Shame to self-love.
Shame to self-love is the ground from which we set ourselves free. Without shame, we have no inhibitions — and without our inhibitions, our inner wise one, and desires are set free.
Being shameless means that we have no inhibitions when expressing ourselves and that we have no inhibitions in living our lives how we desire. It means we follow our truth, our intuition, and our inner knowing. It means that we are not afraid to be seen, that we aren’t afraid to be heard, and that we are not afraid to simply be who we are at our very core willing to accept the consequences of that.
Being shameless means we aren’t afraid to speak our truth, and that we aren’t afraid of making the decisions that are right for us. It means that we aren’t afraid of how other people are going to react or what they think.
It means that we have the courage to leave the job we hate or that we’ve become complacent in — and going after something we love, or at least something different. It means physically moving, or leaving a partnership that you know in your gut isn’t right. It means naming the elephant in the room that has been festering as a lump in your throat or as bitterness and rage you’ve kept stuffing down. It means setting boundaries and saying what you want. It means honoring your truth and pursuing it.
Releasing shame means loving your body, feeling beautiful, feeling sexy and full of life, passion, and creativity, and it means having full faith in your intuition, and being unshakable in your wisdom.
It means that you are secure, and stable, and confident. It means that you trust in yourself, in your capabilities and in your unfolding — meaning that you trust in the divine timing of your becoming, and that you feel whole, successful, enough, and complete in the process — just as you are. It means that you praise yourself, that you have pride, and confidence. It means that you cherish and adore yourself. It means that you are comfortable being bold, not being liked, or rubbing people the wrong way. It means that you truly believe that you are enough. It means that you are not only worthy of success, abundance, prosperity, and the most extravagant love, but that you know that you are capable of manifesting, implementing, and receiving these things — and that you go after them unabashedly,
One of the most confusing parts of facing our shame is understanding that most of us don’t actively think we are ashamed of ourselves — but this is how shame shows up.
Shame shows up as our insecurities. It shows up as self-doubt, self-berating thoughts, shyness, and perfectionism. Shame reveals itself when we constantly raise the bar of self-expectation, not trusting or following our intuition, and it’s not trusting or honoring our capacity — in time or energy. It’s running ourselves thin, and burning ourselves out. It’s being afraid to speak — our opinions, our needs, our wants, our boundaries, our yes’s and no’s. It’s being afraid, or resistant to show our charisma. It’s shapeshifting to fit in with certain people or environments. It’s acting differently around different friend groups or social circles. It’s feeling like our life is compartmentalized and dissonant with our inner truth and outer world. Shame is our fear of expression, exposure, and our fear of being seen for who we really are and for what we really think and believe.
Shame is not believing that the wildness, messiness, vastness, and vulnerability of our hearts and emotions are valid. It’s over or under-active anger. It’s not loving our bodies, or believing that we are beautiful. It’s not feeling uninhibited in our sexuality. It’s not feeling creative or passionate. It’s not feeling sharp and wise in our intuitive knowing. Shame shows up in us not trusting the cyclical nature of our energy, our body, our drive, our emotions, or our creativity.
As important as it is to track our shame when it comes to the shameless woman, the biggest misconception is that shame and fear go away —because they don’t. It’s also thinking that the shameless woman lives in a constant high — because she doesn’t. She still trips and falls, and scrambles to find her truth, and her validity, and her way. It’s just that her courage and her faith in herself become bigger than everything else. And her courage and her faith in herself is fed by self-love and self-acceptance.
Self-love, and self-acceptance are the foundation of the shameless woman, and this is the first significant shift in embodying and awakening our feminine power.
We may intellectually understand that shame has no right to berate us. We may know that we should love ourselves and that what other people think doesn’t or shouldn’t matter, but why is this so hard? What is this struggle of insecurity that we all grapple with? We all have shame, and yes, there is such a thing as healthy shame that humbles us and teaches us poignantly, but the kind of shame I’m talking about is the kind of shame that makes us hide our light, and our power — which we all do to some degree. no matter how minute.
Shame is able to get its hooks in us largely because we seek validation, and wholeness outside of ourselves. It’s largely because we seek validation that it’s okay to be who we are from those around us, instead of granting ourselves permission to be and letting our own loyalty be enough. Acceptance and approval are a survival mechanism. It’s in our innate human nature to seek validation from the world outside of us, and from the people that we love and the things in our life that we cling to and feel safe with. It’s in our human nature to want to please those around us, because it feeds a sense of security.
To some extent — we all put on an act and we role-play who we think the world and our loved ones want us to be.
And I will say this again — to some extent — we all put on an act and we role-play who we think the world and our loved ones want us to be.
The shameless woman is shameless not because she never feels the quality of shame, but because she loves herself madly enough that she would never choose anybody else’s approval, acceptance, or love over her own and she’s willing to accept the consequences of whatever that means because she knows that by hiding in shame, she has way more to lose.
The reality is that life is short and she doesn’t want to find herself grieving a life led by her insecurities. The risk of saying yes to the shameless woman is real — this is why being shameless is so hard. The risk is being eradicated from our world as we know it. Relationships, our jobs, our communities, or our homes may crumble. When we stop playing the role that isn’t true, the “act” so to speak that we are partaking in short circuits. Some things won’t survive but others will blossom, flourish and thrive.
This is the gain though — everything that is right — once you let go and allow your whole self to come out will thrive beyond your wildest dreams.
Sometimes it’s everyone, and everything around us waiting for us to take off our masks, let our guards down, and come out of hiding. Sometimes it’s everybody else waiting for us to claim our truths, speak our truths, and embody them. The people who really love us, and the people who are right for us, usually aren’t judging us in the way that we think. And even if it turns out they do — that’s okay because the risk of saying no to the shameless woman — is that we stay living undercover forever. If we do this, nobody we love will ever truly get to know us unless we let them. And if we don’t, maybe that means we are left in all the wrong places, with all the wrong people, at all the wrong times, because we never gave our true selves a chance.
We all hide. And we are also all empowered women. This is everybody’s life work. But not everybody chooses to do it.
This work is the altar upon which the Marigold Women rest. The Marigold Women are the ones who say yes to themselves. The Marigold Women are the ones with blind faith to keep putting one foot in front of the other and refuse to turn their backs on themselves. No matter how hard, no matter how much resistance we feel, and no matter how many times we have hushed ourselves. The Marigold Women don’t stop listening to that voice deep within, that voice that they know is valid, even if they are still fighting to set it free.
With love,
Abby
