Reflections

​I work a lot with Gestalt Therapy, which at its core looks at what is coming to the foreground, in other words what is emerging. Whatever rises to the surface is the next thing to look at and to immerse myself in. What has arisen in my life this week is "shame". It has been prominent in the work I'm doing with others, but also in my own process.
 
Brene Brown's definition of shame in her book "Daring Greatly" is: "Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging."
 
I also like her differentiation between guilt and shame:

            "Guilt = I did something bad.
            Shame = I am bad."  

Whereas guilt can motivate us to do better in the future, shame often is very debilitating and results in us wanting to hide, not be seen and simply disappear. Even though shame is about the fear of disconnection, it actually keeps us imprisoned in the loneliness and isolation. Shame prevents us from talking to one another and thereby making it harder to get out of the spiral. And, we all have shame. Interestingly Brene Brown says that we can't eradicate shame, but we can be resilient to it, i.e. we can go through the experience and come out the other end being stronger and more courageous. Steps in becoming shame resilient are: recognition, awareness, reaching out and talking about it to the appropriate people.
 
My personal experience this week was that I made a mistake and I felt ashamed about it. However, instead of trying to cover it up or try to make excuses, I managed to just fess up to it, feel the guilt around it, feel uncomfortable and sorry, but also know that I'm not a bad person, because of that error of judgment I made. I had my own back in that moment. The way I see the process: It's about snuggling up to the uncomfortable and unspeakable places, becoming aware of them, feeling them and then also speaking about them.
 
My sense is that at the moment, a lot of deeper patterns and injuries are surfacing, accompanied by feelings of shame, anger, frustration and exhaustion. It's easy to move into isolation with that feeling that we are a bad person or that we have not done the work; that there is something wrong with us. I encourage to reach out to people you can trust and who love you and share with them what's going on for you.
 
We feel the live-streamed classes are an opportunity to check in, to connect with one another and to feel less isolated. We also understand that finances might be a concern of yours, so we've made one recording a week available to especially those of you who truly cannot afford a session. For those of you who have the means, recordings are available daily through our website, where regular class rates apply. Even though recordings don't provide the platform to connect as much and you won't get any live and tailored feedback, we hope they are still useful.
 
Here is the link to the free class. Thank you Janet for making this possible:  
 
Free Recording of Live Streamed Class

FREE Live Streamed Class >

Here is the link to our Timetable including Recordings:  
Online Timetable 

Online Timetable >

Finally, we'd like to remind you of our changed refund and cancellation policy. Until 1st of May, we will allow partial refunds back onto your client account, so that you are not losing any unused sessions. Please contact us by 30th of April to get this arranged. Your class pass needs to be valid in order for us to be able to issue the refund. We've also currently suspended our 24 hour notice of cancellation policy. You will be able to cancel free of charge up until the class starts. Classes will be charged in full if not cancelled at all. This policy is in place until 30th of April 2020.

​Walk in beauty
Sandra