Shame. We all carry it. All of us. Though we may dress it up with self deprecation or layer a bravado to circumnavigate how it feels, it still attaches to us until we own it. It rises up whenever we least want it to "knock us down a peg" or to humiliate us into a powerless frame of mind. Shame reminds us of our humanity. It claims our mortality, our fallibility. It rubs our noses in our inability to control our lives in a way that we favor. No one wants it and, like death, no one escapes it entirely. It is wise to know our shame and to realize its lessons and understand how we cope with it. Most of us will do anything to not ever feel that way again. But to claim your shame is to claim your power. That is the sad truth of it.
We leave our bodies when we have overwhelming feelings that threaten what we idealize as our security or identity. It is like standing helplessly by as our home burns to the ground or a raging river rips away our foundations. We disappear. We disassociate. It is too much. Many of us do not have the skills to allow and to manage such strong feelings. In consequence, we abandon ourselves to trauma.
Hafiz speaks in this poem of lamenting how we leave ourselves and our beautiful lives behind when we indulge shame and guilt. When this happens, we can no longer be present with our spiritual natures - we can no longer be close to god or our sense of love in our lives. We abandon ourselves, then abandon love, then abandon those who love us. It is a festival of darkness and alienation. Not allowing ourselves our human frailty and our fragility to have its say in our lives is extremely costly to everyone.
Thank you for listening.
Serge Quadrado Music https://pixabay.com/music/world-muslim-way-181261/
Music: I've used this song before in my audio book section of this blog. I'm no stranger to feelings of shame and guilt and their hungry natures. I bit off a lot in this life with these issues and I've learned a few things about how they move through a life as a teaching. This song and video captures the weight of it so well. Shame Shame by the Foo Fighters.
The original post in this series of poems by Hafiz (including an addendum regarding the authenticity of these poems) can be found here. Also, my thoughts on this series a year into these poems, HERE.
The Gift: Poems by Hafiz and translated by Daniel Ladinsky can be purchased here.
My book can be purchased HERE. E-book HERE. The Season Two blogcasts with audio excerpts from my book begin HERE: in Behind The Lines. This reading of the book excerpts in a mixed media format is Season Two of this blog. These recorded excerpts are outside the chronological order in which the book was written. Podcasts with audio only beginning with episode 22 can be found HERE.