Vulnerability is the final gift! It was given to you by Life, and you can gift it to yourself.
This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.
Just Be Like This Today: “Today I Choose my Vulnerability”
Every act of true vulnerability is a step towards your truest freest Self.
free
able to act or be done as one wishes,
not or no longer confined or imprisoned
Every choice you make to hide your vulnerability is a casting vote against the truth of who and what you are. The problem of course is shame. You may think it is prudence, or pride even, or proper ethics, but when you cannot speak your truth to yourself, much less to someone else, the reason is always, always guilt and shame.
Guilt says, “I did something wrong.” Shame says, “I am something wrong.”
Shame is nothing more than the shadow you cast by simply being alive and real in this world, which falls outside of your learned ability to be honest with yourself. You cast a shadow simply by being real, and by standing in the light of consciousness.
Strength, resilience and fortitude have their own powerful places of meaning and relevance in our society, but somewhere along the way, you were tricked into the notion that vulnerability means weakness.
What could be more strong than listening to your own whole truth and even if it causes you to wince, you keep listening? What could be stronger than choosing to love and accept yourself the way you are, especially if it has costs?
There is no greater treasure on this earth, than to be loved truly for who you truly are. And to be thus loved for who you truly are, one of course has to have the courage to be vulnerable enough to let people see who you really are.
Authenticity cannot exist without Vulnerability.
HOW TO PRACTICE VULNERABILITY
That is exactly it.
You practice vulnerability. Everything is hard at first. Practice makes progress. Practicing something that you are not good at yet, IS Vulnerability. Vulnerability is essential to growth and learning, and since growth and healing are really two side of the same coin, vulnerability is essential to healing.
The self-discovery you can come to by facing your shadow, the choice to courage, the way in which you lead the child within by the door of voluntary vulnerability to come to the place of great healing, can only be exactly this way because all your first wounds arrived in the only place they could arrive, which was the utmost helpless vulnerability of childhood.
You have to have one conversation at a time with yourself. You have to listen to one voice at a time, and let it speak, without your voices of judgement and self-protection shaming the voice of your inner child or the soft animal in you.
The more you practice speaking and journaling your truth, the better your own articulation and language of your vulnerabilities will be. Then you can properly speak your truth, without causing yourself more harm.
The advice I always give to my clients and patients, (and friends), is that you do not have to lead with your most vulnerable truth. You don’t have to blurt out your kinks on a first date. You don’t have to overshare with anyone who you have not built some rapport with. If it is important, it will come up. It is not dishonest to trickle-feed your truth to someone until you both have the language and the trust to say more. Things have a way of coming up, and we know exactly the shames that plague us.
TAKE HOME/PRACTICE
The take-home today is a practice I call ONE VOICE AT A TIME.
The premise is that you have 4 persona inside:
The Child,
The Animal,
The Protector, and
The Judge.
The Child wants nurture, forgiveness and acceptance. The Animal wants the needs of your body met and those needs honoured from time to time. The Protector wants to keep you safe from Danger, Injury, Violation & Loss. The Judge wants you to be free and wants everything to be fair, or at least protected by Justice.
WHEN WE ARE IN SHADOW
Your shadow response to not getting your needs met is that
the Wounded Child resorts to shame, attention seeking, tantrums, hiding, pretending, self-neglect and fantasy.
the Animal becomes The Beast, which is where your impulses for aggression, excess and vigilance come from. Excess plays itself out as binging, which then causes more shame.
The Protector, when ignored, becomes The Critic, concerned with guilt, self-blame, self-criticism, perfectionism and controlling behaviour.
When the Judge fails, when you don’t feel free or fair, The Victim emerges, who is concerned with blaming someone else, spite and acts from a distended external locus of control.
The practice today is about listening to the loudest voice and letting it speak, holding space and not letting the other voices silence it.
Today I will listen to One Voice at a Time, and I will listen with my whole heart. This is how I receive the gift of Vulnerability and this is how I gift it to myself!
Just Be Like This Today!
There is obviously a lot of nuance and detail to share about The One Voice At A Time practice. If you are looking for a more direct application of this Living Wisdom, or a more tailored approach to this and other effective practices, the other half of my day job is meeting with people and helping them apprentice themselves to their own life: Schedule a Call
We are who we repeatedly choose to be!
💕