Shame is the mind virus of our society, accidentally arrived at, as a result of tribal survival mentality designed to optimise for social cooperation.
If you inspect closely any modern virtue, any fear you have, beneath all the masks, you will encounter the parasite of shame.
Just Be Like This Today: “Fuck Shame”
This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.
(If you are reading this, perhaps take the time to listen to the embedded transcript instead. That way you can close your eyes perhaps and really let the work touch you.)
Once, you were completely held, by The Mother; Nature.
You were safe, warm, enclosed and held in a way that never asked of you first to be worthy or to have to deserve.
You were nourished in a way that never suffered need.
Your time was honoured and you were not hurried along or expected to be anything other than what you were, growing at your own pace, you were a season unto yourself, loved along that journey, and carried, and expected to do none of the carrying.
The question of being enough, or of being too much did not have language that could be spoken into your world. There was no guilt, no shame, no sin, no need to become.
The mother’s womb was your womb—you were whole and you belonged.
And then, you began to encounter discomfort, and the first alarms rang. It was the first whisper of being too much, and your womb was not enough and you were too much, in what became your first movement. And before you understood life, you had to face your first death. Birth is the first death. And you were ushered along towards what was the ending of the way you had been. And just before the very end, when you were being expelled through pain, and struggle, you felt the call.
Fear.
This was your first encounter with fear, it was your first waking up to being disconnected, the first rumours of what would later arrive as being alone. The first sense of there being something terribly urgent and demanding, your first invitation to being a ‘self’ and therefore alone in this world. It was your first arrival in a moment where you realised, I want to live, and this moment is asking something of me, and I am afraid. I am afraid that I will not be enough.
And everything you had, and the belonging that was yours, was taken away, and you knew then your first loss. This was your first wounding.
And you perhaps had to struggle to get here. Perhaps you were not wanted after all. And the brightness and the coldness on your skin and the first burning breath, of which you understood nothing, assailed you and introduced you in an unkind welcome, to surprise, to not knowing, and to a world of chaos to which you did not belong. Even the sound of your own cries was new, harsh and unlovely.
What trauma we face coming both out of that world and into this one. There was no other way you could have come. There was no other door. The gentle sage once said, “Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses the understanding.”
And now, as you arrive here, in this moment, searching for a way forward, again in a womb you have outgrown, answering a call, following the star, you are asked again to face another kind of death so that you can face a new birth. You are being ushered towards an undoing, an ending of the way you had been. The way that brought you here, and always had to break the shell of your understanding along the way.
You are waking up to a realisation of a deeper sense of self. You are stepping half-determinedly, half-reluctantly, into a moment that is asking something of you, and again you are afraid—afraid that the womb of your own sense of self will not be enough. You are uncertain of your own depths, having forgotten your wings, afraid of your own shadow, knowing not that it hides your power. You have let everything small and stern about the world clip your wings, and silence the voice of the child you once were, until, in the desperation to belong, you became party to your own jailing, complicit in your own neglect. And now you say to yourself “I am broken”. The warrior in you weeps, and the child in you bows their head in shame.
How did it come to this? You were innocent once. This moment is asking you to remember.
This moment will pass. You are awakening to a new understanding, of the necessities of seasons and endings—of deaths and rebirths. Like wheat, ripened by long days in the sun, to be cut down, in your prime and to be threshed, to free you from the husk of your own ignorance in what was always meant to be. You are the crowning emergence of this process.
You are the dreams and wordless imaginings of your ancient ancestors, you are their prayers answered. This is your journey. But there is nothing new here for you. The secrets this place once held have become stale and ordinary, the mysteries, shallow. You need to go forward again, as you once did without a map. And the thing that stands in your way, is your powerful reluctance to be unliked, unaccepted, unfollowed. You have to belong to your not belonging.
Sometimes you feel you are entitled to something without realising that entitlement always points to an underlying belief in victimhood. Sometimes you claim virtues and modesties outwardly which you do not really hold authentically within and you are dishonest about your true wants and your true vulnerabilities because you are afraid.
We are all afraid of each other; particularly of not being valued, of not being accepted, of not belonging. This is all that matters to us in the end. Underneath it all, we want to be assured that we are good, so that we can deserve —so that we can be enough and have enough— so that we can belong without shame. Shame is the ledger of poor choices that we have to submit to the clerks of our own higher self, as audited through the distorted lens of self-neglect. We are all ill with the uncertainty of it and all looking to each other for reassurance. We are ill with Shame.
No one else is coming. You must become the leadership, the grace, the shelter, the certainty that you are searching for everywhere outside yourself that you cannot find.
Fuck shame.
TODAY’S INVITATION
No One Else is Coming.
No one is coming to forgive you, to acclaim your worthiness or your worth. No one else is coming to accept that about you which you cannot accept about yourself. Equally, no one is coming to judge you either or tell you how you can or cannot feel. You are the crowning emergence of your own process.
Self-acceptance is not about being worthy by some universal standard; it is about becoming your own worthy leader precisely because no one else is coming. We are all imperfect. And all any of us can do is commit to the code that says “As soon as I know better, I do better.” You start from where you are with what you have.
Accept the paradox of yourself. You did not architect your gifts and talents, and you did not engineer your flaws and failings. Just be like this today: “Today I am honouring the costs and mistakes I made; they remain part of me, as lessons, not as sins. Today I am saying Fuck Shame.”
I’ve listened to this one quite a few times. Thank you for this!
Thanks Rocco. The more I think about this post, the more I find webs of shame throughout my soul, coming up in often unnoticed or unexpected ways. Unwinding that web bit by bit 🙏