As the path of awakening into the body begins, one of the most difficult feelings to integrate is a raw sense of vulnerability.
When I was busy all the time, everyday, overwhelmed with things to do, issues to deal with, emotional reactions, relational challenges, I did not realize how numb I was to my own human being’s core sense of fragility and vulnerability.
After all, we may be the only species on the earth that can anticipate its own death.
Hey, we each know we will die, at any time, any day, that we may not wake up tomorrow, or that today we may be maimed, crushed, or killed.
Yet, our social systems encourage us to find a way to experience the opposite of vulnerability.
For example, when I started teaching at a business school, other professors wisely advised me: “those MBA students smell fear. You must not show any signs of fear if you want to be successful here.”
Perhaps you can imagine how difficult those years were for someone like me.
Why do you think we need to cultivate a culture and society that does not show fear, weakness, or vulnerability?
Yet, to feel our bodies, how soft they are, how easily they bleed and break, is to realize how fragile our body is.
So maybe it is not so surprising that our social response to this reality is not to feel it, not to acknowledge those kinds of awarenesses and emotions, and instead channel that energy into feeling powerful and in control.
Control reminds me of another feeling that is almost unbearable for most people to feel: helplessness.
I used to think that helplessness was particularly unbearable for me because my mother has cerebral palsy, and I always knew that feeling independently capable and socially liked was important to her. and somehow this need for independence and competence became very important to me too (as well as being liked,-).
But recently I sensed how early and young this awareness in the body began:
It is an awareness of a sense of being helpless – at the effect of others, at the effect of the world, of an external environment separate from one’s self.
In my experience, first there was a shock, then fear, then anger and aggressive responses. In the end, a baby cannot always get what it needs from the external environment, and thus it finds other ways to cope with its internal sensations and experiences. I listed some of mine in another blog post linked here
If you are not comfortable feeling vulnerable, or are unaware of feeling helpless, perhaps you want to identify what strategies your system uses to cutoff awareness of these core human conditions.