Being Bad and Feeling Good

Exploring shame, pleasure and creativity

Soulful Impact is a newsletter and podcast by Brooks Barron exploring the path of expanding consciousness and creating profound impact by finding your soul’s purpose and living in your genius. Join the adventure:

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Being Bad and Feeling Good

Are you a bad person?

If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent a lot of effort in your life trying to prove to yourself and the world that the answer to that question is an emphatic NO.

The drive to be a good person informed so many of the decisions I made in the first few decades of my life. From the little things like the language I used (especially in woke or progressive circles) to the bigger things like the career choices I made, I was terrified of “being bad” and wanted to do everything I could to “be good.”

The desire to be good carries a virtuous essence: a longing to dedicate oneself in service to the greater whole. Many people (like the younger me) use that desire to pursue altruistic career paths like climate, healthcare, economic liberation, impact investing, etc. They might use it as motivation to donate to charity, volunteer in their community, or make a personal sacrifice for the sake of someone else. The results can be beautiful and immensely valuable.

The trouble is, this motivation becomes self-limiting. As long as we are driven by an underlying motivation to be good (and the corollary fear of being bad), we aren’t actually in genuine service. We’re primarily serving our own image, and only whatever or whoever aligns with that goal.

What’s more, as long as we are only selectively loving the parts of ourselves we judge as good, we are selectively oppressing our other parts. Our self-love is conditional. Whether or not we consciously see it, we’ll therefore be conditionally loving and oppressing other people and the planet, too. As the ancient saying goes: as within, so without.

That doesn’t sound like a true path to healing and flourishing to me.

If you can’t be bad, you can’t be whole

Let’s face it — we all contain both good and bad within us. It’s just the nature of being human. We have the capacity to inhabit the full spectrum.

When we try to hide, deny or avoid our badness, we are — understandably — operating out of fear. We fear being dangerous, harmful, manipulative… even abusive, violent or worse. Maybe we fear that if we act the wrong way we’ll be taken advantage of, harmed, or ostracized. We might lose control. We might lose our inner sense of safety, worth, and belonging.

This all makes so much sense. Yet it also reveals a basic underlying ailment: we don’t trust ourselves enough to be fully ourselves.

What if it could be OK for you to have all the bad parts that you do — every last one of them? What if every part of you were welcome and appreciated, not just the ones you judge as “good?”

Take a moment and really try that on. I’m not telling you to go act out your worst impulses. I’m simply asking you to feel into the experience of it being OK for them to be here. To let them have a seat at the table. Open up to the possibility that they are worthy of love. That you are worthy of love in your entirety.

That’s what wholeness feels like.

Fascinatingly, when we love and accept our bad parts, they actually become less dangerous. They come out of the shadows and into the light of our loving awareness. When that happens, they relax and open. They let go of their more maniacal or destructive strategies, because maybe what they were really trying to accomplish with those strategies was to be seen, accepted and loved. Pretty relatable, right?

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.”

— Carl Jung

When we love our “bad” parts, they don’t seem so scary and bad anymore. In fact, as we give them the opportunity to step into their true potential, they reveal themselves as incredibly attractive, trustworthy, and useful. We begin to see how they actually hold the gifts and capacity to help us create what we are most missing and longing for in our lives. Sometimes, the best way to serve is to be bad.

As we undergo this inner process of healing and becoming whole, we broaden the range of our capacity and increase our ability to adapt. When we can access all parts of ourselves, we can more readily show up with whatever a given situation needs or demands.

There’s a supportive, friendly energy to that approach, in contrast to the fear-driven desire to prove we’re one thing but not another. We know that we are both good and bad, and that is no big deal. That doesn’t threaten our sense of self-trust and self-love. Then we serve because it feels good, not because we fear being bad.

I think that energy is actually much more likely to create the wholeness, peace and abundance that we crave in the outside world, too.

Shame, Pleasure and Creativity

Now let’s take this one level deeper, and a notch spicier. ;)

Ever notice that being bad can be a turn on? (The kinky among you are smiling and nodding.)

Of course, it’s important to create a safe container to explore and play with our badness in this way. But it’s also pretty fun to feel the energy that lights up when we tap into that space — I imagine many of you know what I’m talking about.

In my coaching and guiding work, a common theme with the leaders I support is a desire to express more creativity and live in one’s zone of genius. That’s the sexy and attractive outcome that so many of us want, and for good reason! It’s fun, enlivening, nourishing and powerful. We live in a state of flow and create exceptional results through a life that lights us up.

The key thing that so many people don’t understand is that to embody our full creativity and genius, we have to be whole. That means making peace with our badness, developing a mature relationship with our sexual energy (often a key part of our “badness” and also inextricably linked to our creativity), and dealing with our shame.

There is a root connection between shame, sexual energy and creativity.

As I’ve done my own work to uncork my authentic creative expression and helped others do the same, I’ve noticed a pattern: As we unravel the ways we are blocking ourselves from our creativity, we often encounter the root source of those blockages as childhood experiences of shame — and often, sexual energy played some role in that experience.

Oxford’s English dictionary defines shame as “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.” When we feel shame, we are believing that what we did — and maybe even who we are — is wrong, foolish, or bad. Perhaps we feel like we are too much, or maybe not enough.

In my case, the connection between childhood shame and creativity feels particularly strong. That’s because my most acute experience of shame was a direct result of a creative output — one that was, in fact, intentionally “bad.”

I was a socially anxious elementary school kid. I wanted more than anything to be cool, and to be liked by the other guys who I looked up to. To achieve this goal, I devised a masterful plan. We had been assigned to write stories for read-aloud in English class. My story was a hilarious, raunchy, totally-inappropriate-for-school-but-absolutely-brilliant tale of culturally-prominent characters (such as Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Barney, and the Magic School Bus) getting into absurd, violent and sexually-charged encounters with each other. I knew I was breaking the rules. That got me excited, and I thought others would like it too.

It absolutely brought the house down. I had the audience literally rolling on the floor in tears of laughter and joy. English class became The Brooksie Show and I was a gigantic hit. I had never felt better.

Of course, it didn’t last long. The next day, I was pulled out of recess and sat down in a circle of chairs with every one of the dozen or so teachers from my small elementary school. Utterly confused and paralyzed by fear, I slowly realized what this was about. Concerned and disapproving glares gave way to sharp questions from all directions. I was completely overwhelmed — and deeply ashamed.

That experience scared me straight, at least for a while. By 6th grade, I was such a goody-two-shoes that I earned the nickname of “Mr. Perfect.” I hated being called that.

As I’ve stepped into my creative expression as an adult and cultivated a more mature relationship with my sexual energy, it’s been critical for me to make a devotional practice out of reassuring and comforting that scared little boy — who still lives inside of me.

As recently as this week, I’ve revisited that memory and stepped into the scene as my adult self. I cut short the inquisition and tell those teachers to leave my precious little boy alone. I give him a big loving hug, and reassure him that he did nothing wrong. He was playing, experimenting, and pushing the boundaries of his creative expression — and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, it was beautiful. Yes, he was being bad. But bad can be OK. It can be brilliant and creative. It can even feel good.

A Feel Good Revolution

What if leaders and people around the world could be with their badness and lovingly integrate those parts of themselves?

I believe this might help them access their full creative potential, while also living consciously and in respect of their fellow humans and the planet.

I imagine a future in which we grow past the fear-based motivation to be good and replace it with the much more life-giving and creative motivation to trust and follow what feels good to our animal bodies and our souls.

Creative expression, sexual energy, and imagination are some of our most powerful capacities as human beings. When we embody them fully, we are much harder to control. We are much less likely to lose ourselves into someone else’s agenda. Perhaps that relates to why these capacities are so often shamed or discouraged by dominant culture. It’s scary to be powerful, and if we can’t be in healthy relationship with our own creativity, sexual energy and power, we sure aren’t going to like anyone else bringing those energies around either.

When I look out at the world and see the array of complex and high-stakes challenges that we currently face as a species, I can’t help but believe we are going to need our full creative capacities online to make it through all of this in a good way.

How beautiful would it be if the path through this wild wormhole of existential risk were to simply love ourselves better? The antidote to all the problems out there might just be to give ourselves what we are really craving in here: loving acceptance, trust, permission to feel good, and a choice to be fully alive.

In closing, I offer the beautiful words of Mary Oliver, who knew this terrain well. I encourage you to take a moment to enjoy this poem, even if you already know it. Let the medicine of her words sink deep into your bones.

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

As always, I’d love to hear how this post impacted you. Drop me a line, or if you’re feeling courageous, add a comment to the thread below. I’d love to know: How can loving and accepting your badness be a gateway for you to unlock your creativity and genius?

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See you out there, my friends!

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