We Are All Vulnerable To Life And Other People

From Awakening, A Daily Guide to Conscious Living, written by Shakti Gawain, Revised Edition, 1991 & 2006, October 3 page:

"We are all vulnerable

Most of us are somewhat afraid of our vulnerability. We have various ways of masking it, hiding it, defending it. The key to intimacy, though, is being able to be vulnerable with another person. To do that, we must first be honest with ourselves about our deepest, most vulnerable feelings. We must learn to care for and protect these feelings, not by closing them off and defending them, but by being able to say honestly what we feel and ask for what we need.

As we learn to use our inner strength to support and express our inner vulnerability instead of to repress it, we begin to feel safer and more comfortable opening up to another person.

I am learning to feel comfortable with my vulnerability."


Being vulnerable enough to ask for help is a biggy for me. You can read my previous article "Dealing With Change" found at http://patricia-singleton.blogspot.com/2009/10/dealing-with-change.html for some of those reasons.

Lately, I continue to put myself in a place of being vulnerable to others. I actually do that with everyone of the articles that I write on this blog. I allow myself to be vulnerable when I call my Al-Anon sponsor or my best friend.

I recently started attending a grieving group which gives me plenty of opportunities to be vulnerable with more sharing of my incest story and my recovery experiences. Any time that you are in recovery, you do grieving work. Any time that you go to a counselor or therapist, some, if not most, of the work that you do is grieving work as you learn to face your issues. The homework for our group this week was twofold:
1. Give someone else some of your "experience, strength, and hope" when they ask for your help.
2. Receive help from someone else gracefully.

One very important fact that the class was told last night was that "Help is not help unless the person receiving it perceives it as help." Giving advice, even when it is asked for, isn't always helpful. Most of the time when a person asks for advice, what they really need and want is someone to listen to them as they talk and figure out their own answers.

I know that a lot of my readers come from a childhood of abuse in some form. I am passing my homework assignment along to any of you who are willing to do it this week. Let me know how you did.

In a recent comment, I was asked to share a website with my readers. After looking at the website and emailing back and forth with one of the contributers, I decided to put up a Blog Link with this person, Thomas Dow, and his website. His website is called "Let's Be Present". You can find his site at the following link: http://www.letsbepresent.com/ . Thomas, like me, is a Lightworker who is reaching out to help others heal from their childhood abuse issues as he works to heal his own issues.
Patricia