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Break through Shame

Break through Shame!

If you are like me, you spend more amount of energy pushing away what you don’t want in your life. After all, if what we focus on expands, then we certainly don’t want to focus on “negative energy” like shame, anger, jealousy or pain, do we?? Well, in order to break through shame, we actually have to face it and integrate it.

What I have learned about shame is that it is a wake up call to check my conditioned patterning and habits. You see, I believe that there are spiritual practices that bring us closer to the Divine (yay!) AND that we also need to do the work of being here in these bodies with all of our mental and emotional conditioning.

So, the Spiritual Response Therapy I do helps to clear and release blocks and past life trauma that might be holding patterns in place, and then we still have to deal with changing our conscious mind beliefs, thoughts and our emotional patterning that results from those beliefs and thoughts.

I believe that shame is a emotional response pattern that has been adapted to keep us safe. When we were little and we did something that incurred the “wrath” of our caregivers, we learned that it was safer to get small and go into shame (among other patterns) than it was to go “big” and get angry, or go into righteous indignation for being mistreated. Because we were too young to fully take care of ourselves, we felt shame as a way to get back into the good graces of our parents and other authority figures.

As we know, conditioned thought and emotional patterns create “grooves” in our brain. The same neurons fire in the same way to create the same emotional patterns from given stimuli.  So, now when our romantic partner, co-worker or friend is disappointed or upset with us, we still go into shame as a way of staying safe.

Shame may not be where you want to go any longer. You may be ready to break through shame and not let it run you any more. This is where your reworking of your emotional patterns begins. To re-wire your brain neurons you have to activate your neo-cortex thinking brain and get some perspective from your feeling brain (or emotions).

Here are some questions that can help:

  • What happened? (the data without your emotional charge)
  • What was my response to what happened?
  • Is there any other response I could have had?
  • When I go into shame, what do I GET from that?
  • Where else can I go besides shame?
  • How can I change this pattern or “push back” against shame so that I can do something different?

The goal is not to put shame into shadow, but rather to choose who runs the show.  Another tool we could use here would be Voice Dialogue. In Voice Dialogue we get into relationship with our different parts and let them speak. So, we might actually choose to talk to shame and see what it needs. We can then get some distance and perspective from shame so that we can integrate shame and take care of the needs of that part of ourselves. I love Voice Dialogue, and it is a very powerful tool to get our observers online and integrate different parts of ourselves.

Mark and I love to integrate various tools such as Voice Dialogue, Coaching, Shadow Coaching Nature-based coaching and Spiritual Response Therapy. Please let us know if we can support you in your journey towards Soul Actualization!

Blessings,

Jeannie