Dancing with Shame & Eros: Part I

Written by Bhav Nancherla

I'm inspired to use this space to have some of my colleagues, clients, and friends share some of their own writing.  Below we have our first guest post by Luminosity alum, Bhav Nancherla*.

---

Where does love go when shame swallows it?
- Beya Jiménez

Here are two moments when eros and shame danced together in my life, and what I’m learning about their entanglement…

A few months ago, sitting on a plane just before take off, I suddenly and very unexpectedly felt this huge effusion of sexual energy, as though I was feeling the thrust of the plane as a force in my own body, translated through the erotic. This had never happened to me before, and I was surprised and frankly, a little aghast. As I sat there, wedged way too close in space to two other passengers’ bodies, something else in me took over with the energy of “this is so deeply inappropriate, it cannot be allowed to happen,” after which I watched a powerful energy within me fold these sensations up, so completely disappearing them as if they had never occurred. How exacting a force is shame: how deeply it can entwine and contain these powerfully evocative impulses towards generativity, towards risk, towards pleasure.

Many years ago, in a season of significant chaos and messy boundaries, I made a choice that caused a lot of hurt to someone I loved. On the other side of this transgression, in the remorse of the hurt I’d caused, I used shame as incantation: sitting in front of a mirror, I cast a spell of shame to call myself back into a shape that was more coherent than the messy reality that was unfolding. I’m not saying if it was a good or bad thing - but it was extreme and effective. It called me back into containment. Was it the right move to fit back into that shape? I don’t know; it certainly didn’t undo the hurt, nor could it stop what had unfolded, even if it did change the course going forward a bit. I think a lot about the role of shame in the complexity of its heavy medicine and its powerful ability to close in around the unfolding of life.

From somatics, I’ve learned how life pulses through existence - a series of expansions and contractions: the inhale and exhale of breath, the beating of our hearts, the tightening and softening of muscles and organs in every movement we make. The same phenomenon guides energy between bodies: life unfolds as enlivening expansion into new possibilities, and then orients to (re)containment, as we integrate and make sense of what has happened, and feel out how this growth fits into who we know ourselves to be.

This pulsing feels in relationship with life and death, with love and grief, with movement and stillness, and I’d invite, with the energies of eros and shame. Where eros invites us to unlock and move into new possibilities, shame brings us to contain and integrate back into oneself. This is how life tangles with the individual ego, this small and precarious container of self, present in the question that shame can often ask: “who do you think you are?”

Giving this experience any dignity might land hard; shame carries such heavy residue in our current reality. For the most part, this is rightly so: it is a powerful magic that has become co-opted by the power structure in the service of domination and oppression. Inside this paradigm, shame has been forced into service too strongly, made overactive in its potency to contain and diminish our life force. This stranglehold is exactly what’s intended by a power structure that seeks to overcontain the power and aliveness of the vast majority, for the benefit of a few. Nothing is so effective in preventing the violence of rebellion and upheaval against the existing inequitable structures as the tightening that internalized shame produces. Something capable of violence prevention sounds like a good thing, and perhaps in right relationship, it is a neutral tool. But in a paradigm committed to “power over,” it has been made into a weapon: we’ve been manipulated into a system where the containment medicine of shame is being used against us to maintain the violence of injustice.

Is there such a thing as right-sized shame?

Outside of this violent misuse, what else is the energy of shame, and is there a right use for its magic? I believe even its medicine has a right role (though maybe we need a different word for it to better distinguish from the heavy-handed shame that has come to be used in service of oppression!), best framed in its relationship to eros.

Eros is definitely an energy where magic is regularly called in - it’s the stuff of stories, these potions and spells to invoke love and the aliveness of connection from those we hope for it from. It’s where our wishes and longings call loudly, and we are so fully humbled into surrender at just how little control we have. Truly, this must be the place where magic feels the *most* alive, in how eros can create such fulfillment, delight beyond delight, or even run chaotic in its generativity.

And alongside this enlivened, maybe even raucous energy, there is another kind of magic: these spells of shame. Shame is the potent contracting tincture that calls back the aliveness of eros. What erotic energy can throw wide open, shame can fold right back up into such tight knots that it disappears completely.

Shame is an experience that is often so diminishing of our aliveness and power that it feels hard to justify, but hear me out on why we need to feel for the magic in shame, too. I think there is such a thing as shame in right relationship: in its right size and use, shame contracts what might feel a little reckless without some titration. There are moments of pleasure or ecstasy or simply abandon, when one forgets everything but the sensations alive in that moment, and a right-sized drop of shame can drop us back into the awareness of witness/other - oh, right: another being is present here, beyond my own experience. Growth, change, transformation, and emerging aliveness matter - yes! And yet so do pace, stability, continuity, and our connection to what has been…we learn to dance between the freefall of movement and the relief of steadiness.
​
It’s important to wonder about what right-sized shame could be, because without asking this, we struggle to differentiate it from the oppressive version of shame that overpowers our eros, and keeps us from what we deeply long for. It also helps us notice that our power structure insists that some bodies bear a massive load of shame (much of which isn’t theirs), in order to enable other bodies (of those with power) to feel none - and this numbing is a part of what enables harm. Correcting this collective imbalance requires that all bodies have practice with the capacity to tolerate right-sized shame, and to know the difference between when something is right-sized, too much, or too little.

How do shame and eros dance in the unfolding of our lives towards purpose?

We live with a hope-driven cultural bias towards progress, positive change, this idea that we must always be moving towards our next evolution. Whether or not it is for the sake of “progress,” it is fundamentally true that we are always in movement and in states of change. This is the energy of eros in our lives, inviting continual growth and unfolding.
​
There is a way that this flow towards growth is accompanied and guided by something larger than ourselves, if we allow ourselves to listen for this - something that seeks to continually move us towards a sense of felt purpose, towards some arc that serves the collective, the all. The trajectory may not be straightforward, but there is a wobbly spiral on which we are each continually deepening into our truths, and who we are meant to be. It is in service to something greater than ourselves that this dance between shame and eros can become the rhythm of our unfolding into purpose, in both the expansions and contractions it moves in our lives.

Prompts for further reflection...

If you’d like to examine the energies of eros and shame in what’s changing and growing within you, here are some reflection questions:
​

• How do you notice the energies of eros and shame present in the longings you have for your life? How do they speak as felt sensations and experiences in your body?
• With the gentlest curiosity, an invitation into deepening honesty with yourself: how is your dance with shame? (Shame can be so vulnerable and isolating to feel into - you might meet it very softly in yourself with a sideways glance, rather than direct confrontation.)
• Where might shame be trying to hold on or stay locked into a shape that has served you until now, rather than allowing for the flow of new (maybe scary!) possibilities? How does it feel in your body that lets you know? 
• If (the right dose of) shame was a soft whisper instead of a shout, a gentle nudge instead of a tight grip: what would be allowed to come a little more alive in you? Who could you become?

---

*Bhav Nancherla mostly moves in this world as a somatic practitioner, facilitator, and parent - held and shaped especially by generative somatics and Training for Change. They've moved in a range of roles and spaces over the last 2 decades: non-profit operations, anti-violence & sexuality rights movements, radical childcare collective organizing, full-spectrum doula support, and peer sex health education, to name a few.  
​
These days, they feel very lucky to be deepening relationship with spirit for both the day-to-day and collective scale, and as parent - humbled and moved by the practice of unconditional love. ​. Bhav longs to be of service in ways that reestablish the dignity and resourced flow of care, and especially for revitalizing channels for our grief. 

Bhav lives on unceded Lenape land, also known as Brooklyn, NYC, and have relentless gratitude for the generous beauty offered by the waterways and life of nearby Prospect Park.