After studying the energy of shame for many years now, one thing has become abundantly clear: shame alters your safety signals in your body.
So how do you find safety outside of its reflection?
This is a huge question that comes up for me, because it's one thing to see shame energetically, shift its frequency within each of the Realms, and create a new and different mirror for you. Et voila.
It's a whole other thing for that mirror to feel safe.
A few realities about shame
Aside from being an energy that we embody, it's a social device often deployed to shift and change behavior. That isn't in and of itself isn't a bad thing.
It is often, but not always, coupled with trauma. Sometimes we experience shame because of our trauma, othertimes we experience trauma because of how we were shamed.
These lead me to understand shame's impact on our social nervous system, or social engagement system.
The social nervous system is a neurobiological framework that describes how humans and other mammals use social interactions to regulate their physiological state and manage stress. It's primarily governed by the ventral vagal complex (VVC), i.e. the vagus nerve.
In other words, shame changes how we perceive safety outside of ourselves, how our body feels in response to that, and how we create and navigate safety and belonging because of it.
This energy transforms how you move through the world, the decisions you make, how you find belonging, what or who feels safe to you, and so much more.
So of course, if we're going to move through your Embodied Realms and release the energy of shame, we have to be aware that it is the basis of a lot of your conscious and unconscious decisions. Releasing it is a big forking deal.
You body knows the pace that feels safe
The Shame Sessions are meant to be engaged with again and again. This is on purpose, and it's because your body will only take you as deep as it's ready to go, and will only release what feels safe each time.
This lets your integration of the work move from your inner world to your outer world in a soft way.
My experience with this has been...interesting. And has truly changed my perception of myself and what I'm capable of.
I always assumed myself to be introverted, shy, easily overstimulated by people. A joiner when I felt like it, not a leader.
As I released the energy of shame and worked with my social engagement system, I suddenly found myself doing things like:
- making bouquets of flowers for neighbors I've never met, walking up their driveways, knocking on their doors, and introducing myself.
- organizing a neighbor dinner at our local vineyard
- wanting to host a block party in our field
- finding various ways to make money that suddenly felt safe
- talking about things that I used to worry would get me ostracized
- un-enmeshing as the parentified child
- realizing staying was just as safe as running always felt
And it's not because I released all the shame I had embodied and suddenly everything that once felt scary felt safe.
It's because I tried something small, my nervous system could handle it, and then I could try again in a bigger way.
There was no distorted mirror of shame saying something like "all of your neighbors now think you're a weirdo because who randomly brings people they don't know flowers?! OMG you're such an idiot!!"
A mirror for what's possible
I'm not a big fan of pointing to myself and saying "see, I did this, you can, too!" because I know that each of us will have our own experience with releasing shame.
But what I want to reflect for you is this: there distorted mirror that used to convince me that I didn't belong, that I had to act a certain way to be accepted, that my ideas were too big and wild and "made up"...those are quieter now. Not gone for good, but they've been replaced with the steadiness of trying, of feeling, of allowing safety to return one step at a time, and seeing myself truthfully in what unfolds.
This is what I want for you, too: the chance to meet shame as an energy you can release, not as an identity of who you are. To reclaim your own signals of safety and belonging.
That’s where we'll venture together in the Shame Sessions. Two live immersions where your body leads, your Realms release what they’re ready to, and your nervous system learns it is safe to belong to yourself again.
In service of clear mirrors,
Ash