In Our Vulnerability

By Bernadette A. Moyer

A few days ago I went to see the new Disney Pixar film titled; Inside Out. The take away for me was that nothing got better until the main character (a little girl) could honestly deal with her emotions. When she could finally communicate her sadness over moving away from her hometown and leaving behind her school and her friends and her hockey team and express it and cry over it in an honest way, everything seemed to get better for her. Nothing worked when she expressed anger and her frustrations. Her parents couldn’t understand why she was disrespectful and why she was running away. In her vulnerability and in her honest communications the darkness dissipated and the light returned and then she was happy again.

I think we have all had those moments when self-preservation takes hold, our ego is engaged and we respond in dishonest ways and cover ups that only prolong the inevitable. Often our openness and our truth and our vulnerability is what is most needed and yet so challenging for us to accomplish.

“Vulnerability may be understood as the capacity to be open, to be attracted, touched, or moved by the draw of God’s love as this is experienced in one’s own life or in the lives of others. It is vulnerability that enables one to enter into relationships of interpersonal communication and communion with others who recognize their own weakness and need. Vulnerability requires the integrity and the strength — indeed the power — to risk enormous pain, to bear the burdens of the darkest hour without avoidance, denial and deception. It demands the stamina to be open in order to be touched in one’s fragility. Vulnerability implies a willingness to lose oneself, to be knocked off center by the claim of the others upon one in the hope of finding one’s true self. It demands readiness to die to one’s self so that one might truly live.” Robert S. Rivers, CSP from Maintenance to Mission  

It is amazing that how when we are honest and when we are heartfelt and when we are open how we attract healing and all the rights things into our lives. For many people honesty and vulnerability are covered up by lies and by self-preservation and these things only serve to take us further away from our authentic selves and from what we need to heal and to become whole and happy.

What touches our hearts? What moves us? What makes us feel emotions from a deep place within? It isn’t bravado but rather an absence of false pride and a willingness to open our hearts up in real and meaningful ways. I don’t know of anything that gets better when we deliberately choose to deny our hearts.

“I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few.” Brene Brown  

Love … belonging … trust … joy … creativity … they all seem to start with our openness and our willingness to become vulnerable …

Bernadette on Facebook at www.facebook.com/bernadetteamoyer