How I Heal My Shame

“This, too, belongs,” a mantra I learned years ago from the beloved Tara Brach, has become a staple for me because for a very long time I lived with the fear that deep-down, beneath my achievements and appearances and the ostensible testimony of motherhood, sisterhood, and partnership, I was truly—and terribly—flawed.

From my earliest days I carried this “knowing” inside as a secret I was meant to both hide and protect— like Daisy the Duck, the soft stuffed friend I’d smuggle to school in my lunchbox after emptying the food my mother had packed, or the thumb-sucking I did lonnnng past the time it was deemed okay.

I felt divided: light-filled on the outside, a thorn of wrongness so dark as to make me, simply, bad—way down on the inside.

It wasn’t until well into my adulthood that I learned the name for my secret is shame. As is always the case, we create circumstances that become evidence of our unconscious/conscious beliefs—opportunities to see, and heal, what resides within.

I created such a mirror in a very painful romantic relationship (not my ex-husband), one I went back to over and over until I hit rock-bottom, when my healing journey took root in earnest.

Though by this time I was a seasoned practitioner of meditation and yoga, and had been in therapy for years, I hadn’t yet fully learned that what I needed most was to turn with open eyes and arms to the part of me inside that I both feared and fetishized.

“This, too, belongs” became the practice that radicalized my relation to Self.

As I widened the circle of my self-acceptance, I saw that “the part of me” I’d feared wasn’t a “part” at all: the “thing” I thought I carried within was simply the spine of my heart, curled around itself in a posture of self-protection.

But self-protection is the opposite of self-acceptance, a distortion of self-love.

As I learned to “let it belong”—my feelings of shame, fear, not-enough and too-much—what I found, in time, was not defeat or annihilation, but the opposite: access to true inner peace, and a growing recognition of my own inherent divinity,  of an almost unbearable Love—for myself, for others, for the world, for Life, for God … for the exquisiteness of being alive.

This is why radical self-acceptance—facing, embracing, and falling in love with one’s whole humanity—is my primary practice, in my own life, and when guiding others.

This, too, belongs.

I invite you to pause, right now, and say this mantra out loud to yourself, or whisper it softly. Really take it in--let your body feel it. You might locate a point of tension—emotional, spiritual, physical—and allow this mantra to touch it, like a loving hand on the shoulder, or a look of understanding and solidarity.  

Notice your breathing, your body. Maybe your exhale deepens. Maybe you sigh. Maybe a weight falls off your back.

What do you feel?

I think many of us are afraid to “let it belong” because we think we’ll be condoning or acquiescing to something we don’t like—about ourselves, another, or the world. We believe that resistance, as a posture of protest, is the first step towards making change.

But what we resist, persists.

Clichéd, but true.

Resistance keeps us self-divided, not unified.

When we make space for whatever it is we’ve been resisting, the thing has a way of softening—it no longer has to clamor for attention. Sometimes, this softening is all that’s needed for the painful emotion or belief to dissolve.

Whatever you may be feeling right now—grief, anger, sadness, peace, joy, ecstasy—my prayer is that you let it belong. That you widen your own embrace as you would for a loved one, and make space for more of you, within …

That you exhale …

That you trust …

You are worthy. You are whole. You are loved.

Thank you for being here, for growing and learning and loving together.