About Shame

Often, in childhood, you have been judged and punished unjustly, but because of your dependence on those who judged you, you accepted it and the wrongful shame it imposed. It was far too painful for you to keep in your conscious mind, and for your own survival you buried it as deeply as you possibly could.

All that “stuff” is now coming up for release, and initially the anger felt for those unjust acts committed against you will appear to be the issue; look deeper and you will find the shame, the disgrace that you felt about yourself for which you cannot forgive yourself.

From "Cry Out Vociferously For Spiritual Assistance and You Will Receive it in Abundance", Saul through John Smallman, December 12, 2012

These words from Saul through John Smallman struck a deep cord within me. In my family, we weren't controlled through anger as many families were, we were controlled through shame. "I'm ashamed of you" and "You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" are words that lived inside me for all of my childhood and most of my adulthood.

For many years I blamed my parents for treating me this way. I first blamed my dad, who was the shaming one, and then my mom for not standing up for me. I came to loathe weak women, for I could see that mom could have intervened, she even told me as much when I was well into adulthood. But really, none of that matters anymore. I've long since realized that in the game of "Who Am I Really?" we set up scenarios like these for their value in showing us whatever we desire to see, behaviors and patterns that we cannot see when we realize that we are the creator of the scenarios. Rather than blame my parents, I appreciate and honor them for playing some very difficult roles in my life. On sSoul levels it wounds a spirit deeply to play some of these adversary roles, and I honor my parents for honoring my request to play out these roles so that I could learn about power and powerlessness.

But that's not the topic of this post. The topic today is the shame itself, as I see many folks who, just like me, believed in, and continue to believe in, shame, both their own and others'.

Shame a powerful emotion, and once accepted as truth, one that allows us to be easily controlled. As we know, or are coming to realize, control over others is a duality concept. Shame is just another form of control-over-others, no less debilitating than physical abuse in it's own way. Invoking shame neither accepts nor appreciates self or other as a sovereign being, as creators in their own right. When we accept shame as a label, we are saying that some one or some thing is more powerful than we are, knows more than we know, deserves love more than we do, and that simply is not true.

An interesting phenomenon has occurred in some of what I will call 'the younger generations'. Many of these children / young people cannot be shamed, cannot be controlled, no matter what we try to do to them. And by "we" I mean parents, teachers, authority figures of any kind, well-meaning though we/they may be. These children know, on deep soul levels, that control-over-other does not serve us in our move toward Unity Consciousness. They are "wired differently" than we of the older generations. They are here behaving in their "unruly ways" to show us that control-over-others is a way of being that we must abandon and replace with the respect of one being for another.

When we treat these children with respect, when we treat them as fellow creator-beings, when we allow them choices, and allow them to experience, through their own choices, the consequences of their behavior, we see what we consider to be miraculous shifts in their behavior. No matter how annoying these children appear to be, rest assured that they are only doing their "job" here on earth, in ensuring that we shift how we deal with each other.

Let's all take a lesson from the training manual for the new generation and dissolve shame, both what has been given to us by others that we've accepted as our own, and that which we try to attach to others. There is nothing to be ashamed of. Absolutely nothing. We are who we are. We've had experiences, and all of those experiences have been of our own choosing. Even when it seems like they weren't.

If you notice feelings of shame coming up (or notice yourself attempting to use shame against others), realize that these are just old patterns, old habits of being, old pronouncement of who we are that we accepted as our own, for our own purposes. There is nothing to be ashamed of. It's time to let shame go. Thank shame for it's usefulness in experiencing that which you chose to experience, then stand in your own power as a creator and release it, now and forever.