Challenging the Voice of Shame

Introducing sexual desire to my life has been the most liberating series of events thus far. It seems that the communication between my body and my soul has a direct channel of remembrance that leads me into pleasure by essentially giving me the desire to give. It’s a feedback loop — I want to receive, I want to give. There is a prayer by St. Francis that goes, “Let me be what I want.” This means, if I want love, let me give love. If I want tenderness, let me give tenderness. Especially if I feel like I’m not receiving something I’m entitled to. It flips the whole game around. Do I want someone to be honest with me? I guess I’d better be honest with them.

The worst thing we can do when dealing with people is give them our shit. I’ve done it, I know a lot of people have. It’s this place where I forget I am responsible as the creator and curator of my life’s experience, and I decide to blame, coerce, or feed into another’s fear that they aren’t good enough. Since we are so powerful, when we do not rest responsibly within the locus of our power, we tend to use it to harm others without awareness.

This usually happens for me when I am in shame. Shame is a funny thing — it blocks us from what we want most, blames us for not having it, and along the way, makes us feel like shit for wanting it. If and when we finally do get to the thing we desire, if shame is working in us, we won’t be able to taste the subtle flavors and nuances of the experience. All we will taste is overwhelming disapproval.

Let me tell you about an experience from my life. When I was a kid, maybe a preteen, I had a lot of erotic energy in my body. I mean, a lot. Who at that age doesn’t? I had desires to kiss people, even a desire to have sex with someone. I would fantasize in my bed at night when my conscious mind would take a rest and the darker shades of my subconscious would emerge, filling me with strong, lusty feelings and inclinations. At that age, I was still a part of the church I’d grown up in, who told me that my sexual desire was wrong. This instilled in me the most powerful shame I have ever experienced and I continue to deal with its untanglement. I believe that if anyone wanted to control a population, the introduction of shame is the most powerful weapon. Forget fluoride — shame is way better at keeping people from doing things that they really want to do. (That’s not to say that fluoride isn’t awful and shouldn’t be removed from the water system, because it is and must.)

Shame would hit me like a hot layer of burning soup that I’m suddenly swimming in, unsure of whether to go back or keep swimming, only knowing that anything done in this place makes me feel like a terrible human being — even just, chopping vegetables or trying to get dressed. When I’m in shame, anything I do makes me feel like a bad person. Eating a cupcake makes me feel like a menace.

Shame lingers around places that I have desire but I don’t have approval for my desire. As a kid, I didn’t have the street smarts to say, “Fuck you. I want what I want.” What I was allowed to have still was determined by the approval I was given by the adult figures and peers in my life. If it wasn’t deemed acceptable by the authority, it wasn’t okay for me to harbor those feelings. Of course, try telling my subconscious that. It created a split that drove me to psychotic breakdown.

I lived in a world of “me,” and everything I had created, at night, with my writing, and when I was alone enough that I felt safe. Then apart from that, there was the “me at church” world, there was the “me at school” world, “me with my family” world, and several other, smaller worlds which filled the gaps. It was in one of these smaller worlds, introduced to me by my school world, that I encountered the experience of marijuana.

Marijuana, whose actual name is cannabis, showed me a doorway to a larger, more intact me. It did so by pulling the threads of my worlds apart, revealing the unchanging self beneath. I did not enjoy smoking weed for the first year and a half that I used it. I kept smoking because the people around me would roll a blunt, and we would partake. I was young and malleable. Around a year and a half later, I found myself in a car with folks from out of town who I’d become casual friends with, and they offered me a hit from their bowl. At first I was inclined to say no, but they told me that this was “dank shit” if I remember correctly. I learned that day that there is shitty weed, called mids, and there is good weed…some people call it loud, others call it dank, it doesn’t really matter what you call it, because you’ll know it by its smell.

“They will know me by my smell.” –Marijuana Jesus.

Anyway…I had a good experience. It changed the way I saw drugs. It’s not all drugs and not drugs. There’s a whole spectrum of quality. It matters where it comes from, who grew it, what they grew it with, how it got shipped, who blessed it with rosary beads and holy water…One of those was a lie, can you guess which?

I digress. Marijuana helped open me to my sexuality. It brought it to the front of my awareness and made me feel my desire. For the longest time, I was in disapproval of it. The shame that wrapped around my inner soul like a thick fur coat wouldn’t allow it. It would rather I do the things that were safe, already deemed appropriate by my masters. But like a patient hammer, it steadily chipped away at that which I believed to be true, and gradually revealed a newfound sense of self beneath it.

I found myself in situations that were wildly different than the stories my shame told me I was allowed to have. I found myself in a world of hippies, where people smoked weed, ate mushrooms, and talked about the quantum nature of reality. Finally…I felt my soul let out a deep exhale. I was home.

That is, I felt like I was home until I learned how blocked by shame these people were, too. They had managed to squeeze past the shame gargoyle, bringing some earth medicines and really good ideas with them, but there was still a pervasive sense of “what is okay and what is not?” that would sometimes sneak up and bite me on the back. Of course, I could be projecting here. Perhaps it was I that snuck past the shame gargoyle with all my young curiosity. But I noticed that there was a lingering sense of people being cut off from their sexuality, instead opting to embrace spirituality in the name of a new age, whether it’s Krishna or just one’s higher self.

After having lived in the world of Jesus Christ and his devoted followers since infancy, it was clear to me after untangling my own conditioning that these people were essentially following the same dogma — they just had slapped another name onto it. I felt disillusioned — I thought this was my home, what I had been looking for, but now it looked just like the thing I had abandoned for the sake of my freedom.

Of course, I won’t say it was all like that. There were people practicing sacred sexuality and touch. The massage therapists became our holy people. As much as I liked to think of myself as a liberated person, I was still bogged down by shame, and I had many layers to go. What I was seeing in the world of hippies was my own inner world reflected to me in a myriad of fractals. I discovered, through the assistance of a powerful young healer who was still discovering their own power, my own desire to practice massage as a healing art form. The energy that emerged from my body was immense and intense. Waves of light and sound become perceptible to me at one point while I was deeply engaged in the practice of massage and truth-revealing. I learned that massage is a powerful tool to get someone to say what’s true and release the energy that is keeping them from it.

My desire to practice massage was deeply assuaged for a while after I was sent to a psych ward to deal with my shit because I had grown so far into my boundaryless self that the many worlds I had cultivated and kept separate became one. I had no marker or definition for what was appropriate or acceptable in any situation. This was as liberating to me as it was terrifying to those around me.

I found myself opened to worlds of creativity that I had never allowed myself to go before. I knew what colors my emotions were, and I was painting with a little boy who totally telepathically “got” where I was. I looked into a little girl’s eyes and I saw exactly what she felt. I jumped dimensions and landed into a different quantum universe than the one I had started in. By the time I was out, I was, altogether, a different person. The many separate worlds I had worked so long to cultivate now were completely gone. They had burned to ash and then grown so bright that there was nothing left of them.

I had my name, but I didn’t feel like a person. I found myself often thinking thoughts like, “Who am I? Where did I come from?” I didn’t know. I didn’t know why I was here, who I really was, or where I had come from. The memories from the past self seemed like they belonged to someone else. I couldn’t identify with any of them. I felt a pervasive sense of loss. It was so all-encompassing that everything in my life felt false. Any trust I had had slithered to the wayside. I was alone. There was a quality of gray flatness to all my experiences. I felt numb and so hungry I couldn’t even talk about it.

I learned, very gradually, that I needed to feel my grief for the loss of my self in order to let go and let a new self bloom. Something beautiful began to happen, but it was happening very slowly.

A things happened that changed who I thought I was into who I am: I became a vegan fruitarian and I travelled to Southeast Asia with a near-perfect stranger. There, the shame I had let billow around me like a fluffy dress began to be poked at, hard. I learned I could no longer live as if I was entitled to everything I wanted. There were certain limitations that I had to accept if I wanted to be a human being who lives as a part of this planet. I recognized my place as a member of the planet, not just all the separate worlds I had created.

I was blessed many times with gifts, food and money while travelling. I developed a sense of humility that had somehow left me along with my trust all those years before. I realized that everything someone gave me was a gift. Conversely, I recognized that while I felt I was entitled to things, I certainly didn’t believe I was worthy of them. I had built up the armor of being entitled to cover up for the fact that I didn’t think I was worth squat. My sense of receptivity as a power began to stir from its slumber, where it had grown docile and sleepy. I began to remember.

The remembrance brought forth with it a great shadow, the part of me that I didn’t see for such a long time that it was excruciatingly painful to become aware of it. I remembered I had sides, shades and different characters within myself who wanted different things and had different agendas for how to get what I needed. It became clear that I was attempting to get what I needed through subtle manipulation, because it was so difficult to ask when I was running on fumes from a place of disapproval for my own desire and a rejection of my worthiness.

Talk about a smack to the head for a New Age love and lighter. Everything I had spent the past few years cultivating on a mental level meant nothing in fact of actual experience. Well, that’s not true. I would say that the experience itself was a test to what I had believed. What came out with me, what lasted through the fire, was what was true. There was much less to my ego than what I had left with. I developed a sense of humility, humor and approval. I let myself go places I had never gone before, and I let myself feel good in places I always told myself was wrong previously. I felt more connected to my surroundings, and more powerful in influencing the people I was around.

The reason I was able to feel more powerful was because I had confronted my shame around my desire for power. I had let go of some of the stories I had about being good and anchored myself in my pleasure. I still had a lot of pride, I still do, but I let myself go to places that in the past would have humiliated me because I would have believed a story that said I was wrong for being there.

Shame around the desire for power is one of the most common things that blocks today’s witches and wizards from fully taking their life by storm and having what they desire. Let’s face it: we are perfect. We don’t have to go around telling everyone stories about our messed-up-ness and having them collude with us on how we should stay stuck, yep, it’s much better for us. No, yuck!

When we aren’t using our power with approval, we are using our power for something else. That is, namely, to keep ourselves small, invisible and safe. We do that by getting others to collude with us on our stories of how much we need to be fixed before we can step into who we truly are.

We don’t need to be fixed. We need to love ourselves. It’s much easier said than done, and as I tell you my story I’m thinking to myself, wow, I could never have “made” any of that happen. Do you see what I’m saying? I can’t control this journey. I never have. The times when I most thought I was in control, trying to make things happen, were the times when nothing was happening!

Just try it by sitting in meditation. If you start out trying to make something happen, anything happen, nothing happens, and you get really frustrated. It’s instinctual for us to go there, though, because that’s what we’ve been taught to do. Going into meditation with an openness, curiosity, and willingness for anything to happen isn’t exactly our instinct because that state of mind requires cultivation and practice.

It is how we were as little children. As we approached adolescence, we learned other ways of being and doing that helped us in our journey through the school system, which taught us to try hard, be the best, and focus on the future and what we needed to do to make what we wanted to happen, happen. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this and it has helped a ton of advancement and progression happen in our civilization that couldn’t have happened without it. What I’m saying is we need to remember the other way. We need to get back into balance and be able to operate from both places.

The root cause of the codependency so rampant in our culture may lie underneath this. It may be about how we are approaching our needs. If we approach our needs and desires with a “go get ‘em” attitude, we leave little room for exploration of what we need and want, and why. The space underneath our desires is ripe with possibility and when we approach it with curiosity, we may find out a lot about ourselves that we didn’t know.