Shame Relief

Not surprisingly after yesterday's posting, one person emailed me (blayneyc@earthlink.net) asking how one can find relief from shame. Not merely some neurotic sense of shame, but the consequences of some shameful thing one may have done that caused ripples of sorrow for others. I will answer that person in due course personally, but the issue is so broad-based, I believe, that I thought to post something about it here.

Shame that is not neurotic or inappropriate, that is prompted by something shameful one has done, deserves serious attention. Not only because simple justice requires it, but because what buddhists call karma, the consequences of one's acts, keep recurring until somehow the momentum is broken.

Assuming one has made an attempt to put things right, which means acknowledging one's malign action and doing what can be done to set things right (sometimes nothing can be done), the time comes to recognize that none of us is able to live totally as we wish or believe we should.

There comes a moment when one has to move on. That may require tough psychotherapy or it could be some sort of spiritual discipline like sitting meditation in which one lets the offense come into consciousness, look at it honestly, and then watch it leave.

But like a scar from any wound, it will leave a long-lasting, perhaps permanent mark on one, a reminder of a moment of human weakness. Humility, a virtue that makes life rich in reality, is fed by those scars.

Of course this can also be an opportunity to face down our old friend ego, who wishes to persuade us that, despite all evidence to the contrary, we are the center of the universe, and until everything about us is as it ought to be, the uiniverse will be off-center. In fact it is a monumental conceit of ego that makes us believe something we have done is so much worse than what anyone else has ever done, that it cannot be forgiven.

Few of us, with the exception of Hitler, Pol Pot or Stalin, have committed such a grave sin.