Endless Inner Satisfaction
Guidance for a Life Better Than You Could Imagine
Question: "Does the feeling of vulnerability ever turn into a sense of power for you?"
If you had asked me that earlier in life, my answer probably would have been something like: "What's this vulnerability you mention?"
For a good part of my life, if you had asked me to describe my feelings, I might have said, "What feelings?" And I don't think that's uncommon.
I went through much of life with a kind of emotional neutrality as my normal state. I wasn't particularly unhappy. I thought of myself as pretty happy-go-lucky. But looking back, I can see that I wasn't exactly feeling life deeply, either.
I was living in what I now call the "Meh" state of being. That's different today. I understand much more clearly what kept me there. And I've come to know vulnerability not as weakness, but as something we pass through when we stop protecting ourselves from what we feel.
So what is vulnerability, really?
To me, it is allowing whatever emotions are inside you to come up and be present without immediately resisting them, escaping them, explaining them away, or pushing them back down.
That sounds simple. It isn't always easy.
For years, you could have told me I was suppressing emotions and I would have looked at you blankly. "Huh? I don't know what you mean. I'm a pretty happy-go-lucky person."
I firmly believed that. It wasn't until later, when I began to see that life wasn't really working the way I wanted it to, that something changed. And then one day my system apparently said: "Enough."
I went into a swirling panic attack. Now that was fear. A panic attack can feel like massive fear coming from nowhere, while you have absolutely no idea what to do about it. My response was the obvious one: get to a hospital quickly and ask them to fix whatever was terribly wrong with me.
Except they couldn't find anything physically wrong. Imagine the quandary of being filled with overwhelming fear while everyone around you is telling you that you're fine.
For a couple of years, medication helped keep much of the fear at bay. But for me, that wasn't enough. I wanted to understand what was happening and why. Eventually, I began to see something I had never recognized before.
I had spent much of my life resisting emotions I didn't want to feel. And the resistance had become so automatic that I didn't even know I was doing it. That was perhaps the strangest realization of all: you can become so practiced at not feeling something that you no longer know you're avoiding it.
You simply call the resulting state "normal."
Today, strangely enough, I'm grateful for those panic attacks. Yes, it's much easier to say that looking backward. But I mean it.
They forced me to discover something I might otherwise never have learned: feelings do not always need to be fixed. Sometimes they need to be felt. I began learning to allow whatever arose within me to simply be there.
There were mornings when I would wake with my heart seeming to ache and my body filled with fear because of not knowing what that was. Instead of immediately fighting it, I practiced relaxing around it. Allowing it. Letting it be there. And letting it pass.
Some of what we carry may have been with us for a very long time. A child who feels frightened, rejected, embarrassed, or overwhelmed may have no idea how to process those feelings. Sometimes the only thing the child knows how to do is push them away and carry on.
I certainly did. As a quiet and decidedly unpopular teenager, rejection and embarrassment were difficult for me. Those feelings didn't disappear simply because I didn't want to feel them. I learned to bury them. But buried feelings have a curious habit of knocking on the door again.
And when they do, our old instinct is often to push them down one more time. I eventually discovered another possibility: Don't.
When an old fear arises, it still feels like fear. When old sadness arises, it still feels sad. That is where courage enters. Not the courage to defeat the feeling. The courage to let it be there. To stop running. To stop insisting that this moment must be different before you can be at peace.
That is vulnerability. That is opening the heart. And something remarkable can happen when we do.
The feeling is finally allowed to move. We are no longer spending our energy holding it down, defending against it, or organizing our lives around avoiding it.
Something else happens. You realize that in pushing down what you perceived as negative, you also held back what is beautiful, expansive, even extraordinary within you. Vulnerability opens you to all of it. And suddenly, life can be experienced far more richly and deeply.
And on the other side of vulnerability? You may call it power, if you wish. But to me, it feels more like returning to something natural.
Life without so much unconscious weight. Life without constantly protecting yourself from life. And underneath all that resistance, what begins to reveal itself is remarkably simple: Peace. Joy. And ultimately, Love.
When we stop rejecting so much of life, especially the parts of ourselves we were afraid to feel, something changes. The heart opens. We begin to allow. And that is freedom.
Yes, you could call that power. But you may discover that the word power no longer means what it once did. It isn't power over others. It isn't the ability to control life so that nothing can hurt you. It's the power of Life used for others.
It is the power of being fully available to Life. And gradually, the question within us begins to change.
From: "What can I get, and who can I get it from?" to: "How can I help?"
Power is no longer something we use to protect ourselves from the world. It becomes something Life expresses through us for the benefit of others.
And to me, that is real power.
If this has resonated with you, then these are the practices you've been looking for.
