Vulnerability and Courage

Dear Friends, This Monday we met a few hours after the horrible bombing in Boston. The tragedy was fresh in our hearts.

We focused on vulnerability and courage. As we open up, hide less we feel vulnerable. As we taste presence we can sometimes confuse this with the normal and real vulnerability of childhood. We are profoundly vulnerable as children. We cannot survive without the care and protection of our parents. We are slow to develop both physically and cognitively. And along the way we need the attuned support and holding of our parents, later our schools and larger community. And most us have experienced times when the support was far from attuned and sometimes non-existent. So we all developed ways to cope and to hide our vulnerability. The ego in a sense is a complex layering of protection around the pure openness of our souls. The superego develops as a way to insure that we don’t get too close to our vulnerability. It tells us that we are weak, stupid, girly if we are vulnerable and sensitive. We also associate vulnerability with being powerless, victimized, and abused. All these experiences and layers of self protection make staying with the openness and true vulnerability of living presence quite difficult. We instinctively associate it with the real defenselessness of the child.

Despite all the defensive pulls to hardening up, to hiding, to numbing our vulnerability, there seems to be deep sense of longing for the possibility of being ever so close to our own experience and to others. We long to feel close, to relax and to simply be. This letting go is our vulnerability, our openness settling, relaxing. 

We explored two questions: Tell me a way you react to vulnerability? And tell me a way you experience the preciousness of your vulnerability.

Our defense mechanisms are the ego’s way of trying to protect us from being, hurt, humiliated, betrayed. If we are to open to living presence we need a kind of boldness, a kind of courage that supports us.  Courage is a juicy, loving, strong heart that can meet threats, and take on superego attacks head on. Gradually as we come to love our precious vulnerability, our precious openness-- the doorway to our depths, to living presence-- we cannot help but let the bold heart bubble up to protect us. Ego defenses try to protect us, but they always disconnect us from our living presence. Courage, this bold face of living presence protects, defends the truth, but does not cut us off. How can it? It is living presence.

Question: Explore your courage to protect your living presence. What does it take to stay faithful to what is most precious to you. 

Correction: Thanks to Ruth, we are meeting on Monday 22nd for our last session. (Not 21st as I mistakenly emailed you a few days ago!)

Sunshine today. Spring is really here. Hope to see you on Monday. Warmly, Alison