Healing Shame Through Somatic Inquiry

Shame can be overwhelming, isolating, and deeply misunderstood, but it's something we can gently turn toward and heal. In this somatic inquiry practice, we explore the roots of shame, how it shows up in the body, and ways to soften its impact through nervous system regulation. Using breath, mindful attention, and compassionate reflection, we begin to unhook from old messages of unworthiness and reconnect with our intrinsic value.

Whether you’ve felt shame from social rejection, systemic oppression, or early life experiences, this session offers a grounded, healing space to reclaim presence and kindness toward yourself.

Transcript

We're working with shame today.

How do we recognize it when it's happening?

How do we work with it?

What is it?

And as we do this,

We're going to do a lot of nervous system regulating.

This is what's happening right now.

This is what it feels like when I have a memory of that,

And I come back into remembering that that's something that I can work with,

Especially with these topics that are so tender in our hearts.

Remember to be really present with yourself and honor what would work best for you.

Shame,

Just the word can feel a little bit intense.

So let's start with just noticing that we're here.

Notice that you're not in a situation where you're being shamed right now,

That we're just in a situation where we're bringing up a topic to look at.

A lot of these things go underground and they really affect us.

So when we're working with something that's driving our unconscious behavior,

It can be helpful to bring it forward into the light.

Let's start with a little bit of breathing.

Cyclic sighing is a very effective way to come into a practice,

To reset during a practice.

Deep inhale through the nose,

And then again,

So double inhale through the nose,

And then a long exhale like you're breathing out through a thin straw.

And as you're doing that,

Let your body soften.

We could also look around the room as we're doing it.

Continue the deep double inhale through the nose.

Long exhales through the mouth like you're breathing out through a straw.

Release tension out of your forehead.

Release tension out of the hinges of your jaw,

The neck and shoulders and upper back.

As you're breathing in,

We might be lifting our shoulders up.

And on the exhale,

Let them really release and soften.

Looking around the room,

We're noticing what might have come forward as a memory,

Either in our body or as a memory with thoughts and details like that,

Isn't actually happening in this moment.

Looking around the room and noticing that person who used to give me that look or say those things,

They're not actually in the room with me.

Maybe you're also looking around and going,

You know,

I'm looking at these pictures of friends or family,

People who love me and who are not ashamed of me.

People who value me and honor me and understand me.

Maybe you're looking at your pet or outside into the sky and the trees or whatever it is that you're looking at.

It's not that.

It's not the old experience.

We go into this a little and we take the intensity off.

So that's why I wanted to start some regulating and to really encourage you to do this through the practice.

Shame is a sharp correction of a behavior.

That is the survival mechanism of shame.

If you're in a small community,

Which most people were until the last few hundred years,

There were norms,

There were social norms,

There were things that were not allowed.

There were some things that are taboo.

And if you did those things,

You would be kicked out of the group.

You would be out on your own and you wouldn't survive.

Shame is a sharp correction.

It feels really strong in the body and it's meant to be behavior based.

When somebody does a behavior that's not acceptable to the people around us,

And it could be something that's acceptable to us.

Maybe if you're queer,

For instance,

People find out that you're gay and then they shame you for that.

That's not legitimate.

Doesn't mean their view is correct.

But just looking at it from a survival aspect,

The intent of shame is to correct behavior and it feels really strong in the body because it's meant to be something that really gets our attention.

If we look at the way shame is often used,

It's aimed at us as a person.

So it's no longer a behavior.

It's no longer,

I can't go along with the fact that you're stealing from this person,

Something like that.

It's you are a bad person.

And some of the ways that we talk about that,

You should be ashamed of yourself.

Shame is not meant to be condemning our whole person.

It's meant to be correcting a behavior.

Renee Brown has a lot of great resources on shame and she talks about it as being a feeling of fundamental flaw.

There's something really wrong with me and that's why I'm being rejected.

That's why I've been pushed out.

Anytime we're abandoned,

Pushed out,

Rejected,

Especially as children,

But as adults as well,

It's a really uncomfortable situation.

Let's come back into the body and just notice what's your experience in your body right now.

How do you feel?

What are the sensations and energy?

What happened with your breath?

So when we're bringing up something like shame,

We might have memories of times when we were shamed or felt shamed.

There might be some anger as well.

It's like,

Well,

That wasn't fair the way I was shamed for that,

Or I didn't even do that thing that I was being shamed for.

If you're in a family where shaming was one of the strategies that the parents used to get you to comply,

Then you have a lot of experience with that.

This also really ties in with core deficiency beliefs.

As children,

We can't afford to see clearly the dynamics of what's going on as to do with our parents or adults,

And we just try to make it better,

Be smarter,

Be kinder,

Be funnier,

Whatever it is.

Children have a very good sense of what's going on underground.

The more that we disconnect from our bodies,

The harder it is for us to be present with what's going on.

If you're having this experience in your body of some kind of heaviness,

Some kind of anxious feeling,

What's going on in your body?

And then see if you could bring some softening,

If it's tension,

Some attention.

Maybe there's a feeling of heaviness.

What are the impulses in your body right now?

And what are the sensations?

It's natural for us to want to get away from things that are difficult or painful.

The only reason that we would do that is if it's healing.

If what we're noticing is memories are coming up,

Then we can work with thoughts.

Those thoughts are images and sounds.

We hear words and we see images.

Visual images are colors and shapes.

When I've been talking about this,

You might have had a little flash of a memory I did of something that happened in the hallway in junior high.

We just noticed that our brain is so associative.

It's always trying to bring forward what's relevant.

Plus,

It has a negativity bias,

So it's not going to bring forward all the times when we felt accepted and loved and cared for and part of the community.

That's not what's going to come up in our memory.

We might have really difficult memories coming up.

And this might be something that was really key in your childhood or at some point in your adult life.

Take a step back for a moment and just notice that.

What is your life experience with shame?

Was it kind of the same through different ages or did you work on it at some point?

Did you come to peace?

Just take a few breaths,

Relax your shoulders,

And notice what's coming through your mind,

What's coming through your thoughts.

So one of the things that came up for me was when I came out as a lesbian in my mid-20s.

That was in the 1970s.

It was not an acceptable thing.

I remember feeling a lot of shame and anxiety about,

Am I going to be kicked out of my family?

By then,

I was living alone and I had a child.

It was in my adult life.

It wasn't as threatening as it could have been if I was a teen.

A lot of teenagers are kicked out of their homes if they're found out or if they come out.

This is a dangerous situation.

It's a high-stakes situation.

What happens when we think about something like that?

My response at the time was mostly I was really angry about the inequality and the injustice.

I knew that I wasn't what they said I was.

I knew that I wasn't sick or disturbed or something like that.

Here's this really personal thing about me that I've come out and other people,

Some of them are neutral,

Some of them are tolerant.

A lot of the people who are welcoming were people who were also in the queer community.

We found each other and that was how we formed families and formed communities where we felt accepted.

We just felt like part of the community.

Whatever your personal experiences,

What was your survival response around that when you felt shame or felt judged?

Did you go into a fight response?

Did you get angry?

Did you go into a freeze?

There were times during my life when I just didn't talk about it at work because I didn't want to deal with the crap that would come down.

Most of the time I was very open.

There's an arc of history here too where we have the ongoing and then we have our personal.

We have the world stage and then we have our personal experience with it.

My personal experience now is very different than if I was 13 or 14 years old and coming out so we have to take that into account as well.

We don't want to be rejected,

Judged.

We don't want to be condemned.

Sometimes a healthy response is to be angry because there's an injustice.

The foundation of this is what's your experience with this and how much have we internalized because we've all internalized some of it for sure and then what are we doing to be who we are in the world and not in a sense of everybody has to be completely out.

That might be too vulnerable for some people depending on your situation but just in a sense of what's right for me.

Let's sit with that for a moment.

Let's sit with that question.

Obviously it's not going to be the same issue but the mechanism is fairly similar.

It's really helpful to know how we strategize and how we protect ourselves.

There's no right or wrong here in terms of how we are engaging with the world.

What's more important is how are we engaging with ourselves and then could we also be kind and compassionate with ourselves.

This is very painful when we're rejected.

It's painful when we have to hide part of who we are.

It's painful when we just have that feeling of there's something wrong with me.

If there wasn't I wouldn't be rejected.

I wouldn't be abandoned or shamed.

Continuing to notice your breath.

Notice your experience in your body.

It's part of the cost of being not in the acceptable range.

Sometimes it's because we feel like a failure.

It can often feel very personal and we take it really hard.

How can we rebuild our sense of worthiness given what happens out in the world?

One of the first ways that we need to work with that is to be in our body and come back into some sense of I'm not in the survival mode anymore.

So if you're in a fight or flight come back down into calmer state.

If you're in freeze then bring your energy up so that you're more aware and here again.

Let's do cyclic sighing again.

So we've got all of this rolling around inside of us.

We might have experiences that are kind of flashing into our mind or that we're really thinking about.

Some thoughts are very persistent.

Let's do some breathing.

So inhale through the nose.

Double inhale.

Long exhale through a straw.

As you breathe out let your whole body soften.

If you don't like this one you could do another breathing practice.

Bring some oxygen into your body and soften as you breathe out.

Let yourself come back into a calmer state.

We're looking at an issue right now.

We're not actually in the situation where somebody's pointing the finger at us.

Experiences live in our body.

What does shame feel like in our body?

Using myself as an example there,

I had this flash and I had a feeling in my body.

Shame feels like a gut punch kind of.

Our eyes go down.

We often slump.

We're very much affected by shame.

We want to hide.

And one of the things that will help us to come out of shame is to lift our collarbones,

Come out of that slumped over,

But also to risk looking up.

It's risky because who knows what we're going to find on their face.

Let's sit with that as you breathe,

As you relax your body.

You could stand and shake.

You could lift your shoulders up as you're breathing or move around a little.

This is heavy.

We've been carrying around something that doesn't even belong to us.

But sometimes when we're getting shamed for a behavior we're like,

Oh yeah I need to be a little bit more aware of that.

It has a lingering effect in the sense of we're aware we don't want to do that again.

Maybe it's fawning.

Sometimes when people are fawning or people-pleasing,

We have a sense of shame about that.

Shame can be an alert that here I am,

I'm kind of giving myself away.

I'm not acting in a way that I'm proud of.

When I become aware that I'm fawning to somebody,

I'm not on my own side,

I'm going to pull that back,

Commit to not doing that,

And also commit to being kind.

When I notice that I'm doing that,

The reason that we do that is because we're in a survival response.

We've detected a threat.

A lot of these threats are social.

They have to do with who has power over us when it comes to fawning.

We survive however we can and then we don't want to shame ourselves for how we did that.

This is why I'm always talking about nervous system regulation.

We can't be in the middle of a survival response and still have kindness and patience for ourselves.

We can't see clearly because we're in a survival response.

We always needed to come back into this sense of I'm aware that right now I'm here during a practice.

I could take some breaths.

I could hold my hand.

I could give myself a hug.

There are so many things that we could do to come out of our survival responses and back into this practice.

We're doing a somatic inquiry about shame.

Let the load release off of our shoulders,

Out of our hearts.

Let's take the last few minutes of the practice to be kind and see,

Wow,

This was difficult and I was 13 or I was,

I can hold myself in my own heart.

I can make decisions based on what's best for me.

Can we do that?

How can we be kind and realistic and discern?

Am I being appropriately corrected?

Whether I'm correcting myself or maybe someone else,

A good friend might bring it up in a way that's very loving.

We have opportunities to see,

Am I selling myself out or is there a societal systemic oppression going on here that is really appropriate for me to put over there?

It's not mine.

Other people need to change their rigid ideas or their prejudices.

It's not me.

This is complex,

Obviously.

We all have a lot of experience with different forms of this.

We often take on something that's actually not ours.

It's not legitimate to feel shame because somebody is homophobic.

So many ways that we could be kinder to ourselves and each other.

And if we have that feeling of shame comes over us,

The first thing we could do is offer ourselves kindness and compassion.

Acknowledge our own goodness,

Our own good heartedness.

Remember that there are ways to get through this and ways to work with this.

And then we come back feeling stronger.

We put whatever other people's stuff is over there because it doesn't belong to us.

And we come into more of a respectful relationship with ourselves.

Reviews

Between a talk and a practice. Deep look at shame with LGBTQ themes. Thank you Lynn

I listened to this twice today. I am ashamed of how much shame I feel & carry! I really need to work on this.
Much gratitude 💗

This is something I’ve been talking about in therapy a lot. Had a strong somatic reaction, even alone in a safe space. Tough but really helpful practice. Grateful to have queer elders like you, Lynn!