Game of Thrones will remain my favorite television show of all time. Despite my bitter feelings about how it ended, I still maintain that it is the best show ever made for television. Period. Yes, you can fight me on this, Sopranos lovers!
This show did weird things to us. It often made us feel sorry for the most vicious characters. (Not Joffery, obviously!). His mother, Cersei (played brilliantly by Lena Headey).
When Cersei is imprisoned by the Archbishop, she is tortured like hell. We don’t feel too bad about that. “She deserves it”, we say.
But then something shifts and the viewers, especially women, start to empathize with her.
(Spoilers: If you haven’t watched Game of Thrones and would like to in the future, you might be better off scrolling past the next few paragraphs)
When Cersei is released from her imprisonment, she is asked to do the Walk of Shame. She is stripped butt-naked and asked to walk the entire distance to her palace, crossing markets and streets lined with commoners. Men and women whom she rules as the Queen Mother.
People go insane! Men step forward with their penis dangling provocatively. People throw garbage at her, call her names and spit at her. The heart-wrenching moment in this scene is another woman, a nun, walking behind her, fully clothed from top to bottom, with a bell in her hand. Septa Unella who had been charged with the responsibility of torturing Cersei during imprisonment and overseeing the ‘walk of shame’ rings the bell and shouts “Shame” with every step Cersei takes.
When Cersei falters, she pushes her from behind never forgetting to chant "shame.” It really is a gut-wrenching moment. Probably one of the very few times in the entire series when we feel for this otherwise ruthless woman.
Maybe we feel for Cersei because we know this feeling all too well.
Shame.
A deep wound Patriarchy has left us with that’s festered for thousands of years.
David Hawkins, the creator of the Map of Consciousness® (the energy scale of different levels of Consciousness or energy), puts Shame at the lowest frequency.
Shame (measured through applied kinesiology) calibrates at a frequency of 20.
In comparison, Fear calibrates at 100 and Anger at 150, both much higher than Shame.
Perhaps they knew this at some level so while they instilled fear in women in a variety of ways (Witch Hunts, for example), a more long-term plan to keep us cowering was to send us all on a never-ending Walk of Shame.
Shame is everywhere.
It is one of the 7 layers of social and cultural conditioning that must be peeled away from us as we pass the 4-Stage Initiatory Path of the Journey Home to Self.
Feeding your child from your breast in public is shame
Our body hair is shame
Desiring pleasure is shame
Gaining weight is shame
Being skinny is shame
Desiring power, fame, and success is shame
Not wanting children is shame
Making a lot of money is shame
Making very little money is shame
Making no money is shame
Leaving your cushy or horrendous 9-to-5 job to pursue a career in creative arts is shame
Being spiritual or witchy is shame
Quitting is shame
We feel shame often and most of the time without even knowing.
When I decided to quit my successful business and pursue my Spiritual calling, I felt a lot of shame.
There is a word coined for anyone who starts to own their Spiritual gifts. It is called “Coming out of the Spiritual Closet.”
I used it often and with a lot of shame those days.
As if our spiritual nature is something we need to be ashamed of. As if we weren’t born as spiritual beings having a very human experience. As if this was a punishment given to us and now we need to come out of the darkness as we walk the walk of shame as Septa Unella rings her bell and chants “shame” behind our back.
That is how I felt. Shame on letting them down. Who exactly? I do not know. My entire family including those extended cousins and relatives I haven’t been in touch with for more than 20 years. My home country. My peers. My friends.
I do not know who, but yes suddenly the burden of pleasing everyone fell on my shoulders. And, the weight was heavy.
Shame is also what I felt as my Priestess journey began to unfold and I started to fall in love with Goddesses such as Isis, Mary Magdalene, Mother Mary, Grandmother Ana, and Quan Yin. I felt shame of my entire country. I imagined their fingers pointed at me accusingly to say “How dare you bring a non-hindu deity in your life?”
Religion all over the world is perfectly primed for us to feel shame. Especially for women.
It did not matter that not even a single person said any of this to me in reality. That shame, manufactured by organized religion centuries ago was instilled in me and I kept feeling it without questioning its validity.
Shame does not care for our wholeness, peace, or joy.
It only cares about making you feel less than and the most disappointing person in the world.
Shame will take you to places you never want to go.
Shame is walking in public naked with people throwing their shit at you because they do not know what to do with all the shame they have within themselves.
It is the lowest frequency because often people will prefer death to shame. There is nothing after shame. You cannot sink lower. It’s a dead-end.
Women have been walking around drenched in shame. We feel it so much, we don’t know what to do with it so we hurl it at other women any chance we get. Which is perfect for Patriarchy because this is exactly what they wanted.
In the book Witch: Unleashed, Untamed, Unbound, author Lisa Lister says “Modern Day Patriarchy keeps us complaint by pitting us against each other, exploiting our guilt and making us fear and mistrust each other”
Even though that entire scene in Game of Thrones is fictional, we can all think of a Septa Unella in our lives.
A fight against Patriarchy would have meant, Septa Unella stripping off her gown and head covering - - Cersei and her skipping hand in hand, both naked, singing and dancing as they made their way to the palace. Once in the palace, they would’ve laughed and laughed together skinny dipping and celebrating each other’s bodies and the power it holds, with some wine and good food.
But as Lisa says “We live in a cultural climate that makes women feel perpetually guilty for simply being women”
Shame leads to Guilt. Calibrated as per Hawkins, Map of Consciousness scale at 30, just slightly above Shame.
Lisa goes on to say “This is the modern-day equivalent of the Inquisition. Only, instead of terrorizing us with accusation, torture, and public executions, Patriarchy has made us torture ourselves.”
We put ourselves on trials every single day. I am guilty of it too.
We watch our thighs rubbing against each other, our boobs sagging, pubic hair growing unruly, our pores as big as craters on the moon, and the lines and wrinkles on our faces and we cast ourselves out.
“Before the trial begins, we already know that we’re guilty” - Lisa Lister
Shame is the most powerful torture of all. It keeps us isolated. It prevents us from talking to our sisters, our friends, and our partners.
We all feel shame. But isolation is where it festers. It spreads like an unchecked coronavirus.
The antidote to Shame is shining a light on it. Speaking it aloud.
This does not mean making a social media post and leaving yourself vulnerable, but perhaps sharing with a friend, therapist, or mentor.
A sacred circle is a safe space to transmute shame. It’s where you are seen, heard, and understood exactly as you are. A simple act of speaking shame is the very medicine to reverse it. When spoken in a sacred space, it alchemizes, its power over you reduced.
I have seen it happen many times during Sacred Circles. There is a release of energy that happens when Shame is released from our bodies. You can see it on the face of the person who speaks.
When left unchecked, Shame festers and turns into resentment, bitterness, or revolutions. Sometimes we need that too. And sometimes we just need to release the Shame so we can start to heal and restore our beautiful bodies and minds.
A couple of years ago, I was working through my shame having decided to not have any more children. I felt the shame of this decision in my body, leaving me paralyzed for days. In a meditation, my channel started to move through me. The words that came comforted me. It was the balm I needed to alchemize my shame into pure fuel.
Sharing the channeled message with you below exactly as I received it, just in case you need to hear this too.
Your shame is like a lotus flower growing in the mud. We know that you see shame as something to hide, but when shame is given all the attention, it blossoms into power. Shame is the absence of agency, the absence of your own inner power. That is why we compare it to the lotus. A lotus can only grow in the midst of the muddiest of waters. It needs the dirt, the murky waters, and the cold dampness of mud to grow and survive. Just like that, shame also survives in muddly, murky waters. When you see shame, and we mean really see it, look at it in the eye, you will see a small lotus bud, ready to bloom. You see the vulnerability, the courage, and the resilience of the human for doing something that went against the grain, for taking a stand, for standing out of the crowd.
Mary Magdalene was shamed for being a consort to Jesus, as she was the only woman to stand next to him as an equal. Mirabai was shamed for being enamored with Krishna, even when she was a married woman as this was not allowed in her customs. You my dear have felt shame for choosing abortion because in your culture a woman is supposed to want children. Many women these days are shamed for not having children for the same reason. Wherever shame lies, you will find your own innate power, courage, strength, and resilience and thus, like a lotus flower, that dies every night to give birth to itself again, you too will use the muddiness and dirt of the shame around you, put down your roots deeper and bloom like a lotus flower. Shame is your and mine deepest wound, but it is also our biggest catalyst for transformation.
With so much ❤️
Deepshikha
"We watch our thighs rubbing against each other, our boobs sagging, pubic hair growing unruly, our pores as big as craters on the moon, and the lines and wrinkles on our faces and we cast ourselves out."
I am gutted by this. Thank you for articulating it.
I loved this post - Deepshikha shares such important wisdom which resonated deeply with me. It's heartbreaking the inherant shame instilled in women and girls, and whistleblowers like Deepshikha are essential for breaking the cycle.