The Shame Of Separateness

This follows on from my previous post today called “Innocence”.

There is a certain kind of feeling that many of us carry, but few of us name. It isn’t anger. It isn’t fear. It sits quietly, like a dull heaviness in the chest or gut, a kind of dead weight that lingers beneath the surface of daily life. You might not even know what it is. You might call it tiredness or numbness. But it could be shame.

And not the obvious kind. Not the shame that comes from doing something ‘wrong’ in plain sight. This is something subtler, older. A more ambient shame. The kind that begins to block your natural innocence.

When I speak of innocence, I don’t mean naivety. I mean something essential. A natural, embodied state of openness. The way we may have once moved, related, existed before we learned to monitor and mistrust ourselves. (See previous post). Shame, when embodied, begins to corrode this innocence. It becomes like a fog sitting between you and the world. You start to retreat from life. You start to self-regulate in ways that are painful, though you may not realise you’re doing it.

This can show up in the body. The physical, energetic innocence of being in and expressing your body freely can become laced with disgust or discomfort. You might become overly self-conscious, turning on yourself with body shaming, sexual shaming, or even subtle forms of bodily self-harm. Not always in dramatic ways. Sometimes it’s simply a refusal to nourish or honour your body. Sometimes it's the urge to use physical pain, consciously or unconsciously, as a distraction from the deeper ache of existential isolation. A kind of inverted wholeness. A way to feel something, anything, instead of the emptiness.

In relationships, shame often strangles emotional intimacy. Here it takes the form of mental self-consciousness. You compare. You envy. You attach. You blame. You project. You other. You guilt-trip or sabotage connections that feel too close or too vulnerable. And again, it’s about control. Another kind of distraction from the unbearable quiet of existential loneliness. Another inverted wholeness. Instead of letting love be simple, you make it complex, because complexity feels safer than surrender.

And then, deeper still, there is existential innocence. The innocence of being itself. The quiet knowing of yourself as the whole. Shame, at its root, is the voice that whispers: I am separate. I am wrong. I am a sinner. It’s the shame that doesn’t just say you made a mistake, but that you are a mistake. This belief in separateness is the root wound. The idea of a fixed, broken self,the ‘I’ that must work to become good or whole, is the greatest illusion. It is the ultimate block to oneness. This is the shame that keeps you from remembering your original state.

So, are you ashamed of being a separate self?

It’s not a question you need to answer quickly. It’s one to sit with. To breathe into. If you need help, reach out. The mind that believes itself to be a separate self is often so very hard on itself in its need to control. Even facing shame can bring great discomfort. It's not shame to ask for it. Its wisdom.

Notice where you feel dull, heavy, closed. Not because you need to fix it, but because the noticing itself can begin to soften the shame that might feel like a frozen iceberg lodged in your life. In the light of the sun of your wholeness, even this iceberg can begin to melt.

The key is to sincerely experience that wholeness. Then the sun of it will do its work to melt the iceberg of shame.

With love,

Freyja