Discovery 1: Vulnerability is just the ticket

What is vulnerability to you? In my case, it has had an evolutionary significance. It’s been assuming different things throughout my life. Specifically, three. These are my three ways of relating to vulnerability.

Stage 1. Ignorance

Like many people, I received an education in which showing one’s feelings was frowned upon. The priests told us that “men don’t cry” and for many years I suppressed my emotions. This was what we had learned to do.

Let’s say that at this stage my emotional management consisted simply of turning my back on showing any symptoms of weakness in public. Because vulnerability was associated with weakness. Crying, showing feelings to others, was a bad way to be a man.

Stage 2. The crush

My second stage I see as a crush on vulnerability. In the formations with Ketan Raventós I learned what we could call the circle of fullness.

The human being resembles a fruit that has a very hard outer shell, another intermediate layer and an exquisite seed inside: they are our shell, our vulnerability and our essence. We almost always live in our shell, with that public persona we invent as we grow up, so that society does not harm us. The armour gives us security and control.

To reach our interior, our true essence, we have to cross the middle ground of vulnerability, where all our wounds, our fears and the memory of all our painful experiences are stored. But knowing them, and recognizing them, is the beginning of fulfillment. We can only grow as people and increase our awareness if we dive deep into our vulnerability. We only come to know who we really are when we also know our shadows and accept them.

But this exercise requires a lot of awareness: to detect our wounds and observe them, without judging. Only from acceptance does fulfillment come. Ignoring them or fighting them only succeeds in perpetuating them. To transcend them, we must include them in our identity. Naturally.

AVOIDING VULNERABILITY

Finally, the essence is your intrinsic nature, your truth, the unique and perfect being that you already are. It is the potential within each of you, which is reached after a long journey of inner discovery.

There are many people who want to enjoy their essence, but are in a tremendous panic to put their little toes into the deep waters of their own vulnerability. For them, what I call “vaporizers” were invented, which imitate the experience of being freshly showered, but without having to get wet with our vulnerability.

THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING VULNERABLE

Well, here’s the theory. It sounds very nice, but you don’t understand it until you really break down, drop the shell, and let all those feelings come out that we’ve been covering up for a long time. Vulnerability is, and I can’t find a more direct expression, all our shit. Yeah, our shit.

The problem is that we think other people don’t realize it, but the shit smells, and not very well. And no matter how much you hide it, the perfume gets everywhere. So, no matter how much we hide it, we go with our palominos or our plasta in our underwear, and people notice.

In my case, I experienced vulnerability when I shared with several loved ones how I felt about an especially painful subject for me that I had never talked about in public. I began to cry and when I finished, I went under the shower for 20 minutes, so that she could take away all the things that had come out.

THE PARADOX OF VULNERABILITY

There’s a paradox to vulnerability. Even if you think that showing one’s emotions is a symptom of weakness, people who observe it think the opposite, that it is an act of courage, in this day and age, to show one’s self in the open and with one’s feelings in the flesh. In my case, they thanked me for that courage.

So that’s where the first thing I called a crush on vulnerability began. In addition, I had the prize of connecting with my essence, which in my case, unleashed a terrible creativity. And, since my work has creativity as an ingredient, I became a regular of vulnerability. In short, for some years I was the crying Nancy.

You spend a lot of time avoiding pain and when you feel it you discover that it’s not so bad. Of course, the step is to overcome the fear of pain.

“It’s easier to cause pain than to feel pain.”

Brené Brown

STAGE 3. IT’S THE TICKET, NOT THE DESTINATION

I am deeply happy to have discovered this third stage recently. Vulnerability, as American psychologist Brené Brown points out in her talk on Netflix, is indispensable for growing as a person.

https://youtu.be/HhZNXbP0vnk

When you’re in the shell, and you don’t recognize your vulnerability, “you beat other people up with your shit,” Brown recalls.

My discovery is that vulnerability is necessary, you have to go through it, but not stay in it. It is, as I put in the title of this discovery, just the ticket. It is indispensable to go on a trip. But what is important is to reach the destination, your essence.

I discovered by Eugenio Moliní that “pain has no value in itself”. So let’s go through it in the best possible way and focus on reaching the goal. And, the goal is your essence, the unique person that, as a child, you stopped being. So become the change you want and respect others as they are. Try to see the potential within them and stop wanting to change them.