Vulnerability

Aloha, and welcome to the Secret Art of Huna, where today I’m gonna be talking about vulnerability.

One of the reasons I’m talking about vulnerability is that for a long time, I’ve not really understood what is meant by vulnerability.

It’s certainly something that people have told me that I need to express more, but I haven’t understood what they’re talking about.

So I’m hoping that my musings today will be useful for you either if people have been telling you to show more greater vulnerability, and you’re wondering what the hell they’re on about.

Or if you do what they’re on about, but you’re struggling to express it. So about 15 years ago, my then business partner said to me, “Jane, you need to express your vulnerability more.”

Now, I’ve done a lot, and I mean a lot of personal development work and spiritual development work and so forth, and I thought I was pretty good with the vulnerability thing. I’d shed my tears. I talked about things.

Not everything, but I did talk about what was going on for me, and I couldn’t get what he was on about. He because I had a male business partner at the time.

And I couldn’t really get what he was on about. And from time to time over the years he has repeated that. He said, “You need to be more vulnerable.”

And I’m like, but what does he mean? I am vulnerable. I do show myself. About five years ago I did a programme with one of many,

and this organisation which is all about women’s leadership and about helping women become the leaders that they want to be whether it’s in family, community, your business, another organisation,

whatever to make the change in the world, and there was a particular exercise we did on one of the retreats, and I won’t say what it is just in case you end up at one of their retreats and you end up doing this exercise.

So I won’t tell you what it is. But it was about showing yourself. Showing up. And it took me ages, but ages for people to feel that I was really showing up.

And once again I didn’t get it because in my head, in my mind, even in my heart I was there. I was showing up. I was being vulnerable. But I still didn’t get it.

And even up to today when people talk about vulnerability and sometimes people say, “Oh, you’ve become “so much more softer, so much more vulnerable.”

And I’m not sure what they mean because for quite a few years now, I’ve talked openly and freely about what bothers me in life.

I do videos, I put out videos and I talk about the things that previously I felt ashamed about, things I’ve felt guilty about, things that worry me, all those things and isn’t that vulnerability. Apparently not.

So recently I was doing this course on voice dialogue. Now voice dialogue is a way of talking to the different parts of ourselves, our different selves.

We have a self which is sort of the whole thing but the self is made up of many component parts. That’s the theory behind it. And there’s the pusher self, and the pleaser self, and so on and so forth.

And we’ve been talking to the parts, and this last weekend we were talking to that part that is known as the inner child. Hadn’t expected it.

Inner child not really my thing but anyway, we were talking to the inner child and I found myself absolutely in bits, just weeping and weeping. Not so much because the inner child, I knew I hadn’t had a particularly happy childhood.

I’ve addressed that in all sorts of therapy sessions, and coaching sessions, and God knows what all and else sessions, so I knew it wasn’t that or I felt that wasn’t really the problem.

The problem for me was the inner parent because I haven’t a clue about parenting. I haven’t a clue about what the perfect parent should look like, no idea.

And I can’t really even begin to imagine it, and it felt like betraying my own parents. Certainly my own mother because I was looking for the perfect mother.

But it made me realise that connecting with that self of me that is really not quite together, that self of me that is not fully healed is really what people are talking about when they’re talking about vulnerability.

Because particularly at my age, but it really doesn’t matter what age you are, we’ve all had years of practise of putting things that emotionally we’re not comfortable with, of boxing them up and perhaps not opening the lid on the box.

Now some of us have done a lot more box opening than others but most of us have at least a box or two that we haven’t opened, or we don’t open,

or we don’t particularly go and look at because it’s too uncomfortable, because it hurts too much, because it’s too painful.

And it seems to me now that one of the keys to vulnerability is actually going over, opening the lid, and sticking your nose in the box because most of our hurts when we unlock them, they don’t kill us.

Unlocking them doesn’t actually kill us. Unlocking them and revisiting them heals us because when we visit it and we look at it with a adult eye because so much of it comes from childhood and so many of these things when we look at them with an adult eye and we go, oh, and we understand in a way that we didn’t when we were kids.

So I’ve been pretty good at developing a wall of resistance, a wall of, let’s call it a wall of invulnerability, and now I’m looking at different ways of breaking down that wall or opening up those boxes.

Problem is it’s not always obvious what the boxes are. So it’s all very well to say, I’ve got these boxes, but I haven’t put the labels on them.

So when I’m doing some release work for myself, or doing a meditation with myself, or trying to figure out if I’m feeling stuck and I’ve done all this release work.

I’ve don’t loads of release work, but I’m still not unsticking, and I still can’t quite fathom what it is that’s under there. Actually the best way is to ask somebody, so to get a coach. I have a coach.

And to get a coach and get them or the therapist to get them to help you to really identify what those boxes are. Now I’ve had coaches in my time. I’ve had therapists in my time.

But one of the things that I’ve realised with a lot of coaches and therapists is that they don’t really go deep enough, especially somebody like me.

I’m experienced at avoidance, so finding a coach that knows how to go deep, finding a coach that knows how to get underneath and really help you explore the boxes.

Ideally who’s got a range of tools and techniques in the box and lots of experience because again, a lot of the coaches I worked with, they didn’t necessarily have either the range of tools and techniques or the experience. I’m lucky.

The people who support me know, they do. But sometimes I have to go the extra mile myself to uncover those things which I’m still avoiding.

If you want to work with a coach and you’re interested in working with me, then get onto secretartofhuna.com/diary and arrange a call. It won’t cost you anything.

It’s an opportunity to talk through and see if I’m somebody who can help you dig out your stuff. And it may be that I’m not, and I’m fine with that.

And I’m completely open to people calling me, having the conversation, and then nothing going further, or something does go further.

But hopefully this has been useful for you, useful food for thought for you, particularly if you’re stuck in some way and you can’t understand it.

Particularly if you’ve done a lot of work on yourself, but you can’t quite get to the thing that’s underneath. And I hope that this has been useful, and I look forward talking to you very soon.