Shame
After an extraordinary and intense experience of writing non-stop over the first seven months of this year, often while traveling, and often in snatched hours between all the other commitments of my life, I am very happy to announce that the fifty two new essays that make up Consolations II, are now available for pre-order on Amazon and at www.davidwhyte.com. Readers in the UK can find local book-sellers and details on the book launch tour here.
This Saturday, October 26th, in Santa Monica, California, I will be exploring some of the new essays in Consolations II. This live, in-person talk ‘Sex, Shame and Death’ will look at ‘Shame’ in particular, not as a negative dynamic but as the chief foundation and driver of our maturation - both psychologically and spiritually. Find out more and register to attend the in-person event here.
Shame is the inverse measure of our ability to incarnate fully into our bodies and the vast overwhelming, and astonishing, tidal body of the world.
SHAME
is nothing to be shameful about. Shame is the very physical, heartrending, painful measure of the way we hide from life and from others because we do not feel equal to the astonishing nature of what we meet. Shame calibrates all the ways, great and small, that we don’t measure up: and therefore shame secretly affects even the outwardly shameless and is the core human driver of all human maturation.
Shame outlines exactly the ways we feel inadequate and unequal to life and exactly the nature and place of our hiding. Shame provides us, generously and on a daily basis, with the invitation to understand all the ways we do not wish or do not deserve to be seen, to be touched or to be invited to join the extraordinary dance of the world: shame tells us instantly all the ways we desire to meet but dare not meet, all the ways we are desperate to play but do not play; all the ways we desire to sing but do not sing. Shame tells us all the ways we long for real change but do not feel worthy of the transformation that change brings, and all the ways we deeply desire to be enlivened or to feel pleasure in the extraordinary miracle nature of creation. Shame instructs us in all the ways we feel we do not deserve to be here.
Shame is the interior blind we have drawn over our unexplored, interior nature, or that has been drawn over us by others, in our childhood, in our growing, to keep the blessed, transformative nature of the world at bay. Shame carried unconsciously for a long time or left unexamined becomes the daily unspoken dynamic of undermining ourselves and then in protection of that broken down, undermined identity, trying to prove that everyone and all the world is also undeserving of whatever it thinks it deserves.
Shame is the inverse measure of our ability to incarnate fully into our bodies and the vast overwhelming, and astonishing, tidal body of the world.
Shame thrives in secrecy and hiding, shame leads us into dark corners, shame seems not to like to show its face, but therefore in that hiding, we learn to know what we are fearful of, what we are afraid of showing, what we keep from the world: we learn self-compassion. Shame tells us that the nature of our hiding is also a very real gravitational pull toward what we are hiding from: the pull out of that darkness into the light of being seen and being known at some essential, foundational level . . .
—excerpt from the essay, ‘Shame’ from Consolations II
The original Consolations; upon which I modelled my title was the Consolatio Philosophiae, written in approximately 524 AD by Boethius, a virtuous Roman government official who was imprisoned for exposing and refusing to join the corruption of the Roman court. Even under the threat of his imminent execution, Boethius wrote a very generous and merciful book, that was still a 'best seller' six centuries later. He brought a consoling perspective and offered a lifeline to people trying to make sense of the difficult world in which they were seemingly forced to live. We could say that metaphorically, a sense of imprisonment and imminent disappearance, are the conditions under which every writer writes and actually, every reader reads. In our short lives we are not only trying to make sense of many of the powerful dynamics and unnamed forces that seem to steer our existence, we secretly want to join and become part of those very forces ourselves, and in that joining, become more conscious participants in what, until we were fully present, had only seemed like fate. DW
Funny how bringing light to shame seems to lessen it. In your naming the discrepancies between our desires and what we feel is meant for us I suddenly feel welcomed and included in the human experience instead of a broken outlier. It’s interesting that shame can transform its own experience as something universally relatable and pull us aside to whisper to that it is ours alone.