03/04/2022
"Shame impacts our capacity to self-realize; not only our deepest spiritual selves, but our dreams and goals, sense of feeling we belong in the web of life, ability to take responsibility for our choices and actions, as well as setting boundaries, giving and receiving love, and even taking a strong stand in protection of our own well-being.
While the mind may translate shame into thoughts of badness, wrongness, unworthiness, not enoughness, feeling alien or lack of ability, the experience of shame is relational and is a deeply held in the body.
We forget that it is our body that is living, breathing and having all of the experiences we have in our lives.
It registers all our disappointments and joys, losses and betrayals, cultural conditioning, successes and breakthroughs, and more.
Anything we haven't metabolized or been given an opportunity to make sense of is stored in the body. Our body is living in relationship with all of life, it is our body that feels the impact of our lives.
These unmetabolized experiences eventually calcify into an identity and a habitual way of relating that either pulls us into cycles that validate our unworthiness or have us running away from cycles that want to reflect our deep worthiness to us.
Here we have the roots of the codependent cycle of relating there so many names for.
These are splits in the psyche represented in the ways we defend ourselves against the deep shame we feel in our bodies that often translate into intimacy and love not being safe.
Codependent patterns seek to achieve safety, but when there is this level of fear and defensiveness, there is no real place for love and connection to live.
The felt sense of shame can be something like grief and fear living in our hearts and bellies, the tightening of our hips or the gripping of our entire bodies when we feel we have done something wrong.
Shame is the grief of not having been loved; whatever this lack of love was for us in our early years, which is different for each of us.
Yet, it is at the root a failed attunement and honoring of some core aspect of self we sensed wasn't acceptable, wanted or recognized, all of which are healthy, normal needs we have has humans in all our relating.
This happens not only at home, but also as our culture conditions us in what is acceptable, how we should perform, what to think and what love "looks" like rather than how it feels. Our culture dreams shame into us as much as we inherit it from our ancestors.
This has been going on for FAR too long.
But, I digress...
These experiences form a groove of fear unconsciously connected to love, because when parts of our self feel rejected, we begin to subtly feel afraid of those we love and rely on for care, not to mention ourselves.
Shame is also the fear of not ever being loved or knowing love in the future.
When grief calcifies, it can get turned in on the self and also projected into the future, becoming a form of anxiety that is more of a map of what already happened in the past.
If we can learn to read this map, we can liberate ourselves of the heartbreak we experienced so we have more spaciousness and openness to the potentiality of a new experience in the future.
This experience of grief and fear can feel raw, tender and scary...like anxiety that we can't quite place...because we simply don't feel safe.
In shame, we often unconsciously learn to associate love with fear and grief, so when we encounter love, this deep shame awakens and if we don't have the language for it or the space to acknowledge it, we start to act from this place in our lives, projecting so much onto others, ourselves or the future because we simply don't know how to feel safe, believe that it is safe to be loved or that life is holding us with benevolent care.
This basic safety is a necessary ingredient in being able to self-actualize our selves in our own innate goodness, as well as in accomplishing our goals, acting on our visions and intuition, creating from our genius, allowing inspiration to fuel and move us, accepting provisioning from life, setting boundaries and acting in the service goodness for self, others and the world.
We need it for boundaries too, as well as for commitment in order to dance in the realms of safety and freedom (within ourselves, others and life itself).
The fire of this new season reminds us of the power of our capacity to self-realize.
Aries holds a mirror for us of our relationship to the masculine, the archetypal father, who shows us the direction in which to move with determination to create a flourishing, loving, provisioned and happy life for ourselves.
This energy is the warrior who teaches us what it is to be responsible and care for our own hearts, the earth, the archetypal feminine within us, to serve our deepest visions and gifts and to truly love and be happy.
The warrior protects what needs to be protected so that good can flourish.
This new moon gives us pause, so close to Chiron, the maverick, the guide, the mentor, the wounded healer and the wayshower of ancestral healing, to take stock of what gets in the way of our capacity to take action with integrity, to self-actualize and realize our dreams, happiness and flourishing...our truest gifts for those who come after us.
We are stepping into a new season that asks us to look at the foundation from which we are moving and acting from before we set intentions.
It is asking us to look at our wounds as teachers and guides of how to do better, take responsibility and root into what matters the most in our heart of hearts.
What we most deeply desire matters.
It is the compass of Eros guiding us towards our liberation.
So, we must ask if our foundations are reaction to these old grooves of indoctrinated shame or in response to something deeper and more true.
May the fire of Aries burn away that which keeps us from living in the truth of our hearts.
May we plant the seeds of our intentions in loving soil.
May our earthly wounds be transmuted into the beauty of our true forms so that we may realize our greatest good and open the way for the highest forms of what is meant for us.
More love.
Not less."
words by Mia Hetenyi
artwork by Alessia Lannetti
