Visitations

 

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Rilke

 

I erupted in a rash of shame a few weeks ago.  Someone complained about me at work, about the quality of my work. It is hard to write this without feeling ashamed again.  In shame, I feel queasiness in my gut and pressure on my chest.  I scramble to figure out how to protect myself from this awful vulnerability.  On high alert, my brain tightens and perspective narrows as I focus incessantly on how to defend myself from this existential threat.  This all happens in a matter of minutes during the phone conversation where I am asked to explain myself, defend myself, when I don’t even know what I did wrong, who was offended and why. 

 

This shame from criticism at work has accompanied me through life but passes more easily now than it did in the past.  Before, resonance from the shame would linger for weeks if not months making it hard for me to concentrate and sapping me of energy and joy.  Shame made me fearful of making yet another mistake which led to further sapping of joy and the possibility for creativity.  I wished I could quit rather than face the exposure of more shame, find a way to make a living where I didn’t have to work with people.  Sheep farming seemed like a good alternative. 

 

In yoga philosophy, this kind of strong and outsized response to events are rooted in samskaras deep psychological imprints that come from past events or even other lives. Jungian philosophers call these forces complexes, thick webs of energy spun from prior traumatizing events that remain stuck in the black holes of our unconscious until a situation pricks them from their slumber.  You can be sure a samskara or complex is at work when you don’t understand why you are overreacting to something you know should not make you feel so bad or angry or afraid.  It can take a long time to be able to see this threat from a different perspective and yoga helps.  Asana strengthens the nerves so they can bear a heavier load letting fear flow out more quickly before it gets pulled into the vortex of the unconscious complex making it stronger.  With more physical space the lungs and heart have a chance to aerate a shock to the system. The self-regulating body more readily flushes the toxic aftereffects of shame out of the body/mind.

 

This time something unexpected occurred.  Instead of feeling anger towards co-workers and managers who had made things so difficult for me, I realized that it wasn’t them but me who had brought shame to the table.  For all I know, they only wanted to figure out a way to do our work better or maybe someone was just having a bad day of shame themselves and needed an outlet.  In any case, the shame came from me. More remarkably, I saw the shame not as a terrorizing demon but as a visitation from a long-lost part of myself, a part who longed to be known by me.  She came bearing great gifts, special powers and secret maps that I need for this part of my journey. Without the incident at work and the rising up of shame, this precious part of myself and her gifts would have remained unknown to me.