"This chakra deals with willpower, and is blocked by shame," said the guru to Aang.

My early memory is a series of disjointed sensations and images. Recently, I had a conversation with my mother about my childhood. She said, “You were always a solitary child. You loved doing things by yourself. There were never many children around, because you were the oldest, but you loved the company of adults.”

For the last two days I've been choking on the concept that shame blocks willpower. The mind expands in a series of explosive bursts, blasts away all that useful energy, and leaves only a cold dense core, sitting in the crook of my throat. But we'll see what we can come up with:

When shame covers the heart [cloud-like] we are willing to humiliate ourselves for the sake of others. They are much larger than we. A man climbing a mountain cannot help but feel awe. The boy sitting alone, surrounded by playing children, eventually shrinks to the size of a man.

When was the first time we thought to ourselves, there must be something wrong with me? When was the first time we stood by someone beautiful and thought, I'm just not up to this?

"I guess you get to the point where you look at that pain as if it were there in front of you three feet away lying in a box, an open box, in a window somewhere. It's hard and cold, like a bar of metal. You just look at it and say, All right, I'll take it, I'll buy it."

I don't know how any of this relates to willpower, but maybe after I cough up this stone I'll have a better idea.