VULNERABILITY: OPENING TO LOVE, LOSS, AND JOY
Are you open to living your life as completely, deeply and fully as possible? Do you value being loved by, and loving, others? If your answer to these questions is “yes”, then you will need the courage to be vulnerable. As you open your awareness to life, you realize that death and loss go hand in hand with birth and gain. The courage to be vulnerable is willingness to stay open, to love and let in what you most desire, even though a future loss may bring heartache. I find too many people holding themselves back, trying to not be hurt by disappointment, and locking away key parts of themselves. Poet Elizabeth Sewell describes this as “drawing the tombstone up to the chin (in life)”. This is no way to live. To be fully alive means loving and living openly and seizing each one and only moment for all it is worth.
The courage to be vulnerable is a prerequisite to being able to enjoy love, to being authentic, to living with joy. Yes, loss and pain will be there and come along with the joy and love. Yet, even when you try to protect yourself from being hurt, you have probably found that you simply hurt yourself more. You deprive yourself, as well as those around you, of the power of your full presence, openness and engagement. It is a bargain with the devil when you cut yourself of from feeling love; it simply guarantees that you will feel greatly deprived now, AND in the end.
If you are willing to be open to the wholeness of your life experience, instead of settling for being “safe” and closed-in, then I invite you to make a list of the things that matter most to you and the people you love the most. Outline ways in which you may have been holding back; perhaps there are words you have left unexpressed for fear of rejection or loss. Who would you reach out to if you were on your deathbed? What would you say to them? Why wait? Be bold: practice vulnerability and open to love, starting in this precious moment now.
By Robert E. Staub