Bread & Shame: What do they have in common?!

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There I am, at 10:20 in the morning, cutting into a piece of freshly baked bread (because I married the type of man who normalizes baking sourdough bread…). The smell always takes me back into a simpler time where eating bread was one of life’s greatest joys. And after a full decade of being unable to eat bread due to some vague diagnosis of “IBS” (and healing it entirely because of the way I now choose to live), bread nowdays tastes that much better. 

But, this is not a story about bread. This is a story about how the undercurrent of shame shows up when you least expect it. 

So, as I was saying – there I was, cutting into a piece of freshly baked bread and taking out (wait for it) margarine to put on it (with salt, of course, I’m not an animal!). As I am doing this, I am noticing my own internal dialogue “margarine is disgusting” “I don’t know what you’re doing but…gross” “this will definitely kill you” and other such stuff going through my mind while my body is doing the action of prepping to eat.

Everything I do in my line of work revolves around pattern interrupting habituated patterns of thought (and replacing them with Quantum TLC™). So I was surprised to notice that this very dialogue had been going on in my head every.single.time I eat bread. 

This time I paused … I noticed … and I asked myself what I often ask my clients … whose voice is that?!

Ah, there it is. My fathers. 

Now, up until today, I would try to rush through all the actions, put the margarine on, add the extra salt, and wolf the damn thing down (before anyone sees me?).

But today, once I noticed, I chose to pause, and slow down. 

I chose to take ownership of my choices (in this case, to eat bread with margarine and salt because I damn well please). And in having done so, I noticed the undercurrent that was running the show of my moment for 36 years of my life: internalized, deeply rooted shame.

Now, if you are curious about exploring this nominalization called shame, I offer you some resources for you to consider. Shame is culture’s most powerful weapon because it works. In the last Igniting Your Potential monthly gathering, I found myself saying something along the lines of “parents intentionally choose shame as a tool in order to control their children’s behaviour”. 

This is just facts of life – I don’t believe parents are malicious; I believe patterns (fractals) replicate, so parents use the parenting strategies they know work (because it worked for them). But you 

This is a never-ending intergenerational chain … it will replicate itself till death do us part: aka, until The One in the chain of events wakes up and chooses not-that. 

Curious about how I choose parent? Check out this love letter to my son >

You see, unless and until you and I become mindful of our moment, all we have available to us is repeating history. That’s the power of modeling, especially same-gender modeling. Whether we like it or not, “when did I become my mother?!” has become a cliche in our society for a reason. 

So if you don’t want to become your mother and continue the traditional foot binding processes that keep you (and those you love) enslaved to a double bind of untruths and half-truths, then you, right here, right now, must choose to wake up … and stay awake (hardest thing you’ll ever choose to do, moment to moment, breath to breath, infinitely). 

Staying awake is not a one-and-done. It is a process as fundamental as breathing in and out. This is something I’ll let my friend and co-worker speak to so eloquently in her blog “Lifting the fog of shame” 

“Like fog over a town, shame roiling through our inner landscape penetrates everywhere and everything, obscures our vision, slows movement to a crawl, dampens desire to do anything except stay warm and dry and wait it out. Unlike fog, though, shame won’t just burn off, lift, or otherwise vanish on its own. We can’t control the weather. We can, however, choose to own the foggy apparitions of shame we carry. Owning the shame as our creation, and a genius one at that, is what invites the fog to lift and WOW, there it (Jennifer Hatt)

If you are curious about the process of the pattern interrupt that is an absolute necessity when it comes to waking up and staying awake, I recommend you delve into Louise LeBrun’s book “Fully Alive: Awakening health, humour, compassion and truth” where she outlines the process that it takes to naming it, claiming it, choosing it, changing it (sample reading available here). 

And if you are ready to dip your toes into the life-enriching waters of WEL-Systems based conversations, I invite you to check out the services I offer here, and the resources I have created for you here. You have many options, so simply choose intuitively what’s next for you. 

Movement is a sign of life! 

So, choose movement over stagnation … movement accelerates evolution and frees you; stagnation keeps you in the familiar box replicating mindlessly from fear and pain and shame. From where I stand, that’s no way to live … but hey, what do I know about your meaningful life? 

All I know is…breathing is good!

PS – Shame is an undercurrent that lives inside every single one of us. Here’s another instance of how it showed up for me when I was parenting my child, and again, I chose to STOP, and pattern interrupt to discover. By doing so, I own it … not the other way around.

PS – if this blog post sparked something in you, I invite you to share it with a woman (or two) in your life who you believe would benefit from reading it.