I begin this post in the cold, dark-grey light of 3:30 a.m. on a ranch in northern California. I’m sitting on an old stump with a lemon-wedge of a half-moon above, my fingers stiff with chill as I type. Last night someone heard coyotes on this land.
I’m here for a Nonviolent Communication (NVC) retreat, with 40 other people who are excited about bringing more peace into the world through the way they connect with others. I love the way NVC has helped me to live in a way that feels more alive to me. But it’s also been hard at times along the way, since our ways of thinking and acting and seeing the world can be deep-rooted. I find that it takes a willingness to be vulnerable, to be in “beginner’s mind,” to make those shifts.
Opening to our vulnerability can also have some unexpected side effects. At just about this time last year, at the end of another NVC retreat, I said, to the people I’d just spent a week learning with:
“Thank you for reminding me that it’s really only when I open myself up to being vulnerable – when I stop trying to be perfect and am just am exactly who I am in each moment – that I also open myself up to love.”
It turns out that research backs up what I suspected after that week. Brene’ Brown’s work shows that vulnerability is the only thing that differentiates people who feel deeply loved and valued from people who don’t.
A friend of mine read this blog and wrote: “posting my journaling is something I can’t imagine… the popularity of it is a mystery to me.” I was surprised that he saw it that way, since I keep a separate journal and see it as a very different animal.
But it occurs to me now – as I sit under this moon and imagine a coyote pack somewhere out there in the dark, with my 3:30 a.m. brain so fresh and vulnerable that it feels almost newborn – that maybe what he meant was not so much about journaling. Maybe he was talking about vulnerability.
Writing this blog is a stretch in the direction of vulnerability. So were the “things that scared me” these past 2 weeks: getting up to dance in front of a group of strangers; climbing a tree that jutted out over a long, steep drop into a canyon; asking an old boyfriend to tell me what he thinks might stand in the way of my finding lasting love. I also began writing a one-woman show called “My Ass (In the World),” which tells of the many opinions that I’ve heard, in the countries I’ve lived in, about… well, yes, my ass. I think the project is going to be a one-woman show, which is scary because I’m neither an actress nor very comfortable talking about my ass!
Another of the “things that scared me” was to start a “high risk” writing group, in which we’ll be accountable for the degree of risk we’re taking in our writing. I also taught a class in NVC, which I hadn’t done before; spoke up in ways that felt risky to me, in two classes I’m taking; and agreed to mediate for the first time, between an acquaintance and a former business partner of his.
I made a public commitment, during this NVC training, to consistently check in with how excited and alive I feel in the training, and to look for ways to make the learning more alive for me. I imagine I haven’t been alone in forcing myself to sit zombie-like through classes and meetings in the past. But I’ve been feeling a sort of inner refusal, lately, to be anything less than alive and engaged in the hours of my life.
I was thinking of this as a sort of “aliveness barometer” – but the idea quickly evolved into something else. I got a headache that clenched a tenacious grip onto my temples for most of the retreat (this was the reason that I didn’t post here last week, and the reason that I’m writing the second half of this post now that the retreat is over). It was the kind of headache that makes you want to curl up in a dark room, not spend a week with 40 people you’ve never met before. I’ve hardly ever had a headache like that before.
I noticed that I felt not just the pain of the headache itself, but the pain of feeling that I “should” be feeling well, “should” be meeting more of the people at the retreat, “should” be doing expansive, scary things every day, “should” be performing that famous one-woman show for the group... and on and on.
But as it turned out, the scariest thing I could imagine for those days was just showing up, exactly as I was, headache and all. I realized that, even in my trying to be vulnerable in these NVC groups, I’ve been wanting it to be joyful, meaningful – the kind of vulnerability where you open up to others and quickly find connection around it. Happy vulnerability, that is, not “I have a terrible headache for the fifth day in a row and don’t feel like talking to anyone.”
Finally, on the fifth day, I decided to tell everyone what I was feeling, just exactly how bad I felt and how sad I was that I didn’t even feel like talking to people.
The headache left almost as soon as I did.
So I’m wondering: Could that headache have been my real “aliveness barometer?” Is it possible that by avoiding showing those 40 people I didn’t know just how bad I felt, I was avoiding being fully alive – Alive, that is, even when it’s not pretty?
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