Vulnerability Hangover
My beautiful friend, Dana Balicki and I recently had a live conversation on Instagram.
I had a rough mental sketch of what I was going to talk about, and none of it involved going into any details of personal traumatic life experiences.
Or so I thought.
It turned out that my unconscious - or my larger Self - had other plans.
A combination of ongoing deep-dive inner adventures around unveiling, dissolving and creating new, authentic meanings around deep, swampy layers of shame, voluntarily putting myself into the fire-walk of launching my first group container, and the loveliness of being in juicy conversation with a good friend led to me briefly talking about an event in my late twenties, when I still lived in England, that ruptured mine and my family’s life beyond all recognition.
Since I moved to the desert eight years ago, only a grand total of four friends here - Dana included - have been told about it, because of the heavy rage and unjustified shame that clung to this experience like a succubus-albatross.
Speaking publicly about this topic was definitely not something I felt “consciously” ready to do, although I knew one day I would. Just not yet.
Or so I thought.
As the words came tumbling out of my mouth, my body constricted and heated up. My knees started to feel like Jello, my heart jolted upright with a pounding WTF??!! To say I was in a state of “activation” would be an understatement.
Hello gaping chasm of ego-annihilating vulnerability.
We continued on with our conversation, moved on to different and related topics. I thanked the Goddess for Dana and her energetic “I got you” transmitted to me through the ethers. Miraculously, I managed to string whole sentences together while staying present with what was going on inside me. Afterwards, as the vulnerability and rawness descended into body and soul in full force, I surrendered, knowing that this is exactly what needed to happen, in exactly this way.
Expansion demands opening up to vulnerability, to bearing witness to yourself in all your rawness. As I allowed myself to sink into the discomfort of transformative vulnerability, I also allowed space for wonder at how far I had come, at how I had transmuted toxic shame into clarifying medicine.
I saw how this shame, levelled at my family and I from the patriarchal-colonialist institutions hell-bent on domination and force-fed (de)meaning-making, had instead been allowed to transform into something else entirely.
Meanwhile, vulnerability did her work, and I let her.
It felt like falling, like dying.
I remembered how the freefall part of a skydive is my favourite bit.
But of course, in our dominant, monolithic colonizer culture, being perfectly in control and perfectly turned out, and never looking like a loser, let alone showing the “weakness” of vulnerability is the currency of choice.
Screaming your way into oblivion with your skin blasted back against your bones and surrendering into the Mystery of trust is definitely not considered a put-together look.
And that’s what this raw vulnerability felt like - the undiluted, unadulterated current of Life and the Mystery moving through me. Uncomfortable, revelatory aliveness.
I’ve spent the last few days allowing and making space for this raw, unfiltered aliveness. All the marketing bros would be up in arms. This close to a launch date, I should be sending out an email a day, posting multiple times on all of the platforms.
I’m on a one-way ticket to loser-ville with all this sissy vulnerability crap.
But then, my soul is super turned on by a good freefall. And my nervous system just did not have the capacity for anything more than being in the transformative freefall of bravehearted vulnerability.
I’m still integrating the experience, still sitting in the awe and wonder of leaning further and further into the Mystery of trusting mySelf. Writing this today has been a joyful tonic, infused with play.