We live in a world of beauty and barbed wire. That conflicting reality can leave us dizzy, feeling out of balance and confused. When we experience both joy and pain, we ultimately struggle with a lack of peace with ourselves and with our experience. But there’s a way through.

The barbed wire often leaves us with a sense of unease or dismay rooted in toxic shame, the sense that we are, on some level, irredeemably broken. Every weakness and mistake we see in ourselves is further confirmation of that reality, and we simply accept that version of things. It then makes us dislike ourselves and assume that others feel the same.

The way through is integration of healthy awareness of our own limitations and shortcomings, and of the fact that weakness, mistakes, and pain are inevitable parts of the human experience, but that these do not need to define or defeat us. Rather, we can orient toward the beauty in our experience and in our ability to navigate the pain.