How Social Norms Control Our Wellbeing

How A Pastor Released Guilt And Shame

Last week my family and I, including my in-laws from overseas, we all able to meet my mother and her husband for the first time. It was such an enjoyable experience for all of us. We rented a home in Florida for four-days along the Gulf of Mexico. Mornings were leisurely consisting of a light breakfast of coffee, fruits and vegetables, rice, and pastries.

After breakfast we would all go to the beach and collect shells, talk, and just enjoy all the beauty that nature has provided us along the oceanside. This was also the first time my daughter met my mother, her grandmother. There were many firsts, and sadly, a few lasts as well. My wife’s parents are elderly and live overseas making this trip potentially the last. This is a mindful moment.

One evening while we sat at the dinner table having coffee and dessert, my mother who also is Buddhist, began to relate to me the first time she went to the Thai temple in the late 1980s. She told me how different it was than what she has experienced at a Christian or Catholic Church. All the different ornamentations throughout, smells of incense burning, and even set-up of the hall was not like she had ever experienced. Overall, it was certainly an enjoyable experience.

But the revealing aspect to this entire experience was how she felt afterwards, a little guilty and a little shameful for going ‘against’ Christianity. How was she supposed to reconcile participating in a non-Judaic-Christian religious service? And that’s where a Pastor came in to help ease her mind.

At the hospital where she worked as an ICU nurse, she ran into the hospitals pastor where she began to relate this experience and her current dilemma regarding her feelings. The kind pastor, with a warm and inviting smile, said to her ‘out of all of the religions out there, Buddhism practices love, kindness, empathy, and compassion towards all beings and is in no way against what Christianity’s message promotes’. There was nothing for her to wrestle within her mind now. This too is a mindful moment. 

But what I’d like for you to consider from this story is one of how society, and that may be any society, uses social norms to keep people behaving in a certain, safe, and predictable way. And that if you stray too far from what is acceptable, feelings of guilt, shame, and unworthiness begin to form and be watered. 

As I’ve talked about before in posts and during my Dharma livestreams, guilt and shame are controlling behaviors because we’ve conducted ourselves in some fashion outside of what is expected of us. And that conduct doesn’t even need to be harmful to others or ourselves to allow these feeling to begin grow.

When we live and follow the Noble Eightfold Path the Buddha has laid out for us, we know that our actions and thoughts are wholesome and positive right from our very intention. So it's important to be aware of when were feeling these controlling emotions. Recognize when we’re feeling them and say to them ‘I see you guilt’, ‘I see you shame’. Thank them for their brief visit and let them go. This too is a mindful moment.

I wish you peace and ease,

Vladimir

Blue Lotus Meditation and Mindfulness Center is a registered 501(c)(3) religious organization.