Shame, Healing, Transformation
Shame, Healing, Transformation
Source: Tara Brach (Listen or Watch: 48 min)
Contributor: Selena Garcia
“If we’re at war with ourselves, we can’t truly open our hearts to the rest of life.” – Tara Brach
Legit—where would we be without the teachings of Tara Brach? As a spiritual teacher, she’ll help you find calm in the chaos. Tara always offers examples, so you’ll want to listen to her full talks for context and understanding. She tells silly (but oh so good) jokes, and balances spirituality with psychology and neurobiology.
In this talk, Tara “distinguishes between toxic and healthy shame, as well as shame about our individual self and our group identity. We explore how, with self-compassion and courageous honesty, we can respond to negative, painful feelings about ourselves in a way that serves awakening and alignment with our deepest values.”
Be sure to stick around for the meditation that begins at 38:16. If you’re into meditations that is.
“Shame evolved like all emotions. It has a function. It’s a really yucky, unpleasant feeling that lets us know—you need to adapt your behavior in order to be in harmony with your community and with your own values.” – Tara Brach
(4:16) “We cover over our innate purity to protect us as we navigate through the stressors of life. We all put on coverings. And that’s not a problem per se. It’s just very natural we have our egoic defenses and protections and ways that we can try to enhance ourselves. Where the suffering comes is when we take ourselves to be the coverings—these different defenses, parts of our personality, or emotional reactions or beliefs. We take the coverings to be who we are, and we forget the gold––that’s the core suffering…We forget who we are. We forget the awareness and the love that’s really our essence, and we take ourselves to be at what I sometimes think of as a cluster of waves of different personality features that stand out to us. We identify with our fears and our anger and our ways of controlling.”
(5:29) “When we’re identified with the coverings, we kind of live in this bit of a roller-coaster of inflation and deflation, and for many, it feels like one or the other. But deep down––and this is what’s key––we dislike ourselves. We dislike the self that’s identified with the coverings because we intuit that there’s more. But, we’re just feeling small. We sense the coverings of fear, or selfishness, or controlling, and then we hate ourselves for it. Feels bad becomes ‘I’m bad.’”
(12:57) “Shame evolved like all emotions. It has a function. It’s a really yucky, unpleasant feeling that lets us know you need to adapt your behavior in order to be in harmony with your community and with your own values. So it has a positive function. I think it’s really important to distinguish between healthy shame and toxic shame. Because toxic shame is so pervasive that it actually makes healthy shame impossible for us—we can’t take the message.”
LISTEN OR WATCH, HERE (48 min)
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