HEAL: Beginning with Vulnerability
#crownstatement “Stand bare in the realness”
Healing is a continuous process. To think there is an ending is to pretend that life is a simple experience without the necessity of growth. There will always be repressed wounds to direct your attention and need to be released. A continued need for improvement.
The moments in life that throw you so far out of your alignment, where you can lose confidence and faith in your truth are the most unforgettable lessons if we choose to learn from them. It is natural and sometimes unconscious for us to be in our emotional funk. We understand the feeling we are in and may not realize how the said feeling is affecting our behavior. Becoming aware of your actions in and how you react to situations will inform you of the areas you need to focus your need to release but the process all starts with your ability to be vulnerable. Allow yourself the uncomfortable notion to ask ‘What can I do to change this feeling?’ or to ask for help.
During a time of conscious transformation, I realized that I hadn’t been seeing myself for a very long time. That day, something clicked and I was seeing myself very differently. Not as an image of beauty, desire, disgust or shame as interpreted by someone else’s eye but as a being that was not perfect, not broken, not whole but as a being that was limited. I saw that I wanted to become more than what I was perceiving of myself. I hadn’t looked at myself is such a long time that the point when I actively looked at myself in the mirror and couldn’t recognize who I was seeing. It wasn’t until I started shedding some ideas and layers of myself [my hair included], of what I was feeling to be true that I began to see what the actual truth was, my truth. This truth startled me simply because I facing someone I had never seen before. She was both awe-inspiring and terrifying simultaneously. I saw that I was limiting myself but I didn’t want to be afraid of myself any longer.
No one likes to feel vulnerable. It is seen as a weakness or helpless. However, there is strength in being emotionally vulnerable. Vulnerability allows you to create space for growth. Vulnerability allows you to be open to acceptance, to new perspectives, the release of pain and to become stronger when dealing with life’s challenges. It is a simple notion that requires you to reevaluate your expectations of the situations and accept the reality of it in order to respond better to anything similar or, better yet, not react at all. Opening up allows you to release the old, to accept the truth and to choose how you want to respond.
In this process of healing, it is most essential to be vulnerable when you feel safe, with whom you feel safe. The foundation of safety begins with the relationship of trust you have with yourself. This may require you to create your own space of [emotional] safety instead of waiting to be offered or given the space by someone else.
Creating a safe space can be as simple as writing down your thoughts and feelings. Becoming comfortable with expressing yourself opens the door to emotionally opening up to someone you trust.
When you choose to heal, you begin the journey of becoming a different, better version of yourself than the one you already know. This may be scary because we are now stepping into an unknown space. Generally, we as humans have learned to fear the unknown. However, in order to grow, we must relearn to embrace the unknown. While most of us may fear either change, the unknown or both, without the acceptance of either, there is no room for growth.
You must take a real, hard look at what you have done to yourself, what was done to you or what you have allowed to be done to you [consciously or unconsciously] and the ideas you created about yourself or the world based on that first experience and then repeated process of interaction, in order to reevaluate, look deeply at yourself and ask, 'How did I get here?’. In asking, ‘What was the first instance of this feeling?’ you begin the search to find the root of your emotional restrictions.
You are required to truthfully answer questions about yourself that will allow you to open up. When you want to heal, you’ll start to look at your self. The only way to see yourself is to remove all emotional layers of the illusion of your reality. Your vulnerability will have you standing bare in the realness of who you truly are to simply be open to you; the good, the bad and the ugly.
Remember that you are worthy of BEing and worthy of reclaiming the power of your best self. No one outside of you can determine the truth of who you are. It is your responsibility to present your best self to the world and if you need help doing that, and that’s completely okay.