The fire, the exile, the return
In the Ramayana, one of the great epic poems of India, attributed to the sage Valmiki and composed around the 5th century BCE, when Rama finally frees Sita from Ravana’s hands, the first gesture that greets her is not an embrace, but a doubt. To be welcomed back, Sita must pass through fire: the agnipariksha, the trial that proves her purity in everyone’s eyes. It is not enough that she knows she has been faithful: she must prove it, make herself seen, offer herself to the gaze of the world as a guarantee of something no one can truly see. Fire is the first form of shame: the one that arises when what we are inside must answer to those who watch from outside.
Sita emerges unharmed from the flames. But it is not enough. Suspicion, once planted, does not go out with a single proof. Years later, now queen, pregnant, she is nonetheless sent away by Rama — not because he doubts her, but because the people doubt, and a king cannot reign beside the shadow of a scandal. This is exile: the second form of shame, one that no longer arises from a personal doubt but from a collective gaze, from the need to save an appearance, an image, a social order — at the cost of sacrificing the very person that order was meant to protect.
In the end, called upon once more to prove her purity, Sita no longer walks through any fire. She calls upon Mother Earth, and asks her to open. And the earth opens, and she returns to it. Not a return to Rama. Not a return to a role, a trial, a gaze that keeps demanding proof. But a return to the origin, a dissolving into that which gave her life — the one truth that no longer needs to be proven to anyone.
Sita’s story is not only a tale of fidelity put to the test, but a map of how a shame imposed from outside can cross three thresholds: fire, exile, return.
Fire. Exile. Return.
Perhaps this is also the story of how we build, inhabit, and finally let go of that thing we call identity.
And what if part of what we call identity were, in truth, something we learned to be in order not to feel what we felt?
Perhaps identity is born not only from what we discover ourselves to be, but also from what, at some point in our life, we learned to do, to hold back, to hide, or to become — like Sita in the fire, learning to present herself a certain way in order to be received.
When we are small, we go through experiences we don’t always have the tools to understand. Some emotions are too big to be felt all the way through. Some experiences cannot be processed, and so our system finds other ways to protect us.
And in our not being seen, we learn to react. We learn to protect ourselves. We learn to hold ourselves back. We learn to be a certain way.
And, at some point, we begin to call all of this “I.”
How we felt looked at by our parents can become the way we, in turn, begin to look at others.
Identity, then, might also be a layering of responses: impulses, emotions, patterns of relating and defending that, over time, become familiar. Every self is, in this sense, an archaic structure — capable of reshaping itself, but only up to a point: a point beyond which not only does identity risk collapsing, but with it, even the will to let it go.
But perhaps some of the impulses we now feel so much our own don’t really reflect who we are today. They are responses that belong to something that happened before. Patterns that, at some point, served us, and that we kept enacting even after they were no longer necessary.
And here a question opens that may be worth carrying with us, without needing to answer it right away: What is truly necessary? It was necessary that something was so, back then, for who we were. But it is also necessary that today we recognize it for what it is now — no longer necessary. And perhaps freedom is measured exactly here: in how willing we are to let go of what once kept us alive, in order to feel what truly belongs to us.
And often, behind these patterns, there is a shame that was never truly gone through.
A part of us that learned: “This thing about me is not okay. I mustn’t be like this. I mustn’t let myself be seen this way. I must change. I must become something else.”
And this is exactly where the knot lies: shame sits in the space between inside and outside, between how we are and how we are seen. Who is watching? It is the question of the child who looks, curious, through the keyhole, and who feels watched in turn — caught, exposed, before even understanding what they were doing. It is the gaze of the other that, in Sita, forces her into the fire before she herself has even asked whether she is pure.
And so we begin to identify with those parts of us that were never able to process their shame. Not necessarily because they truly belong to us, but because, for a certain period, they were our way of being in the world.
But here it becomes important to distinguish. Because not all shame is the same.
There is a deep, ancestral shame, one inflicted on us when we were too small to be able to go through it. A shame that may have been too big to feel, too painful to express, and that we then had to hold inside ourselves. It is the fire imposed by a doubt that was never ours.
But there is also a healthy shame.
It is not the “shame on you” that an adult imposes on a child. It is not the one that tells us we are wrong, unworthy, or bad.
It is a shame that can serve a completely different function.
It is that feeling that, faced with something we’ve done, lets us pause and sense: “Hmm. Maybe I could have done better here.”
It does not tell us we are wrong. It lets us recognize that something we did is not in line with what we feel to be right.
And perhaps this possibility of feeling shame, without sinking into guilt, is a possibility we have lost.
Guilt is usually directed at an action — at something we did wrong. Shame, instead, concerns our very being. This is why using shame to make someone feel inadequate is so devastating: it doesn’t strike what they did, it strikes who they are.
Because one of the harms of the vast human community we live in may be precisely that it no longer leaves us any room to get things wrong.
There is an enormous difference between using shame as a tool of unconscious social control — to instill fear, to make people feel guilty — and recognizing shame as something structural within the social contract itself: something that, if held with empathy, can be felt and moved through instead of imposed and denied.
We are taught that we cannot make mistakes. And so, when we do, instead of being able to feel that small shame that lets us recognize what has happened, we move straight into guilt, and in an instant we feel the need to attack or to close ourselves off, just to stop feeling that guilt.
I made a mistake, so there must be something wrong with me — but that hurts too much, so I react the way everyone before me has reacted.
These are truly two different worlds.
Because healthy shame can tell us: “What I did is not in line with who I would like to be right now.”
And this can matter. Because living in a human community also means being able to recognize when we have created a fracture, a disharmony, something we can repair simply by trying to do it differently: perhaps by admitting it, perhaps simply by asking for a few minutes of silence, and then coming back with an open heart…
This is a delicate thing. We need relationship in order to survive. We need to feel that the threshold isn’t called into question by a possible mistake. Being inadequate must not be the prelude to self-isolation or withdrawal: we shouldn’t have to be afraid of being vulnerable.
We need to be able to feel when, through our behavior, we have drifted away from the harmonic field we belong to.
Not to be punished. But to be able to return.
Healthy shame, then, does not condemn us: it brings us back. It brings us back to relationship. It brings us back to learning and to growing. It allows a responsibility to emerge — a conscious response to an action.
It brings us back to the possibility of doing things differently. And precisely because it does not identify us with the mistake, it leaves us free to learn. Free to grow.
Perhaps, then, transformation too can take on a different meaning.
What if we could transform without starting from the belief that we are not okay? What if we didn’t have to become different because we are ashamed of who we are, but could change simply because something inside us has grown?
To learn. To know ourselves. To feel better with ourselves and with others.
And perhaps, when we finally allow ourselves to also move through that healthy shame, something inside us can find balance again.
We can recognize what no longer belongs to us. We can let new parts emerge. Parts that are no longer built only on defense, adaptation, or the fear of not being okay, but on the possibility of opening our vulnerability to community, of sharing, of saying out loud where we stand, without the secrets that close off relationships.
We can then begin to identify with healthier parts of ourselves. Not because we have finally found “our true identity,” but because we have created enough space to allow something new to emerge.
If we give ourselves the time and space to live all of this somatically and socially, another awareness emerges at the same time: perhaps there is not even any need to forgive ourselves or others, since everything, being part of the whole, could not have been otherwise.
At this point, the journey can open further still.
Because even the healthier parts we learn to identify with can, sooner or later, be moved through and let go of.
This is where another form of disidentification can begin: no longer as a flight from what we have been, but as a deeply yogic experience. The possibility of recognizing that we are not only this identity, nor that part, nor that other one.
We can belong to the field of humanity without having to be defined only by our individual story.
We can feel part of something greater. Part of a One. Together within the One.
Though perhaps it is here that an immense problem opens up, one that would deserve far more space: one can speak of the One only starting from the two. It is only within duality that we sense the One exists at all — the One, then, is not other than the two, but its only possible manifestation; the two is the way in which the One manifests. And if we are a part of it, the question of transcendence and immanence opens up at once — a question that perhaps can only be moved past by turning toward the idea of pure becoming, a pure power to be embodied, rather than toward the idea of belonging to something.
Disidentification, then, no longer means freeing ourselves from who we are.
Perhaps it simply means slowly ceasing to believe that what we can call “I” is all that we are. If identity is, in this sense, the very project through which a pure power manifests itself in the world, then what remains to be understood is this: without identity, how does one’s own dissolving into the One manifest in the world?
And here another problem opens, perhaps an even greater one, worth only naming, not closing: if we are everything, then everything was necessary for us to be who we are — everything, including the shame instilled by our parents, including whatever brought us here, to write exactly these words. Or else: we are nothing, nothing is necessary for us, being here is an accident, and being everything ultimately coincides with being nothing. The two are the same, and whatever we do counts no more and no less than anything else.
Like Sita, who in the end returns to no one, but dissolves into that which gave her life. Perhaps one day we, too, will be able to stop having to prove, through fire or through exile, who we are. And let ourselves simply be reabsorbed into what we have always been, even before having to call it “I.”
All of this would deserve to be explored further. But perhaps, sometimes, there is no need to go further: what is needed is to stop, and feel everything that has moved.
Om Pūrṇam adaḥ pūrṇam idam, Pūrṇāt pūrṇam udacyate; Pūrṇasya pūrṇam ādāya pūrṇam evāvaśiṣyate.
That is full, this is full; from fullness, fullness arises; and even taking fullness from fullness, fullness remains.
And within this fullness that is never consumed:
Tat tvam asi — you are that. I am that.
Nadeshwari Joythimayananda