Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (20 page)

However, unjustified shame is very different. It is hands down the most destructive and painful emotion that we humans are capable of feeling. It drains us of life force and creativity. Our energy goes to hating ourselves instead of to self-correcting, and we forget that, like everyone else, we deserve love and acceptance. Too many women are terrified of taking risks and making a mistake, socially or otherwise, because they fear other people shaming them. And no wonder—it happens all the time.

Women are shamed for just about everything. They are especially shamed for not being perfect: being too thin or too fat, too beautiful or too plain, too bubbly or too serious, too emotionally expressive or too cold, and of course, too sexy or too unsexy. You can’t win if you’re trying to please the perfection police!
Mary Pipher, author of
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls
(Putnam, 1994), and others have pointed out that as teenagers, girls start to realize they can never achieve that balance of perfection that’s expected of them and their self-esteem plummets. It seems no matter what we do, there’s plenty of public shaming to keep us from flourishing.

We’re even shamed sometimes just for feeling happy. A woman was telling me the other day that at her meditation center, the group was instructed to meditate on equality in honor of some civil rights legislation breakthrough that had just occurred. Afterward, the meditators shared their experiences. One of the men said he had meditated on all the work that still had to be done, and expressed how depressing and upsetting it was for him to hear people celebrating the new law when its scope was so limited. He was, in essence, shaming those who were looking on the bright side. “How dare you feel happy when there’s still so much more to be done!” This was a blatant example of what I call the “moral superiority of pessimism”—making everyone feel as though they had no right to celebrate while others were still suffering. Happiness shouldn’t be shamed!

It’s crucial to your health and happiness that you learn to spot this kind of manipulation the moment it’s happening and not allow yourself to get sucked in. Let’s look at the logic here: you can’t actually get sick enough to help those who are sick, you can’t get sad enough to help those who are sad, and you can’t get poor enough to help those who are destitute. The belief that suffering somehow makes us holier or superior is rooted in what is called the “zero-sum model” that runs most of Western culture—the system that says, “Resources are limited. So if you get more, someone else will have to go without.” This is simply not true when it comes to the currency of health and happiness!

SHAME HOLDS YOU BACK

Shame is toxic not just to your health but to your creativity, learning, and growth. In the medical and research professions, the one thing you can count on is this statement at the end of just about every research paper that presents new, sometimes helpful
information, such as the health benefits of vitamin D: “More research needs to be done.” It’s become a mantra to let the doctor off the hook of taking a position. After all, if she’s wrong she will be shamed. In the early days of being an ob/gyn, I read many research studies showing that if you prescribe folic acid to pregnant women, you reduce the risk of the baby developing spina bifida, so I went ahead and prescribed it. Despite all the research, it took the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology 15 years to officially recommend this intervention. How many babies were harmed in the meanwhile because shame and fear held doctors back from doing the right thing? We’re still awaiting official permission to get rid of fetal monitoring, which has never improved outcomes for mothers or babies but does increase the risk of C-sections. Current research shows very clearly that having optimal levels of vitamin D in your blood can cut your risk for breast cancer in half and substantially lower your risk of other cancers, such as colorectal cancer. And giving enough vitamin D to pregnant women drastically reduces a child’s chance of developing type 1 diabetes, which should be mainstream knowledge. But almost no one wants to make the first move for fear of being wrong.

What are you afraid to change in your life because you think you might be shamed for making a mistake? Is the desire to be seen as perfect keeping you from expressing yourself? You have to take risks to be adventurous. Not every risk turns out to be a good one, but we can only learn and change and bring about something new if we let ourselves be clumsy, unskilled novices who screw up here and there. Repressing the need to grow and try something new is disastrous for health and well-being. Remember, creativity
is
the life force. Cut it off, and you cut yourself off from the Source of everything.

Let’s face it: shame can get us stuck in every sort of emotion and behavior that can hold us back. Because we’re often afraid of being shamed for not being a “good” person, or for being disloyal, we don’t prioritize our desires and instead focus on pleasing everyone else. Because our culture doesn’t agree on what constitutes “appropriate” grief, we get shamed for being too sad after a loss—or not sad enough. You might find yourself holding on to grief to prove what a good spouse, parent, or daughter you are.
You start feeling like Scarlett O’Hara in mourning, desperately wanting to dance but instead feeling compelled to look every inch the bereaved widow in head-to-toe black.

On the other hand, you might be encouraged to “get over it” when you haven’t had the chance to express your grief fully. Grief is a process, not an event. An acquaintance of mine lost her son in a car accident. A year later, her husband told her she should be “over it” by now. But each of us has our own timeline for recovery from loss. How can you decide for another person when grieving should end?

Sometimes people will shame you because they’re jealous and think,
I should have had that opportunity she had! It’s not fair!
Many people have what author Gay Hendricks calls an “upper limit problem,” meaning they have internalized an upper limit to their joy, their success, their happiness. This upper limit of what is possible is generally set in place by age 11 or so. We learn in childhood what we can expect in love, success, and freedom. And when we surpass that “upper limit” with more success or love than we thought possible or thought we deserved, we tend to get sick, pick a fight, or have an accident in order to bring ourselves back below that subconscious limit.
³
Paramahansa Yogananda said, “Everyone has self-limiting idiosyncrasies. They were not put into your nature by God, but were created by you. These are what you must change—by remembering that these habits, peculiar to your nature, are nothing but manifestations of your own thoughts.” Don’t be afraid to transcend your limits!

RELEASING SHAME

Life is too short to live in shame and limitation, leading a vitality-sapping existence of anxiety and depression as we scramble in vain to hit that sweet spot of perfection where no one will criticize or shame us. The truth is that the sweet spot doesn’t exist. To move beyond shame, we have to learn to consciously feel our shame fully and eventually learn to laugh at it—and at ourselves. Happiness researcher Robert Holden points out that shame cannot continue to exist when the energy around it is lightened up with laughter.

People whose lives are shame based live with the mistaken idea that the harder they are on themselves, the better human beings they’ll be. Western civilization and many religions have sold us on the idea that suffering buys us something and that we have to atone for our very existence.

Our biology takes its cue from these beliefs and responds accordingly, making our physical experience mirror what we believe. Dr. Mario Martinez has studied numerous cases of stigmata, the phenomenon of bleeding from areas in the hands and feet associated with Jesus’s wounds on the cross. The wounds don’t become infected but they don’t heal, and they’re quite painful. Dr. Martinez’s cases include the famous Padre Pio, and he has even been hired by the Catholic Church to carry out his research. In working with some of these individuals, Dr. Martinez has helped them heal and recover from pain simply by offering them the understanding that suffering is not necessary in order to serve your community.
⁴

Like stigmata, illness and accidents are often the result of culturally supported beliefs about the need for suffering and atonement. Unlike the placebo effect, which is the belief that good things will happen, illnesses and accidents can be a kind of cultural nocebo: a belief that something bad will happen or needs to happen. The more critical and unforgiving we are toward ourselves, the more miserable and sick we’re apt to be. The body has a remarkable ability to manifest shame as illness or physical problems, because the hurt of shame registers in the brain in exactly the same way physical pain does—and it also produces inflammatory chemicals in the body that set us up for illness. This is why, in the famous CDC-Kaiser Permanente study of adverse childhood experiences (ACE), it has been documented that those who experience adverse events in childhood generally associated with shame, abandonment, and betrayal are far more likely to experience health problems and die prematurely than those who didn’t experience these things.

Fortunately, there’s an alternative. Shame researcher Brené Brown discovered that it’s possible to become shame resilient, or what she calls “wholehearted.” She says the only difference between those who are wholehearted and those who are shame
based is—get this—the belief that they are worthy of love and connection. That’s it. Nothing else. Wholehearted people can be found in every socioeconomic group, and they lead healthy lives and have rich emotional connections to others. And becoming wholehearted is a learnable skill. It begins with simply accepting where you are now, having compassion and understanding for yourself, and rejecting the cultural belief that self-care is self-centered and wrong.

How many of us are holding on to anger, sadness, and hurt over the false belief that we missed our big chance or someone else stopped us from living the life we wanted? Limiting beliefs can keep old, destructive emotions alive inside us like a cancer that refuses to die. Dissolve it with Divine Love and understanding the minute you become aware of it! Or spend a couple minutes each morning or evening using Gay Hendricks’s Ultimate Success Mantra: “I expand in abundance, success and love every day, as I inspire those around me to do the same.” The subconscious mind is very receptive to the word
expand,
and that word and the feeling of expansion help you release from your body beliefs about what your upper limits are.

LETTING IT OUT

Letting your emotions out isn’t pretty: You aren’t going to look like the flawless-skinned Hollywood beauty in a 1940s movie with one perfect tear trailing down your cheek as your moist eyes glitter with light. You’re probably going to be a ruddy, honking, snorting, sobbing wet mess of raw emotion, and so what? Let it out. It’s not frowning that causes your face to develop jowls and frown lines, but the slow death that comes from stuffing your emotions and keeping them tamped down by drinking, smoking, and worrying about what people will think of you if you’re honest with them. If you want to make your cells sick, hold on to shame and guilt. But if you want to be a goddess who never ages, release those emotions.

According to traditional Hawaiian spirituality, the goddess Pele causes volcanoes to erupt because she’s enraged that she can’t be with her lover. She yearns for sexual pleasure and release, and if she can’t have it, there will be hell to pay! But let’s
not forget that it was volcanic eruptions that created the islands of Hawaii—a process that continues every day. Since its eruption in 1983, Mount Kilauea in Hawaii has created more than 540 acres of new land on planet Earth. Anger can be a force for creation and positive change if you stop fearing it and start expressing it appropriately. Think of your anger as your own personal volcano—creating acres of new choices, new cells, new relationships, and new opportunities from your own bone marrow!

When I was releasing my anger toward my father, I suspected my emotional release process would not only cure my frozen shoulder but free me up to let go of my fear of not being desirable. I wanted to reclaim my womanly attractiveness—my belief that I am one hot, luscious woman that any man would be lucky to be around. I couldn’t do that until I released the emotions that were holding me back. I couldn’t create my new life while I was still hanging on to anger and grief from the old one.

Exercise: Snapping Out Grief and Rage