Weathering the Waves of Shame

The Gathering Room Podcast

Martha Beck

Business, Entrepreneurship, Self-improvement, Courses, Education

5 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Waves of shame. They're icky, they're toxic, and they're not easy to escape. In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha is talking about how we can move past this particularly intense form of anxiety and swim on to better horizons. Shame attacks us at the level of basic self-identity and makes us believe that our vulnerabilities are permanent, personal, and pervasive. It also wants us to keep secrets and hide things. So, Martha says, by being open and sharing our humiliating moments—the opposite of what shame wants us to do—we can actually reduce our feelings of shame. And often, the more embarrassing your “shameful” moment, the more it can be turned into a freeing kind of humor that helps you feel safe. To learn how to share your vulnerabilities safely through openness, humor, and the step-check-step method, don’t miss this liberating episode. It also includes Martha’s guided Silence, Space, and Stillness meditation—with a special devotion to the parts of you that have ever felt shamed.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Gathering Room podcast, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.
0:09.0	This particular gathering room is about shame, and I decided to do this because this morning, I did a shameful thing. Yes. This morning, I was going out walking my dog
0:25.3	and the neighbor's dog chased after us because he wanted to go for a walk. And then I had a
0:31.0	fairly long conversation with the dog's owner, whom I did not recognize. I have been mistaking a house guest of my neighbor for my
0:41.5	actual neighbor. I've had long conversations with the house guest as if he were my neighbor.
0:47.3	Now today I had a conversation with my neighbor as if he were a house guest. And I was like,
0:52.5	hi, I'm Marty, I live over there.
0:54.3	And he's like, I know.
0:57.4	And it wasn't until I walked away that I realized why he was looking at me so strangely.
1:03.2	And I went into a wave of shame that made me want to plunge my head into the nearest swampy bog, because we have a few of those
1:13.0	in the Pennsylvania forest, and just like allow fish to pick at me to somehow compensate for my
1:22.8	terrible sins. You know waves of shame. They're icky, they're toxic, they're full of self-flagellation and
1:31.5	self-criticism, and they're not easy to escape. This is a particular form of that anxiety I talk
1:37.4	about that just twists around itself. And oh my, I was in it. And I wasn't just saying things about, well, that was a foolish thing to do.
1:46.6	It was like, no, I am always an idiot. I am such a, you know, I'm such a loser. How could I do such a thing?
1:54.1	Endlessly thinking about how much the neighbor must detest and look down on me for this ridiculous mistake. This, by the way, is not the first
2:04.7	time it's happened. When I lived in California, there was a couple who lived next door to my
2:11.4	property, which was still pretty long away, but far away away. But one day, they came came walking along and I don't know what happened to his
2:21.0	face. I think maybe he was attacked by chickens or something. Anyway, he had a lot of little scars on
2:27.8	his face and stitches and he usually wore a mustache and a beard and he had, someone had shaved that
2:33.1	and then put band-aids all over his face.
2:35.8	So I introduced myself to this couple and made a long conversation, not realizing they were
	...

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