What If Shame Was A Bridge And Not A Barrier?

​I’m in so much pain I don’t know what to do with myself. A physical pain that, though isolated to just the muscles to the inside of my left shoulder blade, has taken over my whole body. I am crooked and off kilter and have that sick feeling in my stomach that comes when pain is great and relief is in the distance.
 
Though I did get a bit of it for a bit. A chiropractic adjustment that caused discomfort and release, both, and lasted for my car ride home but now I am back to pain. An I-am-crooked-and-it-hurts-to-sit-and-so-I-am-hunched-over-this-keyboard-to-write kind of pain. It sucks.
 
I woke up fine. Really good, actually. Later than normal because my perfect and beautiful and I really can’t live without her Doberman puppy, who is now a dog, had a sleepover at her favorite friend’s house. And so I slept in and awoke rested and feeling just fine and then, in that weird-and-in-an-instant-where-you-just-move-a-bit-funny-and-then-it-is-not-funny-at-all kind of way, I was where I am now. With a misaligned rib and a pain that runs from the cramped up and spasm’d muscle down the back of my left arm. And into my soul.
 
I think I’ll cry a little bit. That always helps.
 
Speaking of soul pain, this is what I was originally going to write about today. Because of a quote I saw yesterday. When I was at the movies with my youngest daughter and my lovely husband. We say Atomic Blond. Really good movie. Great soundtrack. Go see it.
 
So we saw Atomic Blond but before this we saw the four hundred previews that theaters are showing these days so that the start of the 4:00 movie was actually like 5:15. Ok a bit of an exaggeration but you do know what I am talking about.
 
So we saw the many previews that, because Atomic Blond is an action movie, were action movie themed as in violent and scary with some evil thrown in because, you know, we don’t have enough evil in the world so it’s important to have it presented in fiction.
 
Anyway, one of these previews, it was not evil, or scary or action packed. In fact, I am not sure what this movie is about at all. Or what the name if it is. I didn’t pay attention for too long. That short attention span thing. But while I was paying attention, on the screen I saw “What if shame was a bridge not a barrier?” And as I was taking this in, I looked over at my beautiful daughter as she said I love this quote and typed it into her phone to remember. I whispered this is my writing for tomorrow, my brain already visiting the many times that this bridge had appeared for me and the many times I was brave enough to cross it.
 
There is this great book called Broken Open, by Elizabeth Lessor. She writes about those moments in your life that can break you down. But that these are actually the moments that can break you open. They are the opportunities to learn and grow. To rise above the traps and the trauma and to evolve into that next best place where you are destined to travel. This shame quote is this same thing. Shame is our opportunity. When we feel this, it brings us immediately to those deepest of hurts that have planted roots inside our bodies and our hearts and our minds. And our soul. These hurts are our history.
 
They are also our compass.
 
For within those moments of deep shame we are most aware of those things that we must heal. Shame shows us where our work lies. Warm and dark and painful to the touch, shame beckons and if we are willing to sit in her silence we will hear her truth.
 
Shame is our bridge. Cross it.