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.