E is for Embarrassment

As a perpetual blusher, embarrassment is something that has been a regular event in my life. I can’t remember a time when I did not blush, even during my early childhood I was very shy, hiding behind my mother and going red in the face at any sense of attention from others.

At the moment I am more able to embrace the blushing feeling, but I question it because I know feelings of shame and embarrassment are part of the experience for me.

I feel some of us are deeply sensitive to our environment, to the feelings of others and to the unseen energies that we sense in our reality. When I worked in retail I occasionally had a customer who would come in with a very intrusive bombarding energy, they would not say anything that caused me to react in an embarrassed way, but something about this intrusion would make me flush from my heart up to the top of my head.

As I seemed to blush so often I recognised that sometimes it was not embarrassment I was feeling, but simply an increased sensitivity that day and I would be interacting with a personality who was pushy and domineering.

I think most people have felt embarrassment in their lives, but I do know some people who have never felt embarrassed. I wonder do they have such a thick skin or such high self esteem or are they simply not as in touch with their feeling landscape as I am? And are those who feel embarrassed more sincere and genuine because they are more sensitive?

My own embarrassment is slowly changing. I used to be embarrassed to be alive. I had this deep sense of shame and not belonging and felt inherently wrong to be who I was. I was hiding behind a mask of what I believed others wanted from me. It wasn’t until I began my own spiritual exploration that I discovered I needed to reveal my true face and to begin to accept who I was, this was when embarrassment in being myself began to release from my body.

When I was 7 years old my low self worth catalysed as an experience with the headmistress of my primary school. I did not do something in the same way the other children did in a school presentation in front of parents and teachers. After the presentation I was called to the headmistress’s office who could be mean with children. She had her own issues and didn’t seem to like children at all. When I explained why I did it differently to the other children she responded by telling me I had embarrassed the whole school.

Events like the one I had in primary school made me extra sensitive to the world around me. I found myself always looking out for answers, always looking to see who was watching me and I am learning slowly to allow myself to be seen more.

I am not ungrateful for these experiences, I know that all of the feelings of embarrassment simply encouraged me to know myself more, to delve deeply to see where my inner wounds may be causing me to react in certain ways. The experience with the headmistress was one of many. Most experiences of embarrassment happen in front of a crowd of people, an audience. They mirror our own inability to love or accept our feelings and experience in that moment. And they also stem from childhood experiences where we watched our parents react in a certain way to similar situations or we were told we were doing something wrong when we made a mistake.

We all make mistakes, but we are often not taught how to handle those mistakes emotionally. As adults we can look at any mistake and learn from it and if we fall down the stairs in front of a crowd of people we can see it was an accident and we are human. As we learn to explore who we are we can then learn to embrace all of our humanity. This is when embarrassment lessens and we can step into our own power and be our whole selves in a state of wonder.