Original Sin and Shame: Where Did We Learn We Weren’t Enough?
As I began reflecting on human suffering, I found myself returning to a question I’ve been exploring for years: How have teachings about original sin and shame shaped the way we see ourselves, our worthiness, and our relationship with God?
Last week, a fifteen-year-old boy in my community died by suicide.
I never knew him, but I know his mother. We’ve exchanged plants from our gardens over the years, and I keep thinking about these little pieces of life that we’ve shared with one another, still growing in each other’s yards.
And now her son is gone.
As a mother of a fifteen-year-old boy myself, I’ve been struggling to find the words. And while I would never pretend to understand what led to this tragedy, I can’t stop thinking about how many people around us are suffering in ways we cannot see.
How many have learned to hide their emotions, pretend they’re okay, or believe that needing help somehow makes them weak?
And how many of us have spent our lives carrying an even deeper wound, the belief that there’s something fundamentally wrong with who we are?
Where did we learn that we weren’t enough?
Throughout *Know Thy Soul*, we’ve been exploring ancient stories that reveal how we lose connection with ourselves.
In the Handless Maiden, we witnessed the loss of the feminine, our ability to feel, trust, and act upon our inner knowing. In Perceval, we explored the masculine wound and the armor we learn to wear to protect ourselves from vulnerability.
And now, as we turn toward the Garden of Eden, I want to ask a question that has been on my heart for years.
**What if we’ve misunderstood one of the most influential stories in Western civilization?**
At the end of Genesis Chapter 2, Adam and his woman are described as naked and unashamed.
I’ve always found that fascinating.
Of all the ways the author could have described humanity living in paradise, we’re given an image of two people who have nothing to hide. They can be fully seen, exactly as they are, without believing there’s something wrong with them.
And then something changes. They become ashamed. They cover themselves. They hide.
But what does God do? God comes looking for them. “Where are you?”
I wonder how differently we might understand our relationship with God if we saw that question not as an accusation, but as an invitation to come home.
You were never born unworthy of love
So many of us have inherited beliefs that teach us to measure our worth by what we accomplish, how well we behave, or how closely we meet the expectations of others.
Some of those messages come from our families, some from our culture, and some from the religious traditions that were supposed to bring us closer to God.
But what if love was never something we had to earn?
What if, like the father running toward his son in the parable of the prodigal son, God has been calling us home all along?
In this week’s deeply personal episode of *Know Thy Soul*, I’m exploring the relationship between shame, human suffering, and the beliefs we’ve inherited about our worth.
I share some experiences I’ve never spoken about publicly before, a different way of understanding the Garden of Eden, and a moment from my own life when I experienced what it might feel like to be truly naked and unashamed.
And I close with a letter to anyone who may be struggling, especially those who have begun to question whether their life matters.
Because I believe you were never born unworthy of love.
And you don’t have to find your way home alone.
Content note: This episode discusses suicide, suicidal thoughts, bullying, grief, and religious shame. If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 in the United States for free, confidential support, available 24/7.
Mentioned in this episode:
- The heartbreaking death by suicide of a fifteen-year-old boy and the questions it raises about compassion, suffering, and human connection
- How we learn to suppress difficult emotions and become disconnected from our own suffering and the suffering of others
- What The Handless Maiden and Perceval reveal about emotional wounds, vulnerability, and the armor we learn to wear
- Why so many people suffer silently while appearing successful, happy, or strong on the outside
- The relationship between shame, bullying, feelings of unworthiness, and suicidal thoughts
- Why asking for help is not a sign of weakness
- How childhood experiences and generational wounds shape what we believe about ourselves
- The belief that we’re not enough and how Rapid Transformational Therapy explores its origins
- The doctrine of original sin and the psychological implications of teaching children that they’re born inherently flawed
- What The Emperor’s New Clothes reveals about religious authority, fear, and our willingness to question inherited beliefs
- Why the love we naturally offer a newborn child challenges the idea that worthiness must be earned
- What Genesis reveals about humanity’s original state of being naked and unashamed
- How Perceval’s armor and the Star card reflect the journey toward emotional vulnerability and wholeness
- What Jacob’s wrestling with God might teach us about questioning, doubt, and spiritual growth
- A personal experience at Esalen that offered a glimpse of what it means to be fully seen without shame
- Brené Brown’s distinction between guilt and shame: I did something bad versus I am bad
- Why Adam and Eve’s decision to cover themselves and hide may symbolize a change in consciousness rather than a flaw in human nature
- What the prodigal son reveals about unconditional love and the invitation to come home
- How Isaiah describes God’s love through the tenderness and compassion of a mother
- Why the Bible’s journey from Genesis to Revelation might be understood as humanity finding its way back into relationship with God
- What Noah Kahan’s song Call Your Mom reminds us about darkness, hope, and holding on
- A heartfelt letter to anyone who may be struggling, reminding them that their life matters and that they were never born unworthy of love
- And the deeper question beneath it all: What if the journey isn’t about becoming worthy of God’s love, but finally recognizing that we always were?
Content note: This episode discusses suicide, suicidal thoughts, bullying, grief, and religious shame. If you or someone you love is struggling, call or text 988 in the United States for free, confidential support, available 24/7.
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The full episode transcript is below.
Last night, as I was washing my face before bed, I noticed an ant crawling across my bathroom vanity.
I didn’t just smush it and go along with my routine. Instead, I grabbed a clothing tag that was sitting nearby, let the little guy crawl onto it, and then dropped him into a cup so I could carry him outside.
I do this all the time. I save almost every bug I find in my house. In fact, last week I accidentally killed a spider I was trying to rescue, and you guys, I actually cried.
I know that might sound a little ridiculous, but I’ve always believed that all life is sacred. Even the smallest life.
And I used to joke that when God created me, perhaps my compassion meter was turned up a little too high.
But lately I’ve begun wondering whether maybe my compassion compass isn’t turned up too high at all. Maybe I’ve just held on to something that we’ve slowly learned to lose.
The ability to recognize the sacredness of another life, the sacredness of all of life.
And maybe that’s why I’m having such a hard time finding the words today.
Because the morning I wrote this episode, a fifteen-year-old boy in my community died by suicide.
Fifteen years old.
It happened just one mile from my house. I never met him, but I’ve met his mother a few times. We’re in the same gardening group, and she’s been to my house several times to trade plants.
Some of the plants growing in my backyard came from her garden. And I keep thinking about how those plants once knew her son. Somehow, I can almost feel them grieving, too.
And somewhere in her yard, there are plants that came from mine. Plants that have since come to know him, too. And I imagine they’re grieving his absence as well.
These little pieces of life we’ve shared with one another, still growing in each other’s gardens.
And now her son is gone.
My heart hurts in a way I can’t quite explain. And every time I look at those plants, I cry.
And sometimes I find myself talking to them, asking them to somehow tell her how much I love her. How much the world is grieving with her. How I know we’ll never fully understand what she’s going through, but how deeply we wish we could take even a little of that pain away.
I know that might sound strange, but somehow I feel like these little plants are connecting us. Like there’s this invisible thread running between our gardens, carrying all the love and compassion I don’t know how to put into words.
Fifteen years old. I keep thinking about how much life should have been ahead of him. How much he had yet to experience. And how much pain he may have been carrying that the rest of us couldn’t see.
I keep thinking about his parents. About how you even begin to comprehend something like losing your child.
And I know there are no words that can make this better. There’s nothing anyone can say that will take away what happened.
I cry every time I think about it.
I never knew this boy. But I have a fifteen-year-old son of my own.
And today, I hugged him tighter than I think I ever have. I wanted him to know, without a shadow of a doubt, just how much I love him.
And I think, in some way, I was also hugging him for a mother who will never get to hold her son again.
[Pause]
And you guys, I keep coming back to this question.
When are we, as a society, going to start taking a deeper look at human suffering?
We talk about mental health awareness, suicide prevention, access to treatment, and the importance of making our communities safer. And all of those things matter. They matter enormously.
But I also think we need to be willing to ask some uncomfortable questions about the culture we’re creating. About the beliefs we’re passing down to our children. And about how we’ve learned to respond to our own suffering and the suffering of others.
Because one of the things I’ve learned through my years of training as a healing practitioner is that we can’t just keep putting Band-Aids on a bee sting with the stinger still in it. We have to be willing to look beneath the surface, to ask where the pain is coming from, and to find and remove the stinger, as we talked about back in Episode 12.
And I wonder whether one of the things we’ve lost, particularly in the Western culture I’ve grown up in, is our ability to sit with difficult emotions.
Somewhere along the way, so many of us learned that sadness is weakness. That anger is unacceptable. That crying makes other people uncomfortable. That we’re supposed to pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off, and get on with our lives.
And when we don’t know what to do with our own feelings, how are we supposed to know what to do when someone else is hurting?
So we tell them to get over it. We tell them to look on the bright side. We tell them everything happens for a reason, or that they just need to think more positively.
And sometimes, we don’t say anything at all. We look away because we simply don’t know what to do. We numb ourselves. We bury our feelings. We pretend everything is fine.
We put on our armor, just like Perceval, and charge forward toward the next accomplishment, hoping that somehow the success we find on the outside will heal the pain we’re carrying on the inside.
We accept cold, silver hands as replacements for the genuine feeling and connection we’ve lost.
And like the people in The Emperor’s New Clothes, we can find ourselves standing in front of something that is clearly wrong, yet nobody wants to be the one to say it out loud.
Now, I never met this boy, and I don’t know what he was experiencing or what led to his death.
But I do think we need to start asking some much deeper questions about the culture we’re creating.
Because I believe we’ve become so disconnected from our emotional lives, from one another, and from our own inherent worth that we’ve created a world where far too many people are suffering without knowing how to ask for help, or believing they’re worthy of receiving it.
And I don’t think we can keep treating that disconnection as though it’s normal. Because I think there are far more people around us carrying immense pain than we realize, and so much of that suffering is invisible to the rest of us.
And I keep wondering what our world might look like if more of us knew how to sit beside someone who’s hurting without trying to fix them, judge them, or convince them they shouldn’t feel the way they do.
What if we could simply listen? What if we could let another human being know that they don’t have to hide their suffering from us? And what if we could begin teaching our children that their feelings, even the difficult ones, are not something to be ashamed of?
And maybe the problem isn’t that some of us feel too much. Maybe it’s that we’ve become a little too comfortable feeling so little.
And you know, when I look back on my life, I can see how often people tried to convince me that I shouldn’t feel the things I was feeling. As though they could somehow talk me out of my compassion.
I hated fishing with my family as a little girl. I couldn’t watch them hook the worm, and then unhook the fish later. And whenever I got upset, they’d tell me, “Oh, they don’t feel anything.”
As though that was supposed to make me feel better. As if everything I was feeling in my own body somehow didn’t matter. And I’m sorry, but I still don’t believe that. Did you ever ask the worm if he didn’t feel anything?
And you might think that was just the imagination of a little girl, but my own sons love to fish, and to this day, I have a hard time sitting with them while they do it.
They hooked a turtle once, and you guys, I almost died inside.
When I graduated from college, I moved to Boston for a few years. And one of the things I really struggled with was seeing so many people experiencing homelessness. I’d never encountered it on a daily basis like that before, and it broke my heart.
I remember people telling me, “Oh, you’ll get used to it.” And I remember thinking, I’ll get used to it? Why would I ever want to get used to seeing another human being suffer?
And I remember another time when a friend was trying to convince me to watch a television show that I found incredibly violent and disturbing. She said, “Just give it an episode or two. You’ll get numb to it.”
Um, no. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to get numb to any of it.
I’ve never understood why we find so much entertainment in watching people hurt one another. Violent movies, television shows, video games where the whole point is to kill as many people as possible.
I’ve just never found that kind of entertainment very entertaining.
And you know what’s interesting? When I look back on those experiences, I realize that people were telling me essentially the same thing: Don’t feel so much.
Don’t worry about the worm. Don’t let the suffering of people on the streets bother you. Don’t worry about the violence you’re watching. You’ll get used to it.
And I think that’s how it happens. Not all at once, but little by little.
We learn to talk ourselves out of what we’re feeling. We tell ourselves we’re being too sensitive, too emotional, that we need to toughen up.
But think about the stories we’ve been exploring together. Isn’t this exactly what happens to the feminine in so many of our fairy tales?
We lock her away in a tower so we don’t have to hear what she has to say. We offer her a poisoned apple to silence her. We cut off her hands so she no longer has the power to act on what she knows. Or we even take away her voice completely.
Think about what those images are showing us.
When we dismiss our feelings, when we convince ourselves that our compassion is inconvenient or that our emotions are something we need to overcome, aren’t we doing something similar within ourselves?
We’re silencing the very part of us that knows when something isn’t right.
And eventually, we can become so accustomed to pushing those feelings aside that we barely notice we’re doing it anymore.
There’s a passage in the book of Ezekiel where God promises, “I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
I don’t know about you but our hearts are what make us human. I don’t want a heart of stone. I don’t want to numb to someone else’s pain. I don’t want to lose my ability to recognize that pain. I don’t want to become so accustomed to suffering that I stop noticing it.
And I understand why so many of us want to numb to it. Sometimes the suffering in this world feels overwhelming. Sometimes becoming numb seems like the only way to protect ourselves from feeling so much.
But I’d rather have a heart of flesh, even if that means my heart breaks sometimes.
Because here’s what I think we forget when we tell people to toughen up, push their feelings aside, or just get over whatever they’re going through.
Numbing ourselves doesn’t make the pain disappear.
Think about a wound with a stinger still lodged beneath the skin. We can cover it with a bandage, but if we never remove what’s causing the pain, the wound will likely only get worse.
And I think the same thing happens with our emotional wounds. We keep covering up the pain without ever addressing what’s causing it.
And here’s what makes this even harder.
Most of us were never really taught what to do with difficult emotions in the first place. Like Perceval, we learned how to behave, how to perform, how to be successful, and how to make other people happy. But how many of us were actually taught what to do when our hearts were breaking?
How to sit with grief? How to express anger without hurting ourselves or someone else? How to ask for help when we’re afraid? How to recognize when the pain we’re carrying has become more than we can manage alone?
And then, on top of all of that, so many of us are carrying this deeply rooted belief that we’re somehow not enough.
So now we’re not just hurting. We’re ashamed of the fact that we’re hurting.
We begin believing that our inability to handle everything on our own means we’re weak, that there’s something wrong with us, or that we’re somehow failing at being human.
And I wonder how many people are suffering in silence because they’ve never been given the tools to understand what they’re feeling, and they’re too ashamed to let anyone know how much they’re struggling.
And I want to be clear that suicide is far more complicated than any one of these things. But when I think about how many people are suffering, especially our children, I can’t help but wonder what we could change if we began taking their emotional lives as seriously as we take everything else.
According to the CDC, in 2025, roughly one in seven American high school students reported seriously considering suicide during the previous year.
One in seven.
When I was in middle school, I was bullied. And it got so bad that there were days when all I wanted to do was crawl into a hole and never come out.
It made me question my worth. It made me feel unloved, unwanted, and unworthy of belonging. I started wondering what was so wrong with me that other people seemed to find it so easy to be cruel. And after a while, I began believing that maybe they were seeing something about me that I couldn’t see myself.
And when I finally reached out to adults for help, I was met with indifference. “Just get over it, Jenn.” “Ignore them.”
As though it were that simple. As though I could somehow turn off the pain, or stop caring about what other people thought of me.
And I honestly don’t know which hurt more. The bullying itself, or the lack of compassion from the people I turned to for help.
Because when you’re a child and someone is hurting you, you need to know that somebody cares. You need someone to listen, to take you seriously, and to remind you that the way other people are treating you has nothing to do with your worth.
But when the people you turn to dismiss your pain, you can begin to wonder whether maybe it really is your fault. Whether you’re too sensitive. Whether there’s something wrong with you for hurting so much.
And I’ve never shared this publicly before, but there was more than one occasion during those years when I thought about suicide.
I never told anyone that part.
According to the CDC, nearly 49,000 Americans died by suicide in 2024. That’s approximately one person every eleven minutes. We’ve been talking for almost 20 minutes so in the next 2 minutes, 2 people will have killed themselves.
And while we often hear about suicide among teenagers, this is something that affects people of every age.
In fact, nearly 80 percent of those who die by suicide are men. Men are dying by suicide at almost four times the rate of women.
Isn’t that exactly what the story of Perceval pointed to? Remember how Perceval learned to become a knight? He put on his armor, learned to fight, became successful, and eventually earned the admiration of the entire kingdom.
But beneath all that armor was a man who was deeply wounded. A man who had learned to pursue achievement and recognition while remaining disconnected from his own emotional world.
And I keep coming back to the part of his journey where he expresses just how deeply he has suffered, even reaching moments within that success when he wanted to die.
Think about that. This story has been passed down for centuries. This isn’t just a modern problem. This is a spiritual crisis at the very heart of what it means to be human.
I wonder how many people around us are doing the same thing. Going to work, raising their families, achieving success, smiling, and telling everyone they’re fine, while privately carrying pain they don’t know how to share.
Especially men, who have so often been taught that strength means keeping it all together. That vulnerability is weakness. That they should be able to handle whatever life throws at them without asking for help.
But suffering isn’t weakness. And asking for help doesn’t make someone any less strong. I don’t think we talk nearly enough about how difficult it can be to be human.
We need to find the stingers of that suffering and pull them out.
And I believe one of the deepest stingers of all has been hiding in plain sight for centuries.
In the very religious beliefs that have shaped so much of our Western world. The beliefs that were supposed to bring us closer to God, but instead taught so many of us that we were never worthy of God’s love in the first place.
When I was studying Rapid Transformational Therapy, or RTT, one of the most common beliefs we were learning to help people recognize and change was this deeply rooted feeling that they’re not enough.
Not good enough. Not smart enough. Not lovable enough. Not man enough. Not worthy enough.
In fact, Marisa Peer, who created RTT, also started an entire movement around three simple words: “I Am Enough.”
Because so many people are walking around with this underlying belief that there’s something wrong with them. That no matter what they accomplish, how hard they try, or how much they give to other people, they’re somehow still not enough.
And so much of the work we did was helping people recognize where those beliefs came from, how they’d shaped their lives, and how they might begin to see themselves differently.
And one day, I started thinking about my own childhood.
I went to Catholic school. And one of the earliest things I remember learning about my relationship with God was the idea of original sin.
If you’re not familiar with it, original sin is the teaching that humanity inherited a fallen condition from Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden.
And centuries later, St. Augustine even connected the transmission of original sin to sexual desire and the very act through which our parents conceived us.
Think about that. The very sexual act that brings us into this world became associated with passing down a condition of sin.
And this isn’t just some obscure theological idea. It’s the reasons the Catholic Church baptizes babies: for the forgiveness of sins.
Think about that for a moment.
Before a baby can walk, before they can talk, before they’ve even had the opportunity to make a single choice about right or wrong, they’re baptized for the forgiveness of a sin they didn’t personally commit.
And that’s the teaching I grew up with.
That I had entered this world already carrying something that needed to be cleansed. That there was something wrong with my very nature before I’d even had the chance to do anything wrong.
I think we’ve given religious institutions far too much freedom from criticism when it comes to the psychological harm their teachings can cause.
We live in a country that protects freedom of religion. And I believe people should absolutely have the freedom to explore their relationship with God, to practice their faith, or to decide they don’t believe in God at all.
But here’s what I don’t understand.
Why have we become so comfortable accepting harmful messages about human beings simply because they’re being taught in the name of religion?
We allow children to grow up believing that there’s something fundamentally wrong with them from the moment they’re born. That their bodies are shameful. That their natural desires make them sinful. That God is watching their every move, ready to judge and punish them.
We’ve used religious teachings to justify treating women as inferior to men, to deny them authority over their own lives and bodies, and to tell them that obedience and submission are somehow part of God’s design.
We’ve used them to shame people for who they love, for their sexual orientation, for their gender identity, for questioning the beliefs they grew up with, and sometimes simply for being different.
We’ve taught people that anger is sinful, that doubt is dangerous, that sexuality is something to fear, and that suffering may be a punishment from God.
And we’ve sometimes made people afraid to leave communities that hurt them by teaching them that stepping away from the institution means stepping away from God.
And you guys, isn’t this exactly what the con men did in The Emperor’s New Clothes?
Remember, they didn’t just convince the emperor that he was wearing magnificent clothing. They told everyone that only people who were foolish or unfit for their positions would be unable to see it.
And isn’t that exactly what we’ve done with religion? We’ve taught people that if they question the authority of the institution, they risk their very salvation. That without the institution, they might never get into heaven.
And just like the emperor’s subjects, we become afraid to trust what we can see with our own eyes, what we feel in our own hearts, and what that quiet voice of wisdom within us has been trying to tell us all along.
Because we’ve been convinced that the people claiming to speak for God must know God better than we do.
And here’s something I want you to consider.
Have you ever held a newborn baby in your arms, looked down at that beautiful little face, and thought, “There’s something fundamentally wrong with you?” or maybe told it “You are just so unworthy of love?”
Of course you haven’t. The very idea sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?
And yet, we carry those same innocent babies into a church to be baptized for the forgiveness of a sin they never committed.
And then we allow religious authorities to teach them that they’re fundamentally flawed human beings. That there’s something wrong with their very nature, something they can never fix on their own, and that only through the institution’s teachings can they hope to be saved.
Think about what happens when a child begins to internalize the belief that there’s something fundamentally wrong with who they are.
Not just that they’ve made mistakes, but that something about their very nature makes them unworthy of love.
And what happens when that belief follows them into adulthood?
When we hold a newborn baby, we don’t see someone who needs to prove they’re worthy of love. We see this miraculous little human being, completely vulnerable, completely dependent on the people around them, and somehow already deserving of all the love and tenderness we can give.
They haven’t accomplished anything. They haven’t earned a degree, built a career, made anyone proud, or done a single thing to prove their worth.
And yet, we love them. Simply because they exist.
And think about what happens when that same baby begins learning to walk. They pull themselves up, take a few wobbly steps, and fall right back down.
What do we do? We smile. We encourage them. We hold out our hands and say, “Come on, sweetheart. Try again. You’ve got this!”
We don’t look at that child lying on the floor and say, “Well, clearly there’s something wrong with you. You should be ashamed of yourself for not getting it right the first time.”
Of course not! We understand that falling is part of learning to walk. We don’t confuse a child’s inability to do something perfectly with their worth as a human being.
But somewhere along the way, we begin treating our mistakes as evidence that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us. We even call those mistakes sins, and we’re taught that God is keeping a record of every single one, rather than seeing our mistakes as opportunities to learn, grow, and become more fully human.
And then, after spending our entire lives trying to be good enough, we imagine ourselves arriving at the pearly gates, where God makes one final decision about whether we’ve earned the right to enter heaven.
If we can look at a child who falls and recognize that they deserve our encouragement, our patience, and our love, why would we imagine that God’s love is somehow less generous than our own? Aren’t we, too, made in the image and likeness of God?
And you know, we’ve spent almost four months together learning what it means to have the eyes to see and the ears to hear that Jesus spoke about.
We’ve explored fairy tales, mythology, and scripture, looking beneath the surface of these stories to discover the wisdom that’s been hiding there all along.
And now, I want to invite you to use those eyes and ears to look at what may be the most influential story in Western civilization.
The story of Creation and the Garden of Eden.
Because what if one of the very stories that’s been used for centuries to reinforce these beliefs about sin, shame, and our inherent unworthiness is actually telling us something entirely different?
Because what if the problem isn’t the story itself, but the beliefs about ourselves we’ve inherited from the way it’s been interpreted?
Because when I return to the original story, I don’t find a humanity created in shame. I find a humanity created in wholeness, harmony, and balance.
Here’s something I find fascinating.
The Bible begins with humanity living in relationship with God, in a garden, with man and woman united as one, and the Tree of Life.
And in the final book, Revelation, we find the Tree of Life again. A new heaven and a new earth. Another marriage, the marriage of the Lamb and his bride. And God dwelling with humanity once again.
So what if the Bible isn’t simply telling us the story of humanity’s fall?
What if it’s also showing us the journey of finding our way home? 26 (the journey of learning how to pick ourselves back up again, and take the next step, and learn to walk once again with God)
This story is going to take us weeks to get through. But for today, given what happened in my life this week, I want to focus on something that I think is especially important to the conversation we’re having.
Our original design.
The way God created us to be, before all the shame, before all the hiding, before we began believing that there was something fundamentally wrong with us.
And I think that original design is illustrated beautifully in the final passage of Genesis Chapter 2, which may be one of my favorite verses in the entire Bible. “Adam and his woman were both naked, and they felt no shame.”
Have you ever really sat and thought about that? Why are the two descriptions we’re given of humanity living in paradise that they were naked and without shame?
Wouldn’t you expect something a little more exciting? I don’t know, maybe perfect weather, endless sunshine, unlimited food, and maybe no mosquitoes? Maybe the world’s first all-inclusive resort, where nobody has to work, the drinks are always cold, and apparently nobody needs sunscreen?
But no.
Of all the things the author could have chosen to tell us about this paradise, we’re told that they were naked and without shame.
Now, I do think this passage points to physical nakedness, but I believe there’s also something much deeper happening here.
To be naked means to be fully exposed. To be open, emotionally and spiritually vulnerable, with nothing to hide. It means being able to feel what we feel, express what we’re experiencing, and allow ourselves to be seen without believing there’s something wrong with us.
No masks. No pretending. No need to hide the parts of ourselves we’re afraid someone might reject.
And remember Perceval? He spent so much of his journey putting on armor, learning to hide his feelings and protect himself from being seen as weak.
But to heal his wound, he had to begin taking that armor off. He had to learn how to become vulnerable again, to feel his feelings, and to allow himself to be seen.
In other words, he had to learn how to become naked and unashamed.
And isn’t that exactly where we began in the Garden of Eden?
And I want to share something personal with you here.
I use tarot cards as one of the ways I reflect on what’s happening in my life and listen to my intuition. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pulled the Star card when I’ve asked about this podcast.
If you’re not familiar with tarot, the Star card shows a naked woman kneeling beside a pool of water. She has one foot on the land and the other in the water, and she’s holding two vessels, pouring water onto the earth and back into the pool. Above her, the night sky is filled with stars.
And remember, water is often symbolic of our emotions and the unconscious. So here we have this woman, completely naked and unashamed, with one foot in the physical world and the other immersed in the emotional world, allowing the water to flow freely.
And every time I look at that card, I’m reminded of what I’m guided to do here with Know Thy Soul.
I’m not trying to create some polished persona or pretend to be someone I’m not. I’m not trying to convince you that I have everything figured out, because believe me, I don’t.
I’m trying to show up as honestly as I can. To share what I’ve learned, what I’m still questioning, and sometimes the things I’m struggling with myself.
I’m trying to be emotionally and spiritually naked with you.
And that’s not always easy. Sometimes it means sharing things I’ve never spoken about publicly before. Sometimes it means admitting that I don’t have an answer, or that my understanding of something has changed.
And sometimes it means knowing that some of you listening might judge me for what I share.
And you know what? I’m okay with that now. I certainly wasn’t when I first started thinking about this podcast. Back then, I was terrified of putting myself out there and having people criticize me, disagree with me, or decide they didn’t like what I had to say.
But somewhere along the way, something changed.
I stopped looking outside of myself for permission to feel worthy. I began finding that worth within myself, and through my relationship with God. And I began recognizing that my failures, my emotions, and even my desires weren’t things I needed to be ashamed of. They were all part of being human.
And little by little, I found my way back toward the wholeness that this story is describing.
Does that mean I live in that place all the time? Of course not. Believe me, I still stumble. I still have moments when I question myself or worry about what other people think.
But just like that baby learning to walk, when I fall, I look for Gods hand to help me get back up and try again.
Plot twist: What if the entire Bible is telling us a story we’ve somehow managed to misunderstand?
What if, after the Garden of Eden, we’re watching generations of human beings who believe God is angry with them, that they’re fundamentally unworthy of God’s love, and that they have to spend their lives trying to earn their way back into God’s good graces?
And what if the story that unfolds is actually the story of humanity wrestling with that very understanding of God?
Wrestling with our shame, our fear, our suffering, and our belief that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us.
Until, little by little, we begin discovering that the God we’ve been so afraid of was never withholding love from us in the first place.
What if the journey isn’t about becoming worthy of God’s love?
What if it’s about finally recognizing that we always were?
Not convinced. Do you know what the name Israel means?
In the book of Genesis, Jacob spends an entire night wrestling with a mysterious figure, and afterward, he’s given a new name. Israel. A name the story connects with struggling, or wrestling, with God.
Think about that. One of the most important names in the entire Bible comes from a man who wrestled with God.
Not someone who had all the answers. Not someone who never questioned, never struggled, or never doubted. Someone who wrestled.
And honestly, name me one human being who hasn’t wrestled with the great questions of existence at some point in their life. Why am I here? Why is there so much suffering? Is there a God? And if there is, where is God when we’re hurting? Is that an angry punishing God or a loving, nurturing one?
And I wonder if we’ve gotten something terribly wrong when we teach people that questioning God is something to be ashamed of.
Because what if wrestling with God isn’t a sign that we’ve lost our way? What if it’s part of how we find our way?
And I think that’s part of what being naked and unashamed really means.
Being willing to show up with our questions, our doubts, our emotions, and our imperfections. Being willing to admit that we’re still figuring things out, without believing that somehow makes us less worthy of love.
And that’s what I’m trying to practice here with you.
I don’t want to sit behind this microphone pretending I have all the answers. I don’t want to claim some absolute certainty about God, the soul, or the mysteries of this life. And I certainly don’t want to be another voice telling you what’s good and what’s evil, what’s right and what’s wrong, and what you’re supposed to believe.
We’ve had enough of that.
I want to explore these stories with you. I want to ask questions, challenge some of the things we’ve been taught, and share what I’ve discovered through my own experiences and my own wrestling. And sometimes, I may come to understand something differently than I do today.
I’m not asking you to agree with everything I say. In fact, I hope you’ll question some of it. I hope you’ll wrestle with these stories and discover what they have to teach you.
Because I don’t believe the purpose of this podcast is to tell you what to think. I believe it’s to help you remember how to listen to that wisdom within you.
And I’m doing that same work right alongside you.
And maybe that’s part of what the image of nakedness in Eden is inviting us to remember.
What would it feel like to live without constantly worrying about whether the person we really are is someone other people will accept?
To be seen, exactly as we are, and not feel ashamed.
I want to tell you a story about a time when I think I experienced a little glimpse of what that might feel like.
Last year, I attended a voicing workshop at a retreat center called Esalen, on the coast of California. One evening, about ten of us from class gathered in one of the hot springs tucked inside an enclosed stone room.
Now, at Esalen, all of the baths are clothing optional, and let’s just say most people exercise that option.
Only three days into the retreat, these strangers had already begun to feel like family. But something happened that night that I’ll never forget.
And the acoustics in this stone room were incredible. Every time we sang or made a sound, our voices echoed all around us.
And I don’t really know how to explain what happened next, but somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like we were just a group of people singing together.
It started to feel like something sacred was happening. One by one, each person began sharing something tender. Something they were carrying that needed, as one friend described it, the sweetness of honey to help it heal.
A man in his late sixties started crying as he talked about how much he loved his mother and how difficult her final moments had been.
I had actually come to Esalen because I wanted to spend some time grieving my dad, who had died just two months earlier. And I shared the story of the last time we looked into each other’s eyes. It was one of those moments I’ll never forget, because there was so much love between us, but also so much sadness.
Another mother talked about the joy of watching her children grow up, but also how heartbreaking it can be to watch them slowly become more independent and need us less. That strange experience of being so proud of who they’re becoming while also wishing you could hold on to them just a little longer.
And one of the men, who was celebrating his birthday, talked about how much of his life he’d spent chasing perfection, working, and trying to accomplish everything he thought he was supposed to accomplish. And how tired he was of carrying all of it.
And do you know what was so extraordinary about that night?
Nobody tried to fix anybody.
Nobody offered advice. Nobody tried to convince anyone that they shouldn’t feel the way they did. Nobody judged anyone for the things they shared.
We simply listened. We allowed each person to tell their story, to express whatever they were carrying, and we held space for them with compassion and love.
There we were, ten people who had been complete strangers just three days earlier, sitting together in a hot spring, naked in every sense of the word.
Physically naked. Emotionally naked. Spiritually naked.
For a little while, it felt as though the rest of the world had disappeared. I could feel what I can only describe as the breath of God moving between us.
We allowed ourselves to be fully seen. And we allowed one another to be fully human.
I think, if only for an evening, we found our way back to Eden.
And what made that night so extraordinary wasn’t just that we were willing to share all those deeply personal things about ourselves.
It was that nobody made us feel ashamed of them. And that’s what I want to come back to in that passage from Genesis. Adam and Eve weren’t just naked. They also felt no shame. Did you hear that? No shame.
And I think that’s something we need to spend a little more time talking about, because shame may be one of the most destructive emotions we experience as human beings, particularly when it becomes part of how we see ourselves.
And there’s actually quite a bit of psychological research supporting just how deeply shame can affect our mental health.
Brené Brown has spent years studying shame, vulnerability, and belonging, and one of the most important distinctions she makes is the difference between shame and guilt.
Guilt says, “I did something bad.”
Shame says, “I am bad.”
Guilt is about something we’ve done. Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe we hurt someone. Maybe we said something we wish we could take back.
And guilt, when it’s appropriate, can actually be helpful. It can move us toward taking responsibility, apologizing, repairing relationships, and making different choices in the future.
But shame is different. Shame isn’t about what we’ve done. It’s about who we believe we are.
It’s the painful belief that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us. That somewhere beneath all the things we do, all the roles we play, and all the ways we try to be good enough, there’s something about us that makes us unworthy of love and belonging.
And the research on this is troubling.
A 2024 review of studies involving adolescents and young adults found significant connections between shame and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Other research has found that young people who are more prone to shame can also be more vulnerable to depression.
Now, that doesn’t mean shame causes suicide, or that everyone who experiences shame will become depressed. Human suffering is far more complicated than that.
But what do we do when we believe that we are what’s wrong? How do you fix yourself when you believe the problem is your very existence?
And I think this is where shame becomes so devastating. Because when we believe there’s something fundamentally wrong with us, we often begin to hide.
We gather the armor, or the fig leaves, and hide our mistakes. We hide our feelings. We hide the things we’re embarrassed about, the things we’re afraid of, the things we think other people won’t understand.
Sometimes we even hide the things that make us unique, because somewhere along the way, we learned that being ourselves might cost us the love or approval of the people around us.
And the more we hide, the harder it can become to allow anyone to really know us. Think about how lonely that must feel. To be surrounded by people, maybe even people who love you, and yes, you still believe that if they really knew who you were, they might not love you anymore.
Shame is what happens when we stop believing we’ve made a mistake and start believing we are the mistake.
At the end of Genesis Chapter 2, Adam and his woman are naked and unashamed.
But in Chapter 3, after they eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, something changes.
Their eyes are opened. They suddenly recognize their nakedness, and what do they do? They cover themselves.
And then, when they hear God approaching, they hide. Isn’t that fascinating?
The very same people who were standing naked and unashamed just a few verses earlier are now hiding themselves from the very God who created them.
What happened? What changed between those two moments that made them suddenly believe they needed to cover themselves? And perhaps most importantly, what made them believe they could no longer be seen exactly as they were?
Now, we’re going to spend a lot more time exploring the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in a future episode, because I think it’s one of the most misunderstood symbols in the entire Bible.
But for today, I want you to notice something.
When Adam and Eve eat from the tree, nothing about their physical bodies changes. They don’t suddenly become different creatures. They don’t grow horns or develop some biological defect that gets passed down to every generation that follows.
What changes is their consciousness. The way they see themselves, each other, and their relationship with God.
Before eating, they act as one, and they’re naked and unashamed. After eating, they separate, become aware of their nakedness, cover themselves, and hide.
What if the voice of God isn’t the voice telling you how terrible you are? What if it’s the voice that keeps calling you back into relationship, even when you’ve convinced yourself that you’re no longer worthy of love?
Because when I look at the teachings of Jesus, I see that same pattern over and over again.
Think about the parable of the prodigal son.
The son leaves home, squanders his inheritance, and eventually finds himself so desperate that he decides to return to his father. But he no longer believes he’s worthy of being called his son.
And what happens? While he’s still a long way off, his father sees him coming. And the father runs to meet him.
He doesn’t stand at the door with a list of everything his son has done wrong. He doesn’t demand that the boy prove he’s worthy before he’s welcomed home.
He runs toward him. He embraces him. And he celebrates his return.
What if that’s the image of God we’ve been missing all along?
And I want you to think about the way we love our own children.
When our children are hurting, when they’ve made mistakes, when life hasn’t turned out the way they hoped, what do we want more than anything?
We want them to know they can come home. That they can tell us what happened. That even when we don’t have the answers, we’ll help them figure out what to do next.
We want them to know that nothing they’ve experienced has made them less worthy of our love.
But here’s the thing. Most of us probably didn’t experience that kind of unconditional love all the time when we were growing up. And if we’re being honest, most of us have probably had moments when we’ve struggled to offer it to our own children.
Because how do you give someone a kind of love you’ve never learned to give yourself?
Our parents could only draw from what they knew. And maybe their parents never taught them how to love themselves unconditionally, because their parents didn’t know how either.
And on and on it goes, generation after generation, with people trying to love one another while carrying wounds they never learned how to heal.
And isn’t this exactly what we saw in the Handless Maiden and Perceval?
The maiden’s father passed on the consequences of his own unconscious choices. And in Perceval, we saw the masculine wound passed down through generations, teaching boys to hide their feelings, deny their vulnerability, and measure their worth by what they accomplish.
And then those boys become fathers, trying to teach their children how to love themselves when nobody ever taught them how either.
Not because they don’t love their children, but because they’re trying to love them through the very armor they’ve learned to wear.
And so the wound gets passed down, until someone finally recognizes it and decides to stop passing it on.
You don’t become less deserving of love because you’re struggling, because you’re angry, because you’re depressed, because you’re afraid, because you made mistakes or because your life doesn’t look the way you thought it should.
And you don’t have to become some perfect version of yourself before you deserve compassion, belonging, or help.
I don’t believe God is standing somewhere waiting for you to become worthy enough to be loved. I believe God has been calling you home since the very beginning.
Just as God called to Adam in the garden, “Where are you?” I believe God is calling to us, too.
And listen to how beautifully that love is described in the book of Isaiah. In Chapter 66, God says, “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.”
And in Chapter 49, God asks, “Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?” And then God answers, “Even if she could forget, I will not forget you.”
And the very next verse says, “I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.”
Think about that. God uses the image of a mother’s love for her child, and then tells us that even this love cannot compare to the love God has for us.
Isn’t that beautiful?
And yet, how many of us grew up imagining God almost exclusively as a father? A king? A judge? A masculine authority sitting on a throne somewhere, watching everything we do?
And yet right here in scripture, God compares divine love to that of a mother comforting her child.
A mother who gathers her child into her arms when they’re hurting. Who doesn’t need the child to explain why they’re crying before offering comfort.
I want to offer you a different possibility.
What if love isn’t the reward waiting for us at the end of the journey?
What if love is what makes the journey possible in the first place?
What if we were never meant to become perfect before we could enter into relationship with God?
What if, like Adam hiding in the garden, we’ve simply forgotten that we’re allowed to be seen?
And that brings me back to that question God asks in Genesis Chapter 3. “Where are you?”
I don’t hear a God who’s waiting to humiliate us. I hear a God calling us back into relationship. And perhaps one of the greatest things we can do for ourselves and for one another is to begin answering that call. To allow ourselves to be seen. To speak about the things that hurt. To let someone know when we’re struggling. And to remember that needing help doesn’t make us less worthy of love. It makes us human.
And before we finish today, there’s something I want to share with you.
When I heard about this young boy’s death, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the people who might be suffering in silence right now.
And I kept wishing there were something I could offer. Something that might bring even a little comfort to someone who’s hurting.
Remember that little clothing tag I offered the ant at the beginning of this episode? It wasn’t anything special. Just something I happened to have nearby that might help that little creature find its way to safety.
And in some small way, that’s what I’m hoping to offer here.
I can’t reach through this microphone and sit beside you. But I can offer you these words.
I wrote you a letter.
And if you’re struggling right now, I hope you’ll listen.
This is for you.
To the One Who Is Thinking About Leaving
I don’t know you. I don’t know your story, what you’ve been through, or what has brought you to this moment. I don’t know what hurts so badly that the thought of not being here anymore might feel like a relief.
But I wish I could sit beside you for a little while.
Not to tell you what to do. Not to convince you that everything is wonderful or that you have so much to be grateful for. And certainly not to tell you that things aren’t as bad as they seem, because I don’t know how bad things are for you.
I wish I could sit beside you while you weep. And if you don’t have any tears left, I’d sit beside you in silence. You wouldn’t have to explain anything or pretend to be okay. You could simply be exactly as you are.
Maybe nobody really knows how much you’re hurting. Maybe you’ve become so good at pretending you’re okay that the people around you have no idea. Or maybe you’ve tried to tell them, and they haven’t understood.
Maybe you’re exhausted from trying to be who everyone expects you to be. Maybe something has happened that you’re afraid can never be undone. Or maybe you simply cannot imagine a life that feels different from the one you’re living right now.
I can’t promise you that everything will magically get better tomorrow. But the way life feels in this moment is not necessarily the way it will always feel.
There’s a song by Noah Kahan called Call Your Mom. It’s written as though he’s speaking directly to someone who’s struggling with thoughts of suicide, begging them to hold on.
And there’s a line in that song that I want to share with you: “Don’t let this darkness fool you. All lights turned off can be turned on.”
Sometimes, when we’re surrounded by darkness, it’s almost impossible to remember what the light feels like. But just because you can’t see it right now doesn’t mean it’s gone forever.
And if you keep showing up here with me, I promise I’ll keep exploring the things that might help us find our way back to that light, together.
And I want you to know something.
You do not have to figure out the rest of your life today.
Remember that little baby learning to walk that we talked about earlier? How they fall, and we simply reach out our hands and encourage them to try again?
Well, you deserve that same patience, that same tenderness, and that same love.
And you don’t have to get back up all by yourself. You can let someone reach out their hand and help you.
Right now, I’m just asking you to give yourself more time.
And there’s something else I want you to hear, especially if you’ve spent your life believing that there’s something wrong with you.
You were never born unworthy of love.
You are worthy of love simply because you exist. You were made in the image and likeness of God, a God who loves you more deeply than we could ever understand.
And I don’t know what you’ve been taught about God, or whether you even believe in God. But I believe there’s a love that doesn’t disappear when we make mistakes, that doesn’t turn away when we’re struggling, and that doesn’t require us to become someone else before we can receive it.
And you don’t have to feel that love right now.
Sometimes our pain becomes so overwhelming that we can’t see beyond it. We can’t feel the love that other people are trying to give us. And that’s when we need someone to help us carry what has become too heavy to carry alone.
So please, don’t try to do this by yourself.
Tell someone. Even if the words feel impossible. Even if all you can manage to say is, “I’m not okay, and I’m scared of what I might do.”
If the first person doesn’t understand, tell someone else. A parent, a friend, a teacher, a counselor, a doctor. Keep reaching until someone listens and helps you stay safe.
And if you’re afraid you might act on those thoughts, please don’t stay alone. Ask someone to stay with you and help you get through this moment safely.
Because you deserve to be heard. You deserve help. And you deserve the chance to discover that your story contains chapters you haven’t lived yet.
And even if you cannot believe in your own worth right now, borrow my belief in you until you can find it again.
There’s one more thing I want you to know.
I care about you.
I know that might sound strange coming from someone you’ve probably never met. But I do.
My heart aches knowing that you might be carrying so much pain that leaving this world feels like the only way to escape it. I wish I could take some of that pain away. I wish I could help you see yourself through my eyes, even if only for a moment.
At the beginning of this episode, I told you about the little ant I carried outside rather than kill. Maybe you thought that was a silly story.
But I told you that story because I believe life is sacred. All life. Even the smallest life matters to me.
That little ant mattered to me simply because it was alive. And I want you to know that I believe your life is sacred, too.
A human being with a whole world inside of you. With thoughts and feelings and memories, hopes and dreams. With a story nobody else on this planet has ever lived.
I don’t need to know your name, what you’ve accomplished, or what mistakes you’ve made to care about you.
And beneath all of those stories, all of the pain, and all of the things you’ve come to believe about yourself, I believe there’s something sacred within you.
Your soul.
The part of you that I believe remains sacred, no matter what you’ve experienced. The part of you that doesn’t need to earn anyone’s love or approval. The part of you that I believe connects you directly to God.
And I know you might not be able to feel that connection right now.
That’s okay. You don’t even have to believe anything I’m telling you.
I just want you to consider the possibility that there’s more to who you are than the pain you’re experiencing right now.
You are not the mistakes you’ve made, the things that have happened to you, or the stories you’ve come to believe about yourself.
You are not a mistake. You are not beyond love. And you don’t have to find your way home alone.
I wish I could sit beside you while you weep. And if you don’t have any tears left, I’d sit beside you in silence.
But since I can’t be there with you, please let someone else sit beside you. Let them know how much you’re hurting, and let them help you find the care and support you deserve.
You don’t have to be strong for anyone right now. You don’t have to fix everything or become someone different.
You just have to give yourself more time.
Because your life matters. Because you matter.
And because you deserve the chance to experience the love, peace, joy, and connection that may still be ahead of you.
You already belong.
Please stay.
If you’re thinking about suicide, please tell someone today. In the United States, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. It’s free, confidential, and available 24 hours a day. You don’t have to know what to say. You can simply tell them, “I’m thinking about suicide, and I need someone to talk to.”
If you’re in immediate danger, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department.
You don’t have to face this moment alone.
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