The Sweet Nectar of Shame
El Dulce Néctar de la Vergüenza
A question about the slow dissolving of resistance to painful experience, particularly anxiety and shame, and how the creator knows itself through every texture of human feeling.
The Sweet Nectar of Shame
A question about the slow dissolving of resistance to painful experience, particularly anxiety and shame, and how the creator knows itself through every texture of human feeling.
I wanted to pick up on what you were talking about with the previous student, because it really resonates with me. Specifically this trust in pain. Even though it feels like there's no one really choosing anymore, no picking and choosing of experience, it still feels like it's happening. It still feels like there's this, I would say, frustratingly slow melting of resistance to pain. There are things I would have strongly resisted earlier on this path that I no longer do, but there's still a lack of trust in experience, a picking and choosing. If there is pain, especially mentally created, story-based pain, and I find myself identified, there's a real reaction to the suffering that causes. When you were talking about pain as being loved in, something really resonated with me. There's still in me a strong preference, a strong "no" toward aversive experience. I do better with sadness and vulnerability. But anxiety and worry really bring out strategies in me that want to change the experience.
The difference between fear and pain
Anxiety and worry are about pain. They aren't the pain itself that I'm referring to. I'm not talking about how to relate to fear. I'm talking about how to relate to what the fear is about. Anxiety and worry are fear, and they're about pain.
Right. There's fear of pain. All fear is fear of pain.
It's only ever a fear of pain. So what is it? You said you're okay with sadness but not so much with worry and anxiety. But worry and anxiety about what?
I'll give you an example. Something that comes up for me is working with people in my practice and being afraid they're going to find what we're doing unhelpful. Then they'll leave, and all my patients will leave, and I'll be broke. That fear makes me want to control things, to help more, to do more. I notice it happening, and I try to let go of it, but it produces this whole thing in me that's so frustrating.
Shame as the core pain
I think there are two things you're talking about. One has to do with the image of self, so perhaps shame. Shame around failing as a professional in a case of care. Then, tied to that, financial failure, which also carries a lot of shame.
Being financially unwell is usually temporary. You lose, and then you have to work and figure something out. But it's that period where you've failed. There's the image of failing and being known as failing because of your clients. That's shame. And then there is the experience of having failed financially, and the pain I can imagine there is also shame. So my sense is the pain you're talking about is shame.
Yes, that resonates. I feel it as we're talking about it, that sense of shame. It detaches from the actual thing about my clients and my practice and goes into shame itself. Deep shame.
Exactly. And the way you've been coping with shame is by turning it into a strategy. How do you avoid shame? By becoming a good professional, by succeeding. But now that you're in the game, you're always at risk of falling and losing, and there you'll meet the very thing you've been avoiding and running away from.
Yes, it's a strategy.
Tasting the texture of shame
So the texture here is shame. How does it appear? How can you directly know it and taste it, and also discover the sweet nectar of shame?
The sweet nectar of feeling flushed and embarrassed. Right.
Think of it this way. What if you are God? Literally, not some image of God. You are the creator. That's really what we're talking about. The creator. And you have created this universe, this appearance, and this particular human being, so that you, the creator, can know shame only in the way this one human being can know it. Through this body-mind, knowing the human experience of shame through this exact perspective.
What a treasure: the creator can know shame and all of its complexity, challenge, and sweetness through this one appearance that has never happened before and will never happen again. This perspective, right now. Not the idea of you, but you, literally.
From that perspective, shame is no longer just shame. It's a miraculous appearance. And it's not only shame; it's everything. It is the knowing of the human experience.
The mandala of experience
From that perspective, shame starts to look like treasure. Taste this treasure. And then the other pains, the fear of it, the reaction and rejection of it, the inability to sit with it from such a young age, something that has been known since you can remember as the thing you could not be with. All of that is a miraculous creation. What a privilege to be able to know that as you and through you.
We talk about all the stars and planets and galaxies in the universe, how many there are, how unique they are, how they come and go over billions of years. To think of just this moment, knowing this moment through and as you, through the perspective that you know this: it will never happen again. It has never happened before in billions of years. It will never happen again.
There's a sacredness to it when you put it that way. It's much different.
And that which knows this through and as you: this is a miracle, and it must be savored totally, completely. You don't want to miss a thing. It's like a sand mandala. It's gone, never to be seen again. Don't miss it. Don't blink.
The whole thing of avoiding it is so much worse than the feeling itself.
The avoidance is also the creation
The whole of avoiding it is also part of that experiencing. It's part of the whole dance. The knowing of the avoidance, the knowing of the human mind struggling with this, the struggle to be with it: all of that is a deep, rich, human, divine, sacred experience. And then the wanting to know it more deeply, the wanting to see through it, the wanting to wake up and taste it fully. And then the tasting of it, and then the running away, and then the tasting again and the running again. The striving, the work, the struggle, the fear, the stress. And then at some point, boom: you can know the shame directly. You can discover the depth of where it comes from, what it's about. Then it's self-knowing self, rediscovering itself. Creation creating.
There's no escape from anything. It's all exactly the way it is. It's just so hard to get past the judgment of it, the choosing, the preference of one thing over another.
And that thing that's hard, what you're describing, that's part of what's being created by the creator, to know exactly that. That's part of the textures in the mandala: to know how it feels to avoid and struggle. Until at some point, the creator will create knowing directly. And this is you.
What do you mean when you say the creator will create knowing directly?
I'm saying you. What you truly are, call it consciousness, call it any of these different names. The creator will create knowing directly, rather than the avoiding, because that is what will be desired, what will be willed by you.
The avoidance has this engine to it, this mechanism.
It has a flavor to it, and it keeps being created and appreciated by itself. The rejection of it, the experience of non-appreciation, is the very texture being created and appreciated. But the appreciation of it needs to be forgotten, put out of the picture, for the non-appreciation of it, the rejection of it, to be known as truly rejection and non-appreciation.