Shame is Not Your Name

We all live arrested to incidents, they shackle us. Building a small prison around ourselves that keeps us from anything that suggests our worthiness. We seek out people and experiences to punish ourselves and affirm what we already know, we are unworthy and something is wrong with us.

Shame becomes our name and it becomes exhausting to unravel our identity from what we have conditioned to be true. The two identities become so intertwined it’s difficult to distinguish one from the other. We morph into our new identity and when we look at ourselves, we see ugliness, we may have a deep sense that it’s not ours, thus we try to drown it, needle it, eat it, swallow it and yet the only way to depart is to call it by its’ name, to relinquish the control of this identity and exercise compassion to ourselves and become compassionate witnesses.