Good morning, everyone!
I’d like to report in on a piece of a conversation I had the other day with someone that I found to be interesting and helpful. Perhaps you will, too. The gist of what the two of us explore together was this:
Authenticity and vulnerability are not the same thing.
It’s a common thing, I think, to imagine that if I am going to be authentic with other people than I need to be vulnerable with them also. This is not the case at all from my point of view. To be authentic is to be centered: it is to act and interact from a place that is clear, compassionate, and without the influence of conditioned mind. That is being centered on a process level. Being centered on the content level, however–on the level of form, on the level of our actual actions and interactions–can look any number of ways. In the same way that the essential, divine essence can manifest as a tree or a bird, or a stone, or a cloud, or a feeling, or a thought, centered awareness can manifest in relationships of all kinds as someone who is vulnerable and transparent, or as someone who is guarded and closed to particular levels of intimacy, or anywhere in between.
Personally, I have no desire to be open and vulnerable–to show my tender insides–to people who cannot receive that gift with kindness and respect. Most people cannot, in my experience; most people are going to use other people’s vulnerability to their own ends, and create a ‘self’ out of it. They are going to use the opportunity to give advice and be knowledgeable or helpful, for example, or they are going to try and rescue me from something that I am perfectly capable of addressing within myself, out of a fear of their own vulnerability. Stuff like that. I see no point in being vulnerable with someone who cannot hold vulnerability in compassionate awareness, and it seems to me to be an unkindness towards myself to do so.
Now, if I’m interacting with someone who does have an ability to hold their own openness and vulnerability in compassionate awareness, and so can hold mine as well, then I will willingly and eagerly show them where I am and what’s going on in the most intimate places inside of me. It feels good to be held in one’s experience by someone who can offer unconditional acceptance and unconditional love. One of the reasons I practice, in fact, is so that I can offer this same service to myself and others. In terms of my relationships with other people, however, I get to choose how vulnerable I wish to be, and I need to choose–and I take it as my responsibility to interact with them from a place of centered awareness, however vulnerable I choose to be.
There’s something to consider if it’s helpful. Take care, friends, be well, and have a beautiful day!
In peace,
David