Brené Brown tells us that, “Vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it’s also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love.” To truly feel loved, we must expose our vulnerabilities, woundedness, and shame. Otherwise, whatever love we receive from ourselves, or others, will not really touch or penetrate the deepest parts of us. We will continue to hold ourselves back from love, refusing to expose ourselves emotionally, still believing that some parts of us are unlovable no matter what. To unburden ourselves from the darkness of shame into the light of love and belonging, we need to commit ourselves to facing the truth. We need to look in the eye of what's hiding in the dark closets in our psyche. To free ourselves, we must enslave ourselves as servants to truth, as reality supports the truth. Thus, truth can walk the world naked, unarmed, and unharmed. Committed to truth, we can reveal our shame and our sins to ourselves and others, whereby we gain acceptance, forgiveness, love, and liberation.
By delving into our deficiencies, we find our completeness. Shining the light of awareness on the dark, we discover our sacred spark. And surrendering to let our shame be, we recover the power of our essential being, a non-egoic being that is grounded in the source of Being itself. Hence, by diving into the shadowed and shameful places of our manhood, we can recover the brilliancy of our divine masculinity. Such masculinity envisions, cares, and acts with the greater good in mind. Such masculinity harmonizes and channels the powerful energies of sex and our life force with and through our hearts, whereby we can liberate our sexuality from the darkness of shame and into the radiance of love.
Perhaps the “sinner” in us who wants to disappear is our egoic self that feels separate from its source—an ego that is inherently fragile and in need of constant shoring up. It is this separate egoic self which is at the root of our transgressions and violence, sexual and otherwise. It is this egoic self that needs to be softened, dis-identified from, and removed from the driver’s seat of our lives. Indeed, several spiritual teachers and traditions see our ego as a defensive structure formed to protect us from our own vulnerability and inner senses of shame and deficiency.(18) (19) It is through our intimacy with this shame that we liberate the true potency and dignity of our living being, which is beyond good or bad, shame or blame.
Continue reading: 13: References
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References:
18. The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being: An Object Relations Approach by A.H. Almaas (1988). Boston, MA: Shambhala.
19. Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism by David Loy (2018). Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications.