Gratefully Vulnerable
Have you noticed how much easier it is to connect with someone who is genuine? These people have a knack of making us feel valued in their company. They don’t put on a façade or pretend to be someone they’re not. They are comfortable in their own skin and grateful for the various aspects of their life, both smooth and challenging. Whether they realize it or not, these people have embraced vulnerability and given themselves permission to accept all emotions: joy and grief, love and fear, vitality and shame, happiness and hurt. In this way, they are not only accepting themselves unconditionally but they make us feel that they accept us in the same way too.
Brené Brown is an expert in the field of vulnerability. Her research shows that people who embrace this characteristic have a deeper sense of belonging and connection, vital for living a life of purpose. At the core of this sense of worthiness is the ability to be vulnerable and show up true. We isolate ourselves from connection when we don’t believe we are worthy of it. This escalates our sense of disconnection and thus feeds a potentially downward spiral. In addition, it is important for us to realize that we cannot selectively numb emotions and that when we attempt to cut off feelings of grief, fear and shame, we are also numbing joy, creativity, love and our sense of belonging.
Being grateful is powerful in assisting us to embrace an authentic way of living. It opens up our hearts to accept our experiences fully and enables us to harvest the pearls from our past to enjoy the present.
This manner of living, and being, takes courage. It requires us to embrace our stories that we carry from the past so that we are no longer controlled by the emotions attached to them. One of the most powerful examples of this that I have found, comes from Elizabeth Smart and I strongly encourage you to watch her short, moving, Tedx Talk : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0C2LPXaEW4
I have watched Elizabeth’s talk a few times and it never fails to bring tears to my eyes. Her story is one of dreadful violation, yet her final words are filled with gratitude and the power of choice. She demonstrates enormous vulnerability to stand on stage and share her story.
What’s your story? More specifically, what are the parts of your story that are keeping you captive? Perhaps your ego is preventing you from looking at it with an open heart. So often our egos want to keep the status quo and resist self-reflection. I once read that ego loves attention but dislikes scrutiny. If we are serious about ageing gratefully, we need to recognize the boundaries holding us back from the full and vital life on offer to us.
Introducing gratitude everyday will transform the way we show up each morning.
The natural progression will be to embrace vulnerability without realizing it is happening. This is because practicing thankfulness empowers us to live from the heart and not only the mind. There are practical steps that I have found helpful one of which I would like to share in the hope that you find it useful also.
Ever since my husband’s demise, a particular practice that I have found powerful has been to choose one thing daily that I am grateful for, and write about it in more detail. When I first started doing this, it was to shift the weight of my focus away from my grief for a brief period. It allowed me to be open and vulnerable on paper. I wasn’t writing with the intention of being grateful when I first started. However, I found that the honest, raw words on the page began to see the beauty held within the pain. For example, I remember one day a dear friend came to visit to check up on me. My emotions were particularly heavy that day with the weight of my grief too great to stop crying. At the time my friend hugged me, saying to me “Sally, I don’t know what to do to help you. I feel so useless.” Yet she was doing the very thing I needed at that time; she listened and she cared. I realized the preciousness of this later that evening when I picked up my pen to offload my emotion onto paper. My words moved from the pain in my heart to gratitude for the love and compassion of my friend and it brought with it a peace that had been eluding me.
I believe this is what it feels like to be gratefully vulnerable – to open my heart and allow gratitude to flood in.
Over time, I have come to realize the deep effect this method has on me and I continue to do it still. By exploring the reasons why I am thankful for someone, something or an experience, I believe I am bedding it down and shifting my outlook. For anyone who doesn’t enjoy writing, try recording your exploration. It can be interesting to hear what revelations appear to you.
This is also a profound way to embrace something that contributes to each of our life stories. I can’t stress how important it is for our self-worth to accept every part of our history because all of it is relevant to the person we are today. It takes courage and vulnerability to do this.
Of course not all of our grateful recordings need to be significant events like my illustration. Mostly, I record seemingly simple things, yet after I have given them a little more consideration, I realize how true the adage is, “that the little things in life are, in reality, the big things.”
As we grow older it is easy to use the word vulnerable as reference to being frail, when the opposite is closer to the truth. It takes strength to open up, live from the heart and take control of our own individual egos, to allow ourselves to be seen authentically. This means we embrace all emotions, which is so healthy. I would like to encourage you to continue to practice gratitude, even through times of challenge. This is the way to age boldly, know we are exactly who we are meant to be and in this way enjoy every stage of this precious, irreplaceable life.