The Path to Vulnerability part 3 - Actually being vulnerable....

The toughest part of the path to being vulnerable… actually being vulnerable. It won’t come easy and it won’t be natural at first. You’ve spent a lot of time learning how not to do it so it’s going to take time and intelligent effort . It also won’t always feel good either.  There will be times when your worst fears about being vulnerable will come true, but this says more about those judging you then it does you. The ability to get up, dust yourself off and stick your hand back in the metaphorical fire to get burned again is what will make you a strong, vibrant and magnanimous person.

 For me, being vulnerable started slowly. It first started with close friends. Friends that I knew would understand because of similar life situations.  I slowly began sharing things with them, and these few that I let see the softness within are still friends today. We may not speak regularly, but when we do, we pick up right where we left off. There is a deep connection there that withstands time and circumstances.  Another beautiful part of these friendships is an unspoken understanding that we recognize each other’s pain.  We don’t need to rehash experiences repeatedly and look for common threads, we know they’re there and that’s that.

The task of being more open and vulnerable in a romantic relationship was a more difficult hurdle.  My first stab at vulnerability in a romantic relationship helped me realize my worst nightmare about vulnerability, which turned out to be a blessing.  I was terrified to be so open with someone about my feelings and other difficult topics, but forced myself to try. I was as open as I could be at the time, and it was received in a manner that relieved me.  I didn’t feel judged or damaged or any of the billion other terrible things I wasted my energy and time fantasizing about.  I did however, feel fear.

I don’t know how many of you have actually felt fear, I mean feel it physically. Fear, in me, is similar to sadness. Fear is a tightening in my gut; it is my heart pounding; it is a lump low in my throat (sadness’ lump sits higher) and pressure behind my eyes because I am close to tears.  On a side note – I once had a psychic tell me that if I didn’t stop worrying about what other people think I would have stomach problems- crazy eh? Recognizing fear was an important step for me, because once I was able to recognize situations in which I was fearful, I could do two things.  The first is a belly softening meditation, where I focus on relaxing that particular area, deep down including my blood vessels. The second thing I could do is go into the discomfort and do exactly what I was afraid of doing. This really helped me identify times when I was avoiding being vulnerable.

So anyway, back to being vulnerable with a romantic partner. My worst fear was realized. When the relationship ended, which involved me hurting his feelings, unintentionally but nonetheless, the things I was afraid of sharing were thrown back in my face in an effort to equally hurt my feelings.  I was disappointed, hurt and a little pissed. Despite these feelings, I remember reading one of his “lovely” letters to me in which specific topics were brought up, and thinking “Hey, I’m still O.K.”. That was really my worst possible fear realized and yet there I was – still breathing, living and all around ok.  My world didn’t collapse; I didn’t have to hide my face every time I left the house! All the time I had spent obsessing about all the terrible things that would occur if I was vulnerable with someone was for nothing! Sure my feelings were still hurt, and yes there was a little regret that things hadn’t gone smoother, but all in all, the essential part of me was untouched. I was actually better for having been vulnerable.

My second attempt at being vulnerable with a romantic partner although not necessarily smoother, was certainly very different.  I learned a lot about love, my capacity for love and what it meant to truly share yourself with someone.  I have to say that our capacity to love and share ourselves with others is a direct function of how we love and accept ourselves. Being able to see and accept parts of ourselves that we classify as “bad” allows us to extend this to others. We become compassionate towards others because we know how much it hurts to beat yourself up over something or how damaging it is to numb feelings.  We recognize hurtful behavior for what it is, temporarily hurtful to the target, but ten times more hurtful to the perpetrator, and are compassionate towards them. Part of this compassion is the willingness to be open and let someone know that you understand how they feel. They may not receive it well, or they may not understand because they are so unaware of their own feelings, but you are doing good for you both by being vulnerable and compassionate.

“They” say that becoming aware in a relationship will either make it or break it. The thing with becoming more aware is it affects everyone around you. Some may not be ready for it yet, leading to the break it situation. Rest assured that being aware, becoming open, honest and compassionate are an important part of our evolution as a society and as a species. By helping yourself you are helping us all. We are so intrinsically connected that it cannot be any other way.

“You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” Gautama the Buddha

The Path to Vulnerability Part II- Moving from fear to Self-acceptance!

Only once you have become mindful of what you do can you move forward to equanimity through acceptance. Accepting what is reality in every moment is the path to real liberation.

Fear is your biggest hurdle to creating true connections; it is the friend of isolation and the enemy of vulnerability.  Many of us have let fear control our lives. We let fear determine what we do, how we do it, who we love and how much we love them. As someone who lived in fear and really didn’t realize it, I look back now and see everything I let it rob me of. I allowed myself to drift along without relying on anyone.  I kept others at a distance for fear of being hurt and disappointed.

Not only does fear assist and allow us to perpetuate our own self-deprecating isolation, it can cause us to try to control things which are far beyond our control. This self-imposed volition to control anything and everything to avoid any type of pain or suffering is again (like judging) a doubly harmful action to ourselves.  Our attempt to control as much as possible robs us of the opportunity to spontaneously deal with reality as it is, since we impose preconceived expectations rather than allowing ourselves to watch what will naturally unfold. This in itself is painful. Think of a situation where you’ve had expectations about the outcome. Now the outcome is different then you expected. You become angry, maybe sad.  We begin to resist reality, thinking that it should have been the way we imagined. All the energy you spent on mentally creating the future you wanted to see, replaying the story repeatedly in your head and you still ended up in pain. The other harmful aspect of attempting to control things is that it is simply impossible. We are setting ourselves up for even more pain because we are attempting to accomplish something which cannot be done.  Our own fear, in working to avoid pain, drives us to cause ourselves pain, doesn’t that sound a little insane?

So how do we get to this place of acceptance? I would argue that it isn’t a place, it is an ongoing journey, one that I suspect will take a lifetime, which began for me in Dec 2009 when my grandmother died. Watching someone you love deteriorate before your very eyes can have a profound effect on you. To me it was the lack of control, the idea that regardless of how much you loved someone, how exactly we live our life, how much stuff we have, we are all subject to the same universal laws. Annica, impermanence, is one of the characteristics of all things in life.

I very distinctly remember going through my grandma’s apartment after her death with my family to clean it out. There was stuff crammed in every feasible corner, and I was going through VCR tapes (she never fully migrated over to DVD lol) to sort out family videos when I stopped. I looked around at the chaos of the apartment, family sorting through items, her friends coming to claim items, when a thought came over me. All these things she held onto in her life, things she cherished, things that brought her comfort, could do absolutely nothing for her in the end. Not even the love of our family could stop it. I know intellectually you might be saying “duuuh” but when you experience this for yourself, you begin to see life from a different perspective.  This was my first glimpse at the truth that all that arises must pass. I say glimpse, because life has continued to shove this concept in my face in hopes that one day I will truly understand it. This experience spawned a new sense of urgency into my life and started me on my journey to acceptance.

Countless books, internet research, discussions, documentaries, dharma talks, jobs, boyfriends and months later, I finally came to a point in which I could rearrange my life to make room for some serious discovery. My first serious piece of work, and the most difficult thing I had to do was metta practice, which is loving-kindness. I say it was the most difficult project I’d ever had because metta always starts with- what’s supposed to be considered easiest- loving-kindness towards yourself. The structure then has you offering genuine loving-kindness to loved ones, then neutral persons, then enemies. The phrases my teacher/therapist/friend (to whom I will always be grateful to and remember in my Metta) gave me, which there are variations on everywhere were:

May I be happy.

May I be peaceful and at ease.

May I be free from suffering.

May I be filled with loving-kindness.

At first, I thought it would be easy. I would sit on my mediation cushion in my living room, and robotically repeat these phrases over and over again to myself for about a half hour twice a day. I didn’t feel the love so to speak. I did this for weeks before I met with my teacher again, and I confessed that I was having difficulty. He suggested a book to me, Radical Acceptance, which forever changed my life. As I read this book, it was as if the author had decided to spend time in my head to do her research. She phrased things in a way that I connected with and gave situational examples that struck me.  It was through reading the author’s challenges and challenges of her patients (she’s a psychologist and a Buddhist) I began to recognize the fear in me. I could hear its voice as thoughts in my head telling me “Maybe he won’t love you anymore”, “You’re too this”, and “you’re not enough that”. I could also feel myself retreating, a so-called negative emotion would arise and I would retreat into my own head talking myself out of it, whatever it was anger, jealousy or vulnerability.  It was through this process of taking a good hard look in the proverbial mirror that I finally began to understand the cause and effect relationships between how I hurt myself and others.

It’s funny, as people when we are happy, we hoard it. We want to keep it for ourselves and protect it so no one can affect it. When we are hurt, our immediate response is to lash out and hurt others. I remember seeing this cycle in my own behaviours. My sense of self would be offended, and my first response was to make whoever I viewed as the perpetrator to be just as hurt. That is the human condition. We all want to be happy, we all want to be free from suffering but we are also the perpetrators of our own unhappiness. How ironic.

One of my major hurdles was dealing with unfelt anger. Anger that I had numbed for one reason or another finally needed to be released. I certainly did not wake up one day knowing “Hey this is the day I feel it all” but thanks to a perfect storm of events and a mental-emotional fortitude (which I wasn’t aware of, I had been crying like baby for a month basically), it finally came to fruition.  I became angry, seriously angry. At first I was angry about the current situation (I was annoyed with my boyfriend’s behavior) but then I quickly realized as a particular phrase ran through my head that this was anger from long ago. When I say I was angry, I feel like this is the understatement of my life. I cannot describe the anger I felt in any other way except for black. I’d heard the phrase “red with anger” but I was BEYOND that. Internally I felt like I was standing on the edge of an abyss of this black anger, I had a choice I could either jump into this black abyss and act like a crazed lunatic or I could stand on the edge and feel it. Boy, did I feel it. I had thoughts and phrases run through my head that thinking about now makes me laugh. I particularly remember at one point wanting to just scream. Just scream out in pain and anger. I was convinced in my head though, that if I did, it wouldn’t sound human. I just had this primeval, animalistic howl in my head and I knew if I screamed that’s what would come out.

The anger rocked through me, and what I realized afterwards while crying in my kitchen, was that anger was the armor I had used for my pain. Underneath all that anger was the hurt.  Accepting the anger, the hurt and the fact that many of my actions unconsciously hurt others was the most difficult part of my journey, but the most important. Only once we can accept ourselves, and see our own motivations behind our actions can we begin to accept others and reality as they are.  When we recognize ourselves in others is when true compassion and equanimity can develop. We are all motivated by the same general principles, we want to be happy and we don’t want to suffer.

So in a blatant attempt to be vulnerable, I would like to share a kind-of poem I wrote of my angry experience right after it. To be honest, I debated whether to share it or not because it was so deeply personal and because I’m afraid of judgments, but I’m making the conscious effort to be vulnerable, so enjoy!

Anger

Deep, black worm hole

Pulling, calling, begging.

Teetering on the edge.

I want to scream.

I want to smash**       

Pressure in my chest,

Pushing its way out.

Just fucking go!!

Galvanized, thick armor

protecting the softness.

Must feel the way through,

don’t give in,

don’t get lost,

just feel.

Then comes the pain.

I care about this suffering.

** the dishes on my counter, not like the hulk...or actually ya maybe like the hulk.

On the path to vulnerability, Part 1 - Awareness!

To overcome our crippling isolation, we must make true and lasting connections. To do this, we must learn to be vulnerable. The core of honest vulnerability comes from a profound sense of self-worth and courage. Have the courage to be imperfect.

This is probably the most fear inducing aspect of the process of finding true acceptance, happiness and worthiness. Vulnerability. People cringe at this word. Many equate vulnerability with weakness, but I sincerely and respectfully disagree. It takes a great deal of self-acceptance to lay it all out there for others to see. The beauty of struggling in our lives is that it’s necessary. Without some source of suffering, we would never realise that there is another way to live.

I know for many, myself included, being vulnerable was excruciating. It meant bearing your soul, showing those self-labelled less desirable aspects of our personality and sharing pain with others, who appeared (and I stress appeared) to be happy or great or whatever.  There’s a quote by Rumi, which through my process of self-acceptance I painted onto the mirror in my bedroom. He says “Don’t turn away; keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters”. I remember reading this quote one night while working through Tara Brach’s book Radical Acceptance. It really touched me. I realised that our proverbial bandaged places are necessary for enlightenment.

I have discovered that the isolation that we subject ourselves to is caused by a deep, deep lack of worthiness. This black hole of unworthiness affects us in every interaction we have with others. It is fuelled by whatever circumstances we experienced and hold on to. Everyone’s experience will be different, and I don’t mean to trivialise the difficulties we have faced in our lives, but there comes a point when we must let go. These difficulties live on only in and because of us. They ended and we keep them alive by living our lives in constant reaction to what happened in the past.

So how does unworthiness keep its hold on us? Through fear and isolation. Our fear of being unaccepted keeps us from being truthful, open and compassionate. We currently live our lives in the defensive, we react to everything conditioned by what happened to us in the past, rather than looking at every situation objectively as it is in that very moment.

In my opinion, I’m a well-liked person. I can be personable, fun, funny and generally someone people don’t mind being around. In my teens I had friends- as in a group of people I spent time with socially- but I didn’t make lasting relationships. I’ve never made lasting relationships because I was never truly honest and vulnerable about myself. I don’t have any big secrets other than the personal struggle with my own pain and unworthiness. I was terrified that I would never be accepted for me or for my life situation. No one would understand and they would all think I was someone to stay away from.

I arranged my romantic relationships in such a way that I was “needed”, whether it be financially or socially or however I could manage it. I was so fearful that I wouldn’t be loved and accepted for who I was that I figured the only way to obtain love is by making myself irreplaceable to someone. Even writing this now, I become emotional because I can’t believe I valued myself so little. It’s one of the most difficult self-realisations that I came to. If anyone had ever said that to me about themselves, I would have told them “You are enough, just the way you are. You are exactly what you’re supposed to be” and now I can finally say that to myself.

This identification and observation of your patterns, behavioural, mental and otherwise, is awareness. So how do you gain awareness? I would start with some serious self-reflection.  Stop viewing actions such as journaling merely as the self-indulgent past-time for 12-year-old girls to gush about their boy band crushes and use it as a tool for self-reflection and deep analysis. I have always had an analysing mind, and this is not the case for all. I would suggest writing daily, in as much detail as possible. Include in your entries specific information about how you felt in situations, then go the extra distance and seriously debate WHY you felt that way. Were you really pissed because so-and-so said this, or was it because you were agitated about a conversation you had with your parent earlier?

Taking the time to write and reflect allows you to see patterns in your behaviours. As you become more aware of your behaviours, patterns and your motivation behind actions, you will begin to notice them while they are occurring rather than only later on. This awareness in the present moment of your thoughts, actions and emotions is known as mindfulness.  Mindfulness is the key to wisdom and compassion in the sense that only once we see how we are hurt, how we constantly hurt others, we can forgive ourselves and others because we do not know any better. Without mindfulness, we are living half asleep, unconsciously propagating pain indiscriminately.

Suffering is caused by isolation, which is a lack of connection.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

own were; any man's death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

From: Mediation XVII by John Donne.

What is isolation?

How does it manifest itself?

How do we move forward?

Pain, mental and emotional, is primarily a result of a blatant error in human thinking. As people, we categorize ourselves as individuals, rather than the interconnected movement of energy that we are.  This pain of isolation causes us to act in unskillful ways.  We draw lines between “us” and “them” focusing on our differences to strengthen our individual sense of self. We strengthen our “us” vs. “them” mentality by keeping feelings and situations to ourselves, rather than being open and honest. Our ego especially enjoys judging others, further isolating ourselves in this “us” vs. “them” fallacy.

We are ashamed of life situations and keep these events to ourselves. The script (which I’ve heard in my own head and from others) is that “no one else would understand”; “they might treat me differently”; or “they might not want to be around me anymore”. We are reared with a utopian idea of “normal” and how “normal” families are supposed to look and behave. The reality of life is that what’s normal is dysfunction.  This idea of normalcy is propagated by society through media and by ourselves when we put up the façade that “life is always good”.  We hide pain, anger, jealousy, loneliness behind veils of smiles because as long as everything appears “perfect” we can continue on in denial. We continue to segregate ourselves from others in a true sense.

For me, I often struggled with anger. Through conditioning and experiences, I thought anger could only be expressed in one way – yelling and confrontation. I was so adversed to feeling anger that I often avoided confrontation even in situations where it was necessary, like to stand up for myself. That’s not to say I didn’t ever stand up for myself, but I certainly did not show my anger, regardless of whether it was righteous or not.

I spent my young adult life in relationships, both romantic and platonic, where rather than talking out situations I was unhappy or upset about, I told myself not to overreact. I constantly told myself that my upset feelings were never justified and I was wrong. Over time, this would pile repressed anger on top of repressed anger leading to inevitable resentment. "Why couldn’t they just see what I was doing for them?” or “If they really cared about me they would do [insert behavior]!”  I spent a lot of energy blaming the others in the relationship for not reaching out to me, for not understanding me better, but the truth was that I didn’t let them. I perpetuated my own isolation.

The issue with numbing emotions is that this is not a selective process. You can’t choose to say I’ll never feel anger without repercussions.  Instead of living on the complex and large continuum of human emotions, we restrict ourselves to a “greige” existence somewhere in the middle, where the so-called negative emotions aren’t felt, but neither are the blissful ones.  In my opinion, the root of this behavior- and really of all suffering- is denial of what is. If we accepted our full range of emotions, even the ones that scare us, they would lose their power over us. 

The idea of numbing is flawed as well. We think that if we don’t feel something it goes away. WRONG! This denial of reality becomes imprinted on you, like a mental scar. Sometimes the result of stuffing your feelings can be felt physically. I’ve personally seen this in my grandmother. After a life of not standing up for herself she’s become an angry, passive aggressive ball of nerves.  Any time a situation presents itself where strong emotions come to play, she vibrates.  Her whole body rocks in revolt against her numbness. This denial of emotions not only expresses itself physically, but is the main cause for addiction (food, sex, drugs, anything), self-mutilation and other harmful behaviors.

Another tool of isolation is judgment. Judging others creates a doubly negative effect on us. Firstly, judging someone else boosts our ego and strengthens the false concept of identity. Secondly, that judgment then becomes turned around on us, reinforcing the negativity within. As we sit judging others for being a certain way, we begin to think others are judging us in some way. When we hurt or judge others we are in fact hurting ourselves.  What feels satisfying in a moment – thinking you’re superior to someone in some way- reinforces an isolating and destructive sense of self.

The reality of the world itself is constantly proving our concept of separateness to be false. We perceive ourselves as ending at the limit of our physical bodies, our skin. I have several questions which challenge this perceived end; they are:

1)      Your physical body began as sperm and ova from two separate people – at what point did this become you?

2)      The very biological processes that  promote our survival, for example breathing, eating and smelling, require outside objects (food, volatile chemicals, elements in air,etc) to enter our bodies and become absorbed into us. At what point do these become a part of us? Where do these elements end and we begin? Do they end? Do we begin?

The cause and effect relationship of this world as described by biologists, Buddhists, and quantum physicists is another obvious challenge to our separatist thinking. If what I did was a local, singular event, then there would be no effect outside of that event. Quantum mechanics has shown that through no direct connection the characteristics of twin particles can affect one another. Two twin particles emitted from the same atom will have the same spin. Should the spin of one be altered, the other particle acquires this new spin without a visible direct connection. This can be seen in the real world in a macro level through global warming, and in a micro level by how our attitude directly affects those around us. If we were truly separate, would we be required to consume the energies of other beings (plants and animals) to sustain our physicality?

So how do we move forward from our perceived isolation? By accepting the truth that we are all connected, and by fearlessly accepting our reality as it is.

What is the Worthiness Revolution?

Through some amateur study and personal insight I've come to realize several truths about us as people and the way we move through life. I must make a disclaimer: what I'm saying here has been said before by others before me and hopefully many after; however perhaps the way I say it may mean something to you. I've come to understand the way we interact and cause pain in ourselves and eachother by seeing it so clearly in myself. This insight has caused me to accept some basic truths about myself, and about us. I phrase these truths modeled after the Buddha's Four Noble Truths. That being said, I chose this fashion because I think it clearly outlines the cause and effect reality of our actions rather than because I support any one particular religious belief over another.
I see these truths as:

1. Suffering is caused by isolation which is a lack of connection.

2. True connections require honest vulnerability.

3. The ability to be vulnerable requires self acceptance and self-worth.

4. Self-worthiness is the path to compassion.

I decided to call these discussions The Worthiness Revolution because now is the time for us to evolve. Many great philosophers, scientists and theologists have pointed to the fact that as a species we have not physically evolved for an extended period of time. They hypothesize that our next phase of our evolution is a social change. A shift in societal thinking to a more skillful and all-encompassing point of view. Given the recent world events and the general state of our world, I say we really have no choice but to change or become extinct.

I believe that once we really recognize - and I mean experientially not just intellectually- that we are infact all connected, we will begin to make choices that benefit us all. You'll notice through my truths that the key to ending suffering and creating compassion is self-worthiness and acceptance. Only once you can accept the reality of what is really happening in any one given moment within you can you accept and be compassionate towards others.

I offer my limited knowledge on these topics because once one understands them, you can not keep them to yourself. I also ask for the experiences, knowledge and thoughts from others because we are infact all in this together. This is not merely my truth, but ours.