What Humans Do

It makes me so happy that I'm willing to feel my sadness.

Use to, Shame guarded the door to the room that stored my Sadness.

In order to feel my Sadness, I had to encounter Shame.

And Shame was too shameful to be encountered.

Until now.

And now I'm not ashamed of Shame!

And that allows me to enter the Room called Sadness.

And I'm sad.

And that is good.

That is what humans do - they feel sad.

Too Big, Too Small, Just Right

I was watching a Netflix movie called "The Summit". It is a movie about climbing K2, the second highest mountain in the world. And in it, one of the alpinist said, "Sometimes you dream too big and sometimes you dream too small and sometimes you dream just right."

Something inside of me smiled when he said that.

Normally, I experience shame around dreaming too big. If we did that as children, we were told we were "too big for our britches". My adult version of that is that I concocted wax wings and flew too close to the sun. In other words, I should have known better or shame-on-me-for-being-presumptuous.

Recently, having experienced "dreaming amiss", I am observing my disappointment and shame.

But when the alpinist said that, I thought, "But of course ... that is what we humans do: "Sometimes we dream too big and sometimes we dream too small and sometimes we dream just right."

Good for us!

Confession - Detaching or Embracing?

So I've been told that one way to view "confession of sins" is to view it as a practice that teaches us to  "detach from one's thoughts". In other words, if we successfully detach from our thoughts, then when our thoughts tell us "we have sinned" and we detach from them, then that means we are not "sinners".

So there is a lot of merit to "we are not our sins".

But the flip side to "detaching from our thoughts" is, if we detach from the thoughts that tell us we have sinned, we also have to detach from the thoughts that tell us we are fine.

I would advocate for a different approach. I would champion "confession of sins" because it teaches us to embrace our shadow side; it teaches us that if we go into the world of good and bad, right and wrong, then we have to embrace both.

If our shadow side is when we constrict around our virtues, then when I locate my shadow side (i.e. confess my sins), then I am on my way to finding my virtue.