47 | David Bedrick | What’s It Like Being You?: Listening for Soul Beneath Shame and Suffering
“Shame hides us from ourselves.”
Here is an audio version.
A video version can be found below.
In this compassionate conversation, David invites us to see shame and suffering not as flaws to fix, but as doorways into deeper understanding. Drawing from decades of intimate therapeutic work, he illuminates how healing begins when we recognize and honour the intelligence within even our most difficult experiences.
Together, we explore the courage it takes to slow down amid the myriad pressures of modernity, to loosen the grip of survival strategies, and to allow parts of ourselves to fall apart—inviting a kind of beautiful ruination that makes space for true care and soulful transformation. At the heart of this conversation is a call to unshame ourselves and each other through presence, curiosity, and compassion rooted in a deep recognition of life’s wild and woven wisdom.
Find Thematic Show Notes Below
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Thematic Show Notes
The Roots and Mechanisms of Shame:
How shame hides our vital nature and distorts perception
The unconscious fear of complexity and wildness
Shame as a mode of exile: “What’s wrong with you? You don’t belong.”
The invitation to unshame: asking, What’s it like to be you?
Unpathologizing the Human Experience:
Symptoms as expressions of deep intelligence
Witnessing rather than fixing: the radical act of curiosity
Seeing depression and disordered eating not as problems to solve, but as stories asking to be heard
Honouring psyche’s creative attempts at survival and transformation
Soul, Collapse, and the Beauty of Ruins:
What if falling apart is part of becoming whole?
Making beauty even in the crumble
Letting go of coping mechanisms that once kept us safe
The necessity of slowing down to hear the call of soul
Care, Intimacy, and the Sacred Act of Witnessing:
Redefining care as presence, not rescue
The courage to companion someone through the underworld
Soul-making as the opposite of labeling and diagnosing
Trusting in the wovenness of all life: “The same intelligence that grows broccoli lives in you.”
A Hope for These Times:
How modernity disorients us from our essence
Building new structures to hold us through identity collapse
Reclaiming the child within as a compass of truth and vitality
Living from feeling, not performance—from the root, not the mask