Self Hatred. Shame.

Over the last several weeks, there has been a drastic rise in phone calls and emails to me from people suffering from an intense hatred and shame. The discomfort is palpable and for some terribly overwhelming. They want to be healed from it or to know the reasons for why it is there, or what it is about.

We must consider with feelings the importance of the person's experience. We do not want to deny the experience, and sometimes we must totally succumb to the experience of the emotion to transcend it. When first starting the journey of healing, it is necessary to explore, to have someone help you bring awareness to your feelings, and to gain insight into past experiences as to what has contributed to the life you have created. And then at some point, it is time to move on. You have had those emotions, you know them in and out.

It is important at some point to note one's reactions as just that. A reaction, and not to create a whole "body" or a new "persona" around the emotional reactions to old trauma. To do so keeps one invested in trauma, with no room to move on. One's identity becomes so invested in reviewing trauma, and having emotions based on the past, that the present does not get met. People even form whole communities around trauma and survivorship. It is not to say that the experience has not been life changing, and the great comfort that is derived from others' who have had similar exeperiences cannot help, it is only that at some point, the spirit yearns to be free to be its own change.

Self hatred and shame can be a function of a larger shame and hatred as a whole. If you consider that babies do not know hate, yet they are born with the DNA of the larger collective of humanity's original sin, and they are born into the smaller collective of their parental lineage, hatred and shame permeates much of us no matter how hard we try to be loving. It is not that we are doomed for hatred, we are doomed for love as well so to speak. It is more that we are part of a much bigger whole, and when we investigate the feelings of hatred, we must remember not only our own lineage, and the larger community with its own legacy, but the larger collective of the planet and the planetary shifts that are constantly occurring.

Which brings me to all those calls of suffering. We no longer know what to ground into for the earth beneath our feet is constantly shifting. This of course is where spiritual practice comes in, to have a trust and faith in a larger truth that is bigger than one's own mind and logic. We have just passed through an enlightened age, an age of reasoning based on logic and the strength of the mind. This age has also coincided with a frequency or vibration with the solar plexus, a frequency of the gut. As the earth shifts and changes, we move into a higher frequency, that of the heart, a time where logic becomes secondary to our felt senses and the higher truth of the heart.

To navigate this time, it is important to understand our feelings. To understand the source of self hatred and shame, to see how it has motivated us albeit falsely, and to honor it for making us the success that we are today. There is very often a face we put onto that hatred, whether an abuser, a boss, a marriage, someone external to us that we must fight against. I would suggest there will come a time when you must not only look those eyes straight in the face, but to recognize that the eyes that are looking back at you are your own. You are no longer the victim, the child, the helpless and the powerless. You are the healer, the one that has created your reality, and you have the power now to meet this hatred and embrace it. In doing so, to borrow from Neil Armstrong, you take one small step for your humanity, and one great step for the larger healing of the whole planet.