I believe that healing from shame is possible…
Hi there, I’m Helen and I know how it feels to be the outsider and never quite good enough.
My battle with shame’s been a long one. It’s something that’s always been there in the background. It affects everything from decisions to behaviours, friendships to faith.
Shame tells me I’m weird. It makes me feel I’m the odd one out and the only one who struggles. It’s led me into abusive relationships where I didn’t know that I deserved better. It forces me to hide my true self around others. It makes me feel as though everyone’s against me. It causes me to hurt myself on purpose. It makes me feel like a failure when I achieve anything less that perfection. It’s isolated me from others and caused me to pull back from relationships. It’s stopped me from getting close to people. It’s even almost led me to take my own life on a couple of occasions.
A lightbulb moment for me a few years ago was discovering that the things that I hated about myself the most – things like pride, perfectionism, difficulty loving others and excessive shyness – were almost all rooted in shame and self-rejection.
From the Love Not Shame blog
Starting to heal
Thankfully, my story doesn’t end there. I started on a journey to get free from shame in around 2017. I’d hit rock-bottom – a long-term relationship had just ended and with it I lost my home, my dog, my life savings, my dreams, my business, most of my possessions and, most significantly, my health (I became bed-bound with ME/CFS and POTS).
It was then – stuck in bed with no distractions – that I really started to heal.
Now you DON’T have to become bed-bound to recover from shame. There are other ways to heal and that’s what Love not Shame is all about. I like to think that I went through all that so that you don’t have to. I’m still on my healing journey but I’ve come a long way and my role now is to point you in you the right direction.
In 2022 I started a blog – Love Not Shame – to document my struggles and how I’m getting free. I’m a big believer in vulnerability and my blog is extremely vulnerable. Someone has to say the hidden things out loud and let light into the dark places, and that someone is usually me.
All this time of going through my own healing journey, my deepest inner longing has been to help others to get free from captivity to shame.
Now, after years of learning about shame, doing the difficult inner work, gaining experience and qualifications in things like: running peer support, yoga teaching, leading meditations, mental health, supporting people in different bodies and with different abilities, I’m finally ready to share with you the tools that have helped me so much.
I’m excited to introduce the brand-new membership community, coming soon
Every month in the community, I will be adding tools like shame-free yoga, self-compassion exercises, meditations, spiritual exercises and more.
The key part though is that all of this is done in community, with a trusted group of people to journey alongside you.
I believe that connecting with yourself, others and divine love – as well as practicing self-compassion and learning to be vulnerable – are the keys to getting free from shame.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t always easy, and it can be daunting to let others see the real you.
But the result is more than worth the struggle.
You can subscribe to the Love Not Shame email newsletter to be notified when registration opens and get a sneak peak at one of the tools I will be offering – shame-free yoga.
