Asking for healing shame
Created on 11/16/2008
I want you to follow me back to your room in the Cliffhouse. It is not going to be an exercise in guided imagination or visionary suggestion. It is going to be more about identifying a piece of collective experience that is uniquely yours because it wouldn’t manifest without you. I invite you to follow my words as you continue reading, so my words become a key to your own unique room inside the Cliffhouse which is made only for you and which will be there whenever you are ready to visit it. It doesn’t have to be today. You can just stop reading and turn the page and go somewhere else. Or you can stay focused on taking this key that I offer you now to your room in the Cliffhouse and start opening the door.
Welcome again.
Everything here is made out of a substance that is way more responsive to your intention than anything outside of this room. As I tell you more of what I want to share, you may leave it up to your room to shape itself in a way that best fits your visit today.
And you know that when I say room, I mean it very differently from any external spaces you have known. That’s why I say that imagination doesn’t matter. What matters is the feeling of being inside a part of yourself that is always there, the part that we call your room in the Cliffhouse, where you are always welcome. As before, I leave it up to you to fill this space with the furniture, pictures, and memorabilia of your choice. You can choose sounds that you would like to hear in your room, or keep your silence. It doesn’t matter how destructive your environment may be as you’re reading, as long as you’re reading, your room in the Cliffhouse is taking shape.
I chose to talk to you about shame because it is one of the original wounds that brings about all other bad feelings which stick to shame, glued by what shame does best – denial. And because we are a multitude of narratives and our complexity is not contained in any one storyline of the narrative but in the way the stories of our lives intertwine with each other and in their invisible hierarchy, shame and its accomplice, denial, can play with us like a cat with a half-dead mouse. We go through therapy, we try to become aware of our hidden traumas and heal them to break free, but sooner or later something always finds its way back to put us down. This is because most of the time, the healing, the therapy, and the realization it brings applies to the storyline as we know it. Meanwhile, the story of ourselves is just one thread in the fabric of us. But there are many other threads that are like luminous fibers vibrating, interacting, merging and separating as our experience continues to accumulate. And the Memorymaker is the one who creates this web of stories and who knows the entire pattern of our life before it starts. When we want to make a change outside the box we have to go back to the Memorymaker and ask for the transformation. And that is why you are back in your Cliffhouse room, so you can reach your Memorymaker in the most direct way. Please don’t ask me what the Memorymaker means. I wouldn’t be able to tell you because any description will push us to identify with only a limited field of familiar associations and we will be stuck at the far end of one thread of one storyline. We need to go to the core. Check how your room feels now. Find a place where you can rest comfortably, visualize any details that you may like here or just stay relaxed and focused within because this space is well known to you. It is known to you from those moments in childhood when perception was so fresh and memory so vivid and when you knew exactly who you were and life made complete sense. A child. As you were, and as you still are, safe and protected in this space and full of creative force which can take your life into any direction. Just remember the feeling and let me tell you a story.
When I was working on this blog, I knew that I could only do it for you if it worked for me, and when I thought about shame and all its associations, there was so much that I wanted to share with you to help you break free from shame’s prison. Yet, it was all words and then more words and more. And then I stopped and asked myself: what is the first response that I have when I say shame? The answer was strikingly surprising. I certainly had my share of memories that could easily compete for being the symbol of shameful moments. None of those memories came up. The answer was – dying. But it hit right on. And as I followed the feeling, a huge space inside opened up, the space occupied by shame and veiled from my memory by denial for years.
My father died when I was ten years old. He died suddenly from a heart attack in the middle of the night. I was there along with my mother, the paramedics, my grandmother, and my aunt from my dad’s side who all rushed to his side that night. It took place in a small apartment in Siberia where my family lived. It was a cold winter and when the icy morning arrived it was all over, the room looked gray, and the drama and intensity of trying to save his life turned into a mechanical preparation for the funeral. Suddenly, the apartment was full of people who seemed in charge of this business, the news of his death traveled fast and literally hundreds of my father’s friends wanted to be there to help. It was easy to escape. I put on my winter coat, took the wool mittens and walked outside. I remember everything in great detail. I traveled by tram to the local Dom Cultury (the House of Culture). I wandered around its marble columns, I looked at the gray sky that seemed inexhaustible in producing the endless wet snow coming down, like a blanket covering my street, my entire city. My father was there. I just remember the feeling of peace and awareness as I walked outside and looked through the windows of the library where people sat in silence with rows of green desk lamps already lit early in the afternoon, everyone immersed into reading something important it seemed. I knew I had to go back to my apartment and be part of what was supposed to happen, yet I tried to prolong this time of being completely alone, on a Siberian winter afternoon. A child who had just lost her father but knew very well that it was okay because life still made sense through the taste of the snow on my mittens as I touched them with my tongue to feel how cold it was. It was cold and pure and I still remember that taste and the sense of awareness and my father’s presence with me which didn’t require any explanations. It just was.
It all changed as I came back. The mechanical nature for the funeral ended and it seemed that everybody was adjusting to the loss by their own means. Life gradually moved on. The shame part came a week after the funeral when I went back to school, to my third grade class. By that time, I was already used to all these adults looking compassionately at me, yet attentively as if they were somehow evaluating me. I knew how to behave, I told them exactly what I thought they expected from me but my sense of self was still at peace and intact. That changed when I walked into my class a week later. All the kids were looking at me with the look I knew well but had never received before. Ready to strike, to hurt and to observe the pain they caused. The same way they looked at a boy who stuttered, waiting for him to get nervous so they could start mocking cheerfully the words that were stuck in his mouth and then watch him cry. I guess his inability to talk gave them a sense of power somehow. So did my father’s death, apparently. I was the first child to loose a parent at this young of an age, my father’s death was kind of a stuttering, something that made me so different and maybe even threatening that it had to be ridiculed. And it was. I don’t remember the jokes the kids in my class made, I remember the flashes of joy and power in their eyes as they were mocking me and saying I was now an orphan, trying to say it before the teacher came back since they knew she would be furious. I felt ashamed that my father had died. The shame crawled under my skin to stay there for years masked by denial as I tried to play it down pretending that it wasn’t a big deal so the kids would leave me alone. So eventually they did and I tasted the power of denial which replaced the power of awareness. We pretend and deny at the demand of people, and as we do that the door closes to the space where we know ourselves and where we accept ourselves, completely and unconditionally. But as I remembered today that taste of snow on my mittens from so many years ago it felt as if the door re-opened and the entire space hidden behind the shame of that experience returned and my father is still here with me but the shame is gone and I don't have to pretend any more. And I thank you for staying with me through this story and I want you to remember that you are here to create a space inside where the feeling of shame can be dissolved. And there is nothing you have to try, just let it be. The external doesn’t matter. Your state of mind does. And everything I wrote for you so far serves to facilitate you entering a state of mind from where miracles can start happening. And because we are all connected, I know that my story will safely accelerate something in you that will help you find the part of your story that holds the key to healing shame in your life. And as you stay in this room, I want to ask your Memorymaker to bring you healing from shame in the safest and most direct way possible. I want you to ask yourself what is the first response that comes to mind when you say shame and just notice it and let your Memorymaker work it out for you. The original shame is usually hidden in the backside of the life story that is not even relevant in the present, but it continues to affect the web of your experience. I don’t know in what shape and form the Memorymaker is going to answer you, I don’t know how soon or how late. But I know that one day after the answer comes to you through an unexpected memory, a dream, an unusual meeting or situation, you will feel light and happy again as if the space opens up in you and you will see the sky which will mirror your state of mind and at that moment life will make complete sense again as you remember it from being a child.
Until then,
Love and sweet dreams,
Olga.
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