How To Let Go Of Shame And Guilt (+3 Solutions Explained)

In this talk, I answer a viewer's request on how to let go of feelings of shame and guilt. Specifically, I'll be going over 3 different solutions from an Eastern spirituality point of view on how to address this. These perspectives are:
1. Practicing an insight-based meditation practice (which allows you to process and let go of feelings of shame and guilt)
2. Understanding the Yogic Chakra system and using it as a self-development tool
3. Understanding the Scales of Energy / Consciousness

Transcript

Hey this is Ish and today I'm going to be answering a viewer's question on how to let go of shame and guilt.

So this applies not just for certain situations in your life that you feel guilty about,

That you have a hard time letting go of,

But also different situations that have had occurred to you which you have a hard time letting go of.

So I'll be addressing both.

And rather than analyze this topic from a Western psychology point of view where we kind of go into the psyche,

Instead of what I'll be doing is I'll be providing you with three specific solutions and perspectives from the Eastern point of view.

And I'm going to be showing you how this will specifically help you out in releasing shame and also guilt as well.

And these three specific perspectives from the Eastern standpoint is number one,

Understanding the power of meditation and how that can actually help you detect feelings of shame and guilt within your body and psyche and actually release that.

The second solution will be understanding the chakra systems from the yoga point of view and then also understanding the scales of energy and consciousness.

And these two last steps are actually different actionable steps you can take in resolving these kinds of issues and feelings that arise within your body and psyche as well.

So going over the first perspective,

Meditation is very powerful,

As you may know I talk about it all the time on my channel.

But the reason why it works so well in really addressing feelings of shame and guilt is that we have an understanding that different emotions,

Especially strong ones,

Get stored in our psyche or our body.

And in the Western psychology point of view,

We call this as a certain very strong and typically negative emotions get stored in our body and they're called trauma.

And I typically don't like using that word because there's such a negative association with that nowadays that it feels a bit disempowering when you label things as trauma.

But nevertheless,

There is some truth to that where when we go through a certain stressful situation that gets stored deep into the layers of our subconscious.

And rather than going very deep into the different faculties of consciousness,

Just understand that the subconscious layer tends to be buried very deep.

And it does take some periods of actually looking inwards and reflection in order to actually go deeper into our past experiences.

And what you'll find is that when you start to meditate,

At first you will feel very frustrated that you're not able to calm your mind.

But after a while,

If you do persist with the practice,

Something magical truly happens in the intermediate stages.

And basically what will happen is that you're finally able to actually quieten your mind so you won't have those problems where you're not able to quieten your mind.

You'll actually be able to sit down and be calm.

And something actually happens is that when your activity in your mind actually finally has a chance to calm down and quieten for a bit,

What will happen is that all these stored emotions that we previously buried away will all of a sudden come up out of the blue.

You'll just be sitting there and all of a sudden this past thing that happened when you were like seven,

When somebody yelled at you,

Will all of a sudden come up to the surface of your mind or perhaps like a previous experience which you just brushed off last year because you didn't want to deal with it.

Well,

Guess what?

Now it's coming back up.

So you'll have all these intense experiences start to bubble up to the surface.

And this is because they're getting stored away.

And now that your mind has actually quietened,

You're accessing the subconscious mind.

Now it'll start to bubble up.

And this will actually provide you a very good opportunity to now look into these problems.

So meditation will actually give that insight and discernment where now you can actually analyze these charged events.

And meditation will teach you up until this point,

It'll teach you to just notice these sensations as they arise.

And then you can just allow them to disappear and let go.

And basically from the practice of meditation,

You'll see that these stored and very powerful emotions are just that.

They're just emotions and they're just sensations that occur within the body.

So through enough practice,

You'll actually allow yourself to see it in a neutral manner or as much as you can at the moment.

So it does take some time and practice.

And then the bigger aspect of meditation is that it allows you to see the bigger picture and context behind things.

So you'll actually be sitting in a cushion and you'll get this like aha or insight moment like,

Oh my God,

This is why this happened and this is why my reaction was like this because of this event.

And you will start to piece together in your mind a bigger context and perspective of why certain issues will happen.

So it actually gives you a power of insight.

And funny enough,

The practice of vipassana is known as an insight practice of a vipassana meditation I'm referring to.

And this will actually allow you to see through different experiences.

So the practice of meditation,

Not just short term,

But long term,

Has the effect of purifying yourselves.

Because number one,

You're able to notice everything that happens,

Look through it directly and let go of it.

And number two,

You're able to take on different perspectives and insights that you weren't able to before,

Because you're actually able to look and see clearly the emotions associated with shame and guilt without an added emotional reaction to it.

So it's clear seeing and clear insight.

Now,

The second perspective is understanding chakras.

So in the ancient yogic systems,

They have come up with seven chakras and from different schools of thoughts,

There's even more than that.

But to keep things simple,

There are different energy centers within the body and they house certain emotions,

Different feelings,

Different actions and viewpoints.

And this can be actually a very powerful tool that you can use to actually transform yourself.

So in regards to shame and fear and all of that,

This is actually related to the first chakra known as a root chakra or a muladhara chakra.

And this chakra specifically is responsible for feelings of groundedness,

Stability and just an overall sense of groundedness.

And when this is imbalanced,

You have feelings of fear,

Feelings of shame,

Feelings of guilt.

So these are all kind of lumped together in this one chakra specifically.

And according to the yogic tradition,

There are actually some actionable steps you can take to work on a chakra.

And the way to do that is to either work on the chakra itself that you have problems with or also work on the chakra that's above it.

And I'm going to discuss that in a bit on taking the next stage up.

But in regards to the first chakra,

You can work on things like grounding yourselves,

Right?

Because again,

This is responsible for feelings of stability and groundedness.

You can also focus on yoga poses,

Certain poses like tree pose or navasana boat pose to gain stability and strength.

You can also do things like meditation,

Which I've mentioned earlier,

Specifically more grounding types of meditation.

You can also do things like lift weights,

Which will provide you,

Especially those compound lifts,

Which will provide you with a feeling of strength,

Which is probably what you need at this point.

Another thing you can also do is to look into color theory.

And this is what the chakra system is really good at because they've kind of figured out way back in the day that certain colors evoke certain emotions and reactions.

So if you can do things like wear red or look at red things or objects that can actually have a powerful effect because you're tapping into this specific chakra.

And obviously I can go on more about this.

I can talk about the chakra series a lot,

Which I do have other talks about.

But just understand that you can use the chakra system and understand the first chakra and the second chakra to really assess your problems related to shame and fear,

Which are more lower level chakras,

And then address it from that specific level.

And one other great thing that the yoga system has brought to us is just a whole understanding of understanding ourselves and how we relate to our emotions.

So in the eight limbs of yoga,

Known as Ashtanga,

Basically the first two limbs are actually just concerned with our conduct,

Our moral conduct and how we relate to the world,

Which is the first limb.

And the second limb is relating to ourselves.

And essentially what we can do is to understand our own conduct and we can actually stop the cycle of shame and guilt.

Because I don't know if we realize it or not,

But sometimes we may conduct certain activities based out of just autopilot and we will cause ourselves to get into a loop of shame.

Say we do something that's,

You know,

We drink a lot of alcohol and we say something mean and then all of a sudden we feel guilty the next day of what we said.

And then to cope with that,

We drink some more and then you can see how this builds to a cycle of shame,

Guilt,

Oh no,

I did this and then regret and then it kind of loops together,

Right?

Well,

If we can stop this at the source by refraining from alcohol or doing some other activities where we are mindful of our conduct,

Then this whole cycle wouldn't even start to begin with.

So that's a very practical way of just understanding our own conduct and our own morals and what we're specifically doing to stop it from happening externally.

So we don't shoot ourselves in the foot.

Now the last perspective and solution is to understand the overall scale of energy or consciousness and then we can use that to understand what we need to work on.

So this can be a full hour long talk,

But I'll keep this very brief.

But basically,

There are different philosophies and schools of thought where they've taken the scale of human emotions and also consciousness and they've conducted and created a certain model for this.

So you can see this in David Hawkins' scale of energy.

We also see in Hinduism and yoga that we have the three energies,

Which are tamas,

Rajas and sattva.

And this is just referring to different scales of energy.

One feels very dense and heavy.

One feels a bit more active and one feels light and clairvoyant.

So there is different scales of energies.

And the one I personally like is by Fred Dodson and he has a great book called Levels of Energy.

So I recommend you check that out.

I've read that a couple of different times.

And what I like about this is that he gives a specific number for a certain emotion.

And the way to work on the specific emotion that you're working on or certain attitude or viewpoint is to access certain emotions or viewpoints of reality that are within the range of that specific reality that you're living in or working on.

So for example,

He describes the feelings of shame and guilt as a level 30 energy.

And 30 on the scale,

This is a scale from 0 to 1000.

So you can see that 30 is towards the bottom,

Which is a very low energy.

And this mind you is just talking about a habitual emotion that you're feeling,

Not here and there if you feel shame and guilt.

That's not a big deal.

This is like a reoccurring thing.

This is a pretty low and dense energy.

And instead of reaching for a very high vibration energy like a level 500 gratitude or appreciation,

This technically doesn't really work.

And instead what you want to do instead is focus more on the lower levels that are a bit higher than shame and guilt.

So for example,

You could focus on feelings of anger.

If you're just angry about a situation,

That's a level 180 energy.

And this will actually do more for you than try to grasp for gratitude or appreciation.

I mean,

You can probably see this yourself if you have someone who's like super negative and you're like,

You know what,

Instead focus on what you're grateful for.

How often does this really work?

And for the people that actually things like gratitude and appreciation works for is that people who are actually on mid levels of energy where they can actually benefit and they can see the upside of that.

But if you're so far down,

This is actually not helpful.

So instead you want to access your anger or you want to focus on your desires.

What can I focus on instead?

And this will actually do more for you because it empowers you and it's also very accessible.

So you can actually be angry about whatever that you're shameful for,

Someone wronged you in the past or you did something that didn't really align well with you.

What you can do is build up that feelings of anger.

And instead of feeling in being in a victim mode or a helpless mode,

Instead you have the power of anger.

And obviously,

Over time,

When you can learn to manage this and you ascend up from the scales of emotions,

Then you can instead of anger,

You can now transform this into feelings of calm,

Feelings of focus,

Feelings of interest,

Feelings of gratitude.

Now it starts to build up.

But you want to work on wherever you're at in the specific scale.

So then you can come up with these solutions that are accessible for you because the last thing you want to do is to try to access bliss,

Which is like level like 600 or 700 when you're feeling apathy,

Which is level 50 or level 30,

Which is like shame and fear.

Right.

So you want to work with what is manageable for you.

Otherwise,

You'll fall hard when things don't stack up pretty well.

So essentially what you can do from this perspective is to let go of emotions.

Number one,

Just like release it.

You can cry.

You can release anger.

You can do all these like what we call I'm going to use this in quotations about the lower levels energy.

But you can focus on just like letting go of these emotions however you can.

Obviously,

You don't like hit someone,

But address your anger and these repressed feelings in a healthy manner.

And you might need to talk to someone.

You might need to hug someone.

Just do anything where you can release these emotions in a positive and constructive way.

And then from there,

Once you've done that,

Now you can start to focus on a more manageable and higher feeling emotions and work up from that.

So again,

I hope this helps.

And again,

These three solutions are provided from an Eastern standpoint is number one,

Meditation.

I recommend that everyone meditates,

But the power of meditation will start to work once you've been practicing for a bit and you're able to actually penetrate through the layers of your subconscious and actually go deep.

And all of a sudden,

These emotions and stored emotions will come up.

And this will provide you an opportunity to look into it and then let go of it and also come up with new insights.

But understand that might take some time for you to develop.

So instead,

What you can do in the meantime while you're meditating is to,

Number one,

Focus on tangible things you can work on related to the chakras.

So you need to work on the physical,

The first chakra and second chakra energies.

And then the last thing you can also do is to understand the scale of emotions and then work with where you're at.

So if you're feeling shame,

Feelings of shame and guilt,

You can do things like release those emotions rather than try to intellectualize things or focus on gratitude and appreciation.

Rather,

Just focus on letting go of the immediate feelings and then gradually work your way up and ascend through the levels of emotions and consciousness.

So I hope this talk helps.

Let me know if you like videos like this in the future.

Thank you.

Reviews

Lovely thanks.

Great talk! Enjoyed your advice and plan to put it to use for releasing guilt and shame.

Great tips for addressing shame.

Very interesting! Thank you!