be when Covid hit? Could we have fathomed how blatant and transparent the cruelty and hypocrisy of the American and Israeli governments would become? Every time the unfathomable becomes fact, we learn to normalize the dissonance. Fictitious tales like “Contagion” and “Hunger Games” have already come true. It makes one wonder whether the world’s scriptwriters and filmmakers manifested our current reality or were simply passive prophesiers of the future. Regardless, each time the world is seemingly brought to its knees, do we acknowledge the what needs acknowledging? A profiteering pharmaceutical industry, a struggling healthcare system, a pandemic of loneliness, a brutal genocide, global bullying without any consequences? Do we acknowledge our societal shame?
Rumi famously said, “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” Our biggest wounds are often also our deepest shames. The place where the wound is most tender is often overlooked, hidden away in bandages, suppressed by pain killers. But when the pain reaches unimaginable proportions, we have no choice but to pay attention.
That is the role of shame in our lives - it serves as a messenger, trying to bring to our attention something that we may not be willing to face. But we must. The shame will only redouble its efforts until we do.
Palestine is the wound that’s been festering in our world for three quarters of a century. For decades, the issue of Palestine’s sovereignty has been highly contested yet unresolved. But now the devastation has reached such proportions, the spread of information has become so widespread, that it cannot be ignored any longer. Israel has been like a knife jabbing an already pus-filled burn, and we have come to the point where to look away can no longer be deemed as “blissful ignorance” but more so “wilful heartlessness”. This is the foremost crisis of our times, the biggest and most basic test of our humanity.
The line between the shame we feel for what we’ve allowed to happen in our lifetime, and the love that has been awakened within us for others - indeed the love we’ve begun to feel for ourselves, too, and the righteous indignation towards those in power who try to mistreat us - is slowly disappearing. The boundaries we’d created (or which had been foisted upon us by governments, religious authorities, educational institutions, etc) are blurring to remind us that we are all, in fact, One.
At the same time, shame of other kinds, like increasing economic struggles, rising mental health issues, rampant racism and misogyny, are pushing us outside of ourselves in search of greater community. We are actively seeking the feeling of being One. We are actively seeking the truth of who and what we already are, and always have been.
So the wound becomes both a curse and a blessing. Our collective shame in allowing the Palestinians to face such brutal torture and oppression has broken us, but also broken our hearts open. And if yours hasn’t, you must ask yourself, when did my heart turn to steel? How did I allow it to die while my body still continues to live? Am I an honest-to-God manifestation of the living dead?
On the level of relationships
As a child, I craved wanting to be seen as someone beautiful, but the core people in my life only saw me as extensions of themselves, and not just that, but often the weakest parts of themselves, the parts upon which they knew they could safely project their self-loathing. To absorb others’ self-loathing, to internalize it as if it was my own shame, is to better understand the process of how intergenerational shame and trauma is passed on. I grew up with this codependent blurring of my bondaries, feeling like this is what it means to be home. Home was a place fraught with the tension of dissonance, but hopefully, if you were lucky, healing, too.
As we grow up, meet new people, cultivate friendships and romances, we come to learn that a person can only truly love us when they accept our flaws and deepest shame. But it is hard for another to do that if they are unable to accept or acknowledge their own shame. That is why vulnerability is so important. It allows us to be ourselves, in all our gore and glory, and to be accepting of others at their most vulnerable, too. Vulnerability, then, is perhaps the meeting point of love and shame, the point at which we affirm that to accept one’s shame is the price you pay for experiencing deeper states of love, for both self and others. Vulnerability allows for depth.
On the level of Self
At the most basic level of our existential awareness, when we acknowledge God’s love for us, we may also experience a sense of shame in how much we’ve always been loved, but how, like children, we acted out because we didn’t feel that love. There is a shame in realizing how blinded we were by our traumas. How our fixation on only seeing the glass as half empty prevented us from seeing the abundance of beauty we’d been gifted.
This shame, and the humility that comes with it, is a precursor to deeper and more divine states of loving. Only those of us willing to be comfortable with shame will be able to transcend the trap of self-pity and victimhood it invites us to. We have the ability to switch from obsessing about “How could this even happen to me?”, to thinking, “I accept this happened. I accept my role in it. Now what can I learn from this? How can I evolve?” Often the sweetest rewards lie in wait for us on the other side of shame.
Perhaps I should not chide myself for feeling so much shame all the time. The reason I constantly feel shame - for disappointing my parents, for failing at motherhood, for being unable to galvanize my students - is precisely because I care so much. Do I feel shame for that, too? Loving too much? Being too much? Hell yes, I do. Hell yes, I do. I still can’t help but view my burgeoning, buoyant awareness of love through my outdated lens of cynicism and shame. Why do I feel shame for something that is woven into the original fabric of my being? For that which is infinite and comes naturally to me? Love is divine, while shame is wholly man-made. How can something man-made bar me from accessing my divine birthright?
As the lines between love and shame continue to blur, so does the division between our experience of life and our understanding of it. In a non-dual world, to experience and understand should be one and the same - the Truth, if you will. Truth, for me, is not a series of mental facts, a philosophical quest, or even an emotional-psychological-spiritual state of being. Truth, for me, is a taste. The taste of the divine, a sweetness in the air we breathe, savoring every experience as if it was steeped in the nectar of heaven. The dance between desire and ecstasy. Striving and surrendering. Sin and virtue. Love and shame.
Circling back to my original question: have you ever loved something or someone so much that you felt too ashamed to tell anyone about it? What if I dared you to go forth and announce it to the world? Or even, to just one person? What if I encouraged you to reveal your deepest wound, proclaim your greatest love? What if you finally decided to step into the wholeness of your being, without a shred of apology for who you are?
I wonder if every day would start tasting like bliss.
a wonderful, wise, precious chant to wholeness and divine love through the door of shame... Reading you tastes like bliss ✨ thank you so much Nida 🙏🙏🙏
Once again, just wow.
Shame is probably the most complicated of human emotions yet this piece explores and explains it so beautifully. If shame is the door to Divine love, then shame serves a wonderful purpose. You helped me to see that and also to see shame in all its many lights, and for that I thank you. And I thank you for sharing what is most definitely one of your GIFTS with us - it truly is such a blessing to read your words.
As always, going to reread this because wow wow wow. 💛💛💛