What the shoes were really protecting
We sat with the Red Shoes together in my Wild Awakening Circle
What came up—what always comes up when women sit in honest company with that story—was not what most of us expected.
It wasn’t rage at the shoes, or relief at putting them down. It was grief. A quiet, cellular grief for the self that had been dancing for so long she had forgotten she was tired.
That is shame’s deepest work.
Not the loud, acute flash of having done something wrong. But the slow, chronic shaping of a woman who has learned — in her bones, in her nervous system, in the way she holds her breath before she speaks — that who she actually is might not be safe to bring into the room.
Shame is a freeze response.
The accelerator and the brakes are on at the same time, and when it becomes chronic—when it has persisted since childhood—it stops feeling like a response and starts feeling like a self.
The inner critic that narrates your every move.
The perfectionism that culture applauds.
The performing, the achieving, the relentless forward motion – all of it whispers the same thing underneath: if I stop, if I am truly seen, something bad will happen.
Because once, it did.
When you were small, and the people you needed couldn’t meet you fully, your young nervous system drew a conclusion, not consciously, but it came to the conclusion: it must be me, and shame wrapped itself around that wound like a second skin.
Shame kept you small enough to stay loved, kept you moving fast enough to stay safe, and for your female nervous system—wired, at a biological level, to need its people, to fear abandonment the way the body fears cold—that protection became total.
This is what I see repeatedly in my online Circle.
Women who are extraordinarily capable, deeply feeling, and achingly self-aware often still live at a slight remove from themselves. They still perform the version that earned approval. They still dance.
My Circle does not try to fix that, because nothing was ever broken. Your nervous system adapted.
Instead, my Circle creates enough safety to slow down, feel the feet inside the shoes, and let other women witness the grief of being away from yourself for so long. And often, for the first time, women discover that being truly seen does not destroy them.
No amount of self-improvement can reach that kind of healing.
Achievement cannot reach it. Insight alone cannot reach it. Even understanding, while helpful, cannot fully reach it.
We heal through witnessing. Through being met honestly. Through letting other women hold us in the truth of who we are while they do the same for themselves.
That is what we come together for.
If you’re not yet inside Circle, it’s where I hold this work every month – in live sessions, in shared practice, in the company of women who are learning, slowly, to put the shoes down together. If you feel called, the door is open. Join the Circle here.
Have courage, dear heart,
Charli ❤️🦁
