Releasing the burden of shame

What does it take to go from drowning to floating? (Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20)

Sometimes, the emotional weight of what we’re trying to do is too heavy.

We might be burdened by the shame of past failures.

We might have waited so long to do the thing that now it feels like too big a deal.

We might be scared of what will happen after we do the thing.

We might not actually have what it takes to do the thing — not today.

In these moments, we need to give ourselves permission to do the thing poorly, to do just a tiny bit of it, or even to skip it completely.

When we envision a world in which we don’t do the thing at all or put in the bare minimum of effort, we can consider the consequences. We can decide whether those consequences are ones that we want to live with.

Then, we can either move forward without doing the thing and without a burden of shame hanging over us, or we can choose to do the thing after all.

If we do decide to do the thing, we should make sure that we know exactly what we’re getting into and that we have all of the resources and support necessary to make it happen.

Somewhere along the line, we may have absorbed the narrative that unless we do the work in a certain way on a certain timetable then it's worthless — or worse, that we’re worthless. It’s not true. Most of the time, you can be as gentle as you like and go as slowly as you need to.

Lack of motivation isn’t an indication that you’re lazy. It means you’re struggling with something. When you resolve whatever you’re struggling with, the motivation returns.

When you give yourself love and acceptance instead of judgment — and surround yourself with others who can do the same — you might find that your resistance to doing the thing drops a little bit.

If you’re not used to this approach, you may be afraid that offering yourself compassion is a slippery slope. You may be concerned that if you’re gentle and kind with yourself, then you won't be motivated to do anything.

That may be true, at first, while you recover from a lifetime of forcing yourself to perform in order to outrun the fear of not being good enough.

But I’m convinced that, in the long run, that's not how this works. What I've seen over and over and over again is that if we get used to being gentle with ourselves, then we have less resistance to doing the work. We’ve removed the barrier of shame that we used to have to overcome.

Without that barrier, we just do the thing. There's no angst, there's no thinking about every time that it didn't work, there's no thinking that we're not doing enough or not trying hard enough. It’s not necessary to push ourselves like that. We just get it done and move on with our lives.

It's a beautiful experience to just be able to live the way we want to live. To be able to be content with just doing a tiny increment today just to get ourselves moving again. To plan on a tiny increment tomorrow and continue that as long as we need to in order to get all the work done. We’re no longer fighting against the ideal way to get the task accomplished — we’re not fighting at all. We are free to act, free to wait, and free to rest.

Somehow, when our self-worth doesn’t depend on our choice, it’s easier to make one that serves us well.