I came across some emotions as I learned about a family member who shared how they payed for a cleaning service. Disappointment surfaced in me in a way that I realize is not healthy. And I know the feeling is an essential aspect to my human experience, a real response from the bowels of my limbic system. A gut feeling. I am irritated by the idea that people chose not maintain and clean their home and delegating this life chore to a sub class of people. I judge and cannot unsee this as an irresponsible act of paying another person to clean me as “serviceable”. I know this is a judgment on my part, and the pain this concept creates in me is a reminder of the idea that my grandmother’s brilliance was distracted and her creative vibrance was derailed by the irresponsibility of a class of people who lured her away from aspiration, to clean their messes. Not only to clean their messes, but to clear time so they could find luxurious activities, selfishly satiating their lives. Is this fair of me to surface these darker emotions.
I don’t want to create shame, I know the effects of shame and I know how it cannot be synthesized by our hearts. And it is still useful. In holding on to this paradox of shame and its utility, I find that it might be a vitamin to our soul. Something essential to our growth but equally something that cannot be absorbed by us, our bodies. This is a seed for meditation.
Shame does not seem to be a condition that should be transferred, and even the idea of sharing it might need to be avoided, in favor of transcendence. The root of all soulful vitamins might be to dissolve the compounds and bonds of trauma, pain, and grief to release the healing, their nutritious cathartic energy of grace.
The healing is mine. The healing is loving through the disappointment. The cathartic energy is being able to transcend the paradoxical encounter of shame and the moment, so that I love the other in front of me, before I resort to shaming.
