The coronavirus pandemic is upending our lives. There is understandable fear about how we’ll survive this crisis, not only financially, but also emotionally. But in addition to fear, there’s another emotion that might be even more challenging: Shame.
Losing our jobs and not knowing how we’ll support ourselves and our family is not only sad and scary; it can also be deeply shameful. When the pride we feel about our livelihood is disrupted, we can lose our sense of who we are.
According to Brene Brown, shame is the “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed.” Workshop leaders Bret Lyon and Sheila Rubin describe shame as an “embodied cognition.” As they put it in a recent workshop, “Shame is a combination of a primary, binding emotion with a state of freeze.” The belief that something is wrong with us is not just in our heads, it gets lodged in our bodies.
Embracing Difficulty
The First Noble Truth of the Buddha is that anguish, sorrow, and suffering are unavoidable features of our human existence. His formula for liberation from suffering might be seen as a psychological approach to life. Personal transformation begins by becoming mindful of our inner experience rather than clinging to conventional beliefs, rituals, or superstitions. Similar to modern psychotherapists, the Buddha encouraged us to face ourselves honestly.
