Self-Loathing, Shame, Guilt, Regret

As someone who has spent a significant portion of her life actually believing that she was rotten to her very core and who has spent day after day, night after night and hour after hour being truly lost in a dark pit of self-loathing and seemingly insurmountable shame, there is something I want you to know.

Or perhaps it’s more that there’s something that I want to remind you of, because the chances are that you already know, somewhere inside, what I’m about to say.

No matter how awful you think you are; no matter how much self-disgust or shame you feel for things you’ve done or not done, or things you’ve said or not said, there is a field, a level of consciousness, another dimension of life, where all of this simply does not exist.

There is a field, a level of consciousness, another dimension of life where all these thoughts and feelings that occupy your mind and hold you down simply melt away. And in that place there is complete clarity – as clear as the purest, most pristine sparkling stream you could ever imagine – that you are loved and have always been loved.

The knowing of this love and the knowing that you have always been enveloped in this love is not something that can ever, ever, ever be put into even the most beautiful words a human being could come up with. This love is too complete and too magnificent in its wholeness to describe and can only be known in the knowing of it.

In this place, you know that not only are you forgiven for all the things you feel you need to be forgiven for, but indeed you see that there was never a single thing to forgive.

In this place you know your perfection and the perfection of every other living being. In this place you are held in arms that you know, beyond a shadow of doubt, will never let you fall.

But oh yes, there is also this place in which we feel this shame and self-loathing and have such hatred for ourselves and regret for all the things we think we’ve wasted or ruined. And in that place we have to feel those feelings and look at those feelings and do whatever we are called to do to heal those parts of ourselves. And all of this is as it should be.

And, and, and, there is that place, always there though sometimes seemingly not there, where all of this melts into a golden shimmer and we can relax in a way we have never relaxed before knowing with certainty that we are ok, everything is ok, and all is as it should be.

Love and courage,

Leah