LOTHA

What It Is

When you feel humiliated, here’s what happens: your ego feels exposed, dead, and it decides to wear a mask—that of the executioner or the victim. You know you’re humiliated when all you want is to flee or die. It’s one of those wounds that lingers, giving you the illusion that revenge or self-erasure will let you regain control over yourself. But you forget one thing: It’s not about you, but your ego.
Like the wound of rejection, it stems from a series of childhood experiences where you felt tiny inside. As a child, you’re belittled, judged, and ridiculed for basic needs: “I came home with mud on my pants and Mom scolded me,” “I asked for help and others laughed,” or “I gave an answer in class and everyone mocked me.”

Where Does It Come From?

These experiences pile up to secretly steer your life, until one day you “wake up” and say, “Enough—now I decide,” which really means: “I know I’ll heal if I hurt others (1) or isolate myself (2), because that’s the only way people can truly understand me (1), won’t hurt me, and will leave me alone (2).”
Or, the child grows up and becomes the sacrificial lamb: “If I make myself small, discreet, in my corner, then I won’t be a burden to society.”
In both cases, this wound devastates self-esteem and pushes you to over-adapt until you lose yourself or lash out in return.
Love turns to shame: “If I show who I am, I’ll be rejected.”

Why Is It There?

• To connect you to your moral conscience: Is what I’m doing right or wrong? (1) What drives and motivates me? Why do I want others to suffer? (1)
• To teach you to dance with suffering (1) and (2): “If I suffer, I must accept that every human has their share of suffering.”
• Why is isolation important to me? (2) What does it really bring me? (2) Is this truly the best stance to take?
• To connect you to your inner sage.

What Is Its Power?

It has the power to reveal engrams that control you and influence your choices, decisions, and behaviors toward others:

• How you interact with others.
• Your deepest desires.
• Your hidden and true intentions.
• How you speak to others.
• How you work.
• Your thought patterns.
• Your feelings: empathy, anger, jealousy, regrets…

It says:
Look at me in this shattered mirror: I taught you to be ashamed of your needs. I made you believe that asking, expressing, existing was already too much. I came when your body was judged and your heart was deemed excessive. Since then, you’ve been trying to earn the right to exist. But I’m just a broken mirror. You were never a burden to anyone.
It’s not your job to carry others’ shame.
So stop.

What It Teaches

• To familiarize yourself with temperance.
• To approach calm.
• To reconnect with your true nature.
• Your serenity doesn’t depend on your ability to make others suffer or to erase yourself from them.
• You are not alone.
• Your life is truly worth it.

Why Transmute It?

By transmuting it, you give yourself permission to be happy. You accept your pains and realize the mask you wore was ultimately useless. It gave you power that didn’t fill the void you felt. In transmuting, you free yourself from what brought you to your knees. You reconcile with yourself.

How to Transmute It?

• Why am I suffering?
• Why is it important for me to hurt others? Or why is it important for me to withdraw?
• What if I tried dialoguing with myself? Understanding myself?
• Ten things that truly make me happy?
• Do I love myself enough to accept others even if they don’t understand me?

Lotha