De-shaming:  We recognize our bodies as nature, both wild and civilized.  We recognize and hold our judgements lightly in order to openly witness ourselves and each other.  While we mindfully choose our actions, we release the need to control our experience, asking of our bodies and each other’s bodies what is being revealed through our perceptions.

This principle has three distinct yet interwoven faces:  The power, practice, and importance of witnessing, the perspective that the body is nature, and an opportunity to deconstruct judgement.  Shame is not only an emotion, but also an action:  I can feel shame in myself or shame others by projecting judgement onto them.  Shame and shaming constitute more than just a judgement of a behavior:  They devalue the person who has behaved ‘badly’, whether self or other.  Often the shaming process also involves the larger community, leveraging others to further shame an individual or group.  Shame thus relates personal and communal realities:  We are not just looking at an individual, but at the context of the individual in culture.  Let’s also honor shame as a fundamental human experience, recognizing that shame would not exist if it didn’t serve an essential purpose.  De-shaming examines these relationships, and we should be aware of the cyclical trap of additionally shaming ourselves for feeling ashamed or for holding judgements.  De-shaming is a form of inquiry, not an inquisition.

There is no body outside of nature.  Civilization can train and affect how people and bodies behave, but we remain natural and interconnected systems.  A behavior cannot exist without a person who behaved, and no person’s behavior has consequence outside of relationship with others.  Ecosystems have layers of scale:  We are living systems, participating in living systems, and we are made up of living systems.  Shame can exist within any and all layers of this framework.  To de-shame is to explore the role of a behavior in the physical and social ecosystem as though our behaviors grow on trees—recognizing them as something given by nature.  Our bodies often behave without our conscious intent, and in resonance across the various layers of scale.  I might look at a part of myself with shame because I have internalized a story I’ve received from others directly, or due to what I’ve internalized through structures of media or education.  My shame arises not just because some part of me isn’t what I desire, but due to a belief that if I were behaving ‘better’ then my relationship to others and the whole would be different.  Shame thus asks for my responsibility at my individual scale.  This is what’s right and important about shame:  Shame is a powerful motivator for pro-social behavior.

To witness is to be present with someone or something in its aliveness.  Witnessing draws us deeper into connection with whatever it is we are witnessing.  We can witness at all the social and ecological levels of scale.  I can witness a community within myself, see a part of myself in you, or recognize the divinity of the whole living earth by witnessing leaves ruffling in the wind.  To witness is to acknowledge what is being given by nature.  To fail to witness may be a refusal to acknowledge what is.  Sometimes you or I may lack the capacity to witness, yet failing to acknowledge something doesn’t shift its nature.  Witnessing is a form of love.  What goes unacknowledged will keep asking to be seen and loved.

The problematic aspect of shame is that a part of you or I, a part of society—a part of everything—becomes unlovable and dis-included when subject to shame.  What a shame that this part exists!  If judgement were always sound and consistent from all angles, to dis-include would be brilliantly effective.  Of course, it isn’t.  Shaming others can be an attempt to dis-acknowledge something in ourselves and the larger whole.  An ecological perspective tells us that there is no place outside of the whole.  Every waste in a natural system is composted and re-introduced.  There is no place called elsewhere to which we can effectively banish the behaviors and people we don’t like.  Prisons and executions do this only to the degree that we must sit with the weight of who we imprison and kill to take care of the collective.  It is a troublesome and discomforting task to do so.  Even when such measures are necessary for collective safety, to heal the collective more deeply we can still ask why any behavior arose in the frame of a larger systemic scale, and where it sits in the nature of our shared reality.  To kill the murderer is to kill, and to imprison the thief is to take their freedom from them against their will.  In witnessing behaviors and people, and in witnessing our own judgements, we may recognize we are the very ones we are judging.  Shame on us for judging!  We do well to include that part.

The opportunity in de-shaming is to find the way back to love.  We are given to do this not because it will necessarily fix anything or everything, but because it’s outside our minds’ power to judge or segregate correctly.  There is no one human who carries the moral authority of the whole, and yet each of us is also generated by this wholeness.  Nature pervades all the layers of scale.  In de-shaming we are given the opportunity to inquire into and witness our divinity, and to marvel at the mystery of what is revealed through us.