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Posts Tagged "shame"
I am angry. Yup. Just plain mad! And I’ve changed my mind about something that I used to be wrong about. I am a fairly conservative dresser. I don’t ever wear sleeveless things and I rarely wear shorts. I am fairly modest in my choices even though I like bright colors and I like things that are a little bit funky. I notice if my children wear things that look “tacky” and I have been known to send all three of them back upstairs to change for various reasons. That said, I am fed up with so-called “dress code enforcement” in schools that only gets applied to women. I read an article the other day that talked about “students humiliated for dress code enforcement.” I want to point out these weren’t just students, they were all young women. Young girls were asked to “bend over” to see if their skirts are too short. Women are being sent home in schools all over the place. You can see the video here of one school. Another mom fought back when her daughter was sent home on the last day of school because her dress was allegedly too short. She wore the offending dress to her daughter’s graduation ceremony. You can see that here. In Quebec this week, a 3-year-old girl was called out for swimming without a top and asked to leave. Read the article here. The child’s mother was told the child couldn’t be topless because they didn’t want her to be targeted by pedophiles. Are you kidding me? What? Are we really going there with our children? After further consideration, I think we need to examine our policy on dress codes altogether. Everyone is talking about whether the schools are being too strict and whether the clothing really is offensive. I think everyone is asking the wrong questions. The question we should be asking is why can’t women drape their bodies in whatever they want to? We have laws for public nudity. I am not...
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I have been meaning to share this for a while now, but as with all things shame related, it’s hard. It happened a couple of weeks ago. It wasn’t anything horrific or bad but it has gotten in the way of my practice for a while now, so the shame is clearly lingering. I was super tired one day lying on my mat doing a full class shavasana. I thought it was going well. I had that crazy sense of time where I felt like I was in deep relaxation but every time I had awareness, another 15 minutes had gone by. Then the teacher touched my wrist. “You are snoring,” she mouthed. Then I felt the shame. Oh no! I was really embarrassed. I stopped doing shavasana and started doing some poses. I couldn’t trust myself not to go back to sleep. I felt a sense of panic. Had I embarrassed myself? How loud was I snoring. Did I disrupt people? I felt the need to apologize after class to the instructor. She said all the right things–“It happens to all of us, it’s no big deal, don’t worry about it.” I thought it was over. I let it go. I went about my yoga practice for the next week. It was the most tiring week yet. I was getting more and more exhausted. And then I realized what was happening. I was worried about doing long shavasanas because I was worried I would snore. I was exhausting myself because of shame. I confessed my transgression to a couple of women in the locker room. “I snored last week in class,” I shared. “Just lie on your side,” one friend suggested. I am still struggling with this in my head although I have been conscious of how this continues to affect my yoga practice. Before, I felt more free and able to rest when I needed it. Now I am conscious of trying to do long shavasanas when I am not so sleepy....
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“I am ashamed of you.” I can hear it rattling around in my head, feeling my face get hot. The feeling of not enough.
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I have been on a major organizing kick. I have been buying magazines for a couple of years that mention “organizing” on the cover. I got a quote from a professional organizer. And we decided to give it a go ourselves first, to see how far we could get. I bought a book that I liked and I have been following the author’s steps of: Sort Purge Containerize Equalize I worked in my office all last week and got it up to speed, and this week I am working in the boy’s room. It’s a big job. I worked on Xander’s side of the bed on Sunday and we got a good start. I’m going to try to do one side of the room each day. Today I worked on their Lego table. I had looked at it yesterday and I’d been asking them how it might make sense to organize it. Emerson said by color and shape. I was driving by Target and I had some time so I went in to look. I found some plastic bins in 2 sizes. I got 12 small bins that stack and 6 large bins that stack. I thought we could use the small bins for the Legos themselves and the large bins for unfinished work and projects since they are always working on something. I also got a label maker, as recommended by the book. I brought everything home and went through the mess of Lego. One of the hardest parts of getting everything organized is letting go of feelings of inadequacy or shame that I haven’t done this sooner. Anyway, I sorted every Lego into a box by color, and the organization system started to emerge. I got my label maker and labeled every container and every section. The label maker was very satisfying and fun. I tried to think about what might work and how to make it a useful system. I was lucky that I had a block of time when the...
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It is the hot white flash behind my eyes
the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach
the churning river of not good enough.
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