Be vulnerable

Embodied Awareness practice

I remember this moment from when I was around ten years old. I was walking somewhere and I ran into a friend of my teenage sister. She was carrying a wrapped gift. I asked her who the gift was for and she proffered without hesitation, “it’s for you!” “Oh really!?,” I answered. “Umm no, just joking,” she said as she slunk back. She seemed to realize right away that it had been a regrettable joke. Still, the sting of embarrassment is impressively fresh nearly forty years on. I can feel my body wanting to contract around it right now, in some contorted, foetalesque form.

Most of us have had many analogous experiences during our childhoods and have adjusted by putting in place safeguards against such indignities; patterns of thought, behaviour, and modulation of attention aimed at avoiding a re-occurrence of those feelings. In my case, I learned (for one thing) to be generally skeptical of whatever arises, lest I be caught with my guard down. Fear of embarrassment at being thought stupid has led to a sort of subtle and habitual attempt to contrive how I appear to others. For as long as I can remember, I’ve thought of myself as honest and transparent, but in recent years it has become hard not to notice the continuous stream of baseline effort that goes into to being seen in a particular way: that is, the automatic and sometimes unconscious effort to avoid being seen just as I am, and to avoid being uncomfortably touched by experience just as it is.

We each have old, well-worn patterns that were set in place early in our development. The patterns actually worked well for us, inasmuch as they allowed us to more-or-less function and get by in the context of our youths, but now that we are adults they serve mainly to perpetuate themselves. All the while, their costs might have become more apparent: These habits of interaction gobble energy that could be used elsewhere. They mask vast, open-ended experience, just as they monopolize attention with our fears and our fantasies. They contract and contort body and mind, all in the name of avoiding contact with embodied sensations that have been long since disowned. In the name of security, these patterns steal our aliveness, and deliver mostly staleness.

Perhaps we’ve already come to see this. In this case we may have developed new patterns that live on top of these older ones. Now, to add insult to injury, when we notice the old pattern, maybe we’re annoyed at ourselves for “not being more open.” Maybe we stop trying to seem sharp and in control, and insidiously start trying to act soft and flexible as an attempted corrective, all the while still keeping our distance from what is.

Commit to what is

We can’t relax the existential insecurity that fuels our spinning by applying any particular corrective action in real-time, as any such action will be a contrivance whose appropriateness will be more-or-less out of sync with the situation at hand, and will result in yet more patterns of reactive avoidance; albeit new and therefore less immediately recognizable ones. For example, if we are aware that we are avoiding experience by compulsively making jokes at uncomfortable moments, we might try to catch ourselves and not make jokes at those moments. This could actually be an interesting and useful experiment, but as a “solution” to the “problem” it is a dead end. Very soon we find that we are just avoiding that other experience, not to mention that it’s fun and appropriate and even skillful to make jokes sometimes.

We may also look for correctives in perspective, in the form discovered insights into the historical and psychological underpinnings of given compulsive thoughts or feelings. These may provide relative relief, but since the insecurity is fundamentally existential in nature, and not especially bound to any specific context, it will eventually emerge elsewhere, in new form. We might spend our entire lives uncovering new perspectives on more and more sublte historical patterns, like an unending game of whack-a-mole.

If just feeling relatively better is not sufficiently satisfactory, a different attitude is required: A commitment to experience, just as it is right now. This is a simple practice, there is nothing particularly complicated about it, but it may go against half a lifetime of momentum, so it can take some time to become familiar with and for the practice to gain its own life and express its own motion.¹

Let your body lead

Triggering our compulsive patterns, before thoughts or ideas arise, are raw sensations in our bodies. These sensations usually come along with habitually applied labels (ex. “anxiety”) and/or interpretations (ex. “I’m worried it’s going to happen”), but before these elaborations, are just the raw sensations themselves. We jump from sensation, to implicit interpretation, to well worn reactive patterns of thought and action in a flash.

The sensations in our body may seem to mean what we habitually interpret them to mean, but since we immediately jump away from these sensations and straight into the stories and supposed meanings that revolve around them, we never really get a chance to find out if those sensations might have alternate possible meanings, or maybe even no fixed meanings at all. To give ourselves an opportunity to discover the actuality of any new moment, we must first commit to staying with our raw embodied sensations, without conceptual elaboration. Only in this way can we discover for ourselves whether they truly call for anything resembling one of the old patterns that has become attached to them, or if something new might be better.

Since escaping into conceptuality has been our default in the past, staying with raw sensations can be uncomfortable at first. So, while the practice is not complicated, it is not necessarily easy either. Nevertheless, with sufficient dedication to the body a shift may occur at some point. As we practice dedication to embodied sensation in real-time, throughout our day-to-day lives, we might notice two things happen in tandem (over the course of seconds, minutes, days, or years): As we continue to pay attention, the complexity and peak intensity of sensation continues to increase and change. At the same time, our tolerance to such experiential intensity continues to increase and we may find that our interpretations of said sensations become relaxed and more fluid. What we once might have called “extreme anxiety,” may simply feel like being alive and awake and may even reveal a surprising sufficiency.²

Let everything touch you

The practice is to notice, in real-time, where you automatically contract around uncomfortable sensations in your body and to spontaneously relax that contraction and open to fully experiencing these embodied feelings, without concept, on their own terms. (Note: For the purpose of this essay, “sensations in your body” include also all possibly diffuse, location-ambiguous and physicality-ambiguous sensations.) This may occur in the sting before an interpretation (ex. “embarrassment”, “frustration”, “impatience”, “anger”) arises. Or, if that has already happened, it may occur some time later in the elaboration (ex. “annoyance with myself that I got impatient just before”). It can be practised at any moment, but it is always applied to what is current, rather than winding back to try to feel what has already past (even if only an instant ago). Some examples:

Stay with the desire. Perhaps you are walking down the street and you see a beautiful person walking your way, about to walk past you. Maybe you would typically fantasize about them satisfying your desire. Or maybe you’re someone who has learned not to go there and you automatically put up a mental guard, or just don’t even look or make eye contact. Either of these strategies serve to avoid the presumed discomfort of the experience of the desire. Both are jumpings away from intimate experience with what is. Instead, open to the kernel of desire just as it appears. Allow desire. Stand open in its fire while you walk past. Let it burn as it lingers and let it smoulder until it leaves.

Relax around contraction. Perhaps you are having a conversion with a friend and they mention something about their lives that you might typically feel jealous of. Notice contraction in your body as it clamps itself about uncomfortable feelings. Underneath the jealousy is a deep longing for something you may never get, expressed in these constricted sensations. Right there, just where you are most vulnerable, open up completely. Relax to allow and feel those very sensitive embodied sensations. Physical relaxation (ex. relaxing some muscle tension) will frequently be part of this opening, but not always. Fundamentally, this is not an exercise in relaxing the body, but in exposing oneself to the elements of experience. Doing so may be uncomfortable, or may trigger weeping without obvious origin. Allow yourself to be touched and experience that touch without concept. Your friend is still there. So are you.

Let yourself be seen. Perhaps you are at a party, surrounded by smart and beautiful people, and you catch yourself trying to look cool, or to sound clever; to appear a certain way, or to not show something of your state. What are you protecting, and what do you gain by protecting it? What do you lose? Notice the room you’re in. Let the details catch your eye as they do. What do you hear? Notice the people around you: their clothes, their postures, their facial expressions; feel their energies. Find yourself in your body. Stay with the non-conceptual buzz that is ostensibly about your fear of alienation, but is more deeply rooted in your wish to connect, to belong, even to be esteemed. Feel your vulnerability and let open right there. Allow yourself to be seen just as you are. Discover what comes next.

Discover what comes next

One might hope that openness could make things easier; that feeling more now will somehow mean suffering less later. There is a way in which this is surely true, but not as first imagined. There’s an old fantasy for many who have walked a spiritual path; a belief that if one could see through self-centred delusion, it might smooth out the edges of experience, or quiet anxiety, or maybe transcend suffering entirely. But opening only promises intimacy; simply more contact with what is. More of the feelings you like, but maybe more of the feelings you don’t like too. The intense rawness of experience that once seemed like a problem may still be there, but without the story that it shouldn’t be. The field of experience widens, not because discomfort disappears, but because it is opened to as valid, just as pleasure and new satisfaction are opened to as well; a satisfaction unrelated to likes and dislikes.

Once we become more familiar with our own vulnerability and dedicated to its inclusion in our lived experience, our motivations may change. We may choose to do some activities that we would otherwise have avoided for fear of discomfort. This may lead to infinitely more opportunities to be vulnerable, exponentially propelling our intimacy with such experience. Conversely, we might realize that certain “good” activities we’ve done in the past served mainly to let us see ourselves in a particular light and were another sort of avoidance; we may no longer feel compelled to do them anymore. At some point we may discover that much of our motivation for most of what we choose (or avoid choosing) has had something to do with our avoidance of intimacy with experience as it is. How then to choose?

The practice of being vulnerable is just a preliminary practice. It’s just radical honesty. This honesty begins with allowing experience to be exactly as it is, without justification, explanation or correction. It means letting the world touch us as it finds us, and opening to that embodied experience without flinching away. When we stay with what’s plain and undeniable to our experience, the insecurity that once seemed to drive everything loses its footing. The metaphysical clench that sought safety through control is cut through by immediate, lived experience. What remains is not certainty, but a growing trust that we can stay, or we can go, and that either will be workable. From this place of allowing ourselves to be seen as we are, letting ourselves be moved by life as it find us, and with the flood of care, desire, and deep longing dancing through our senses, all that’s left is to discover what we do next.

1. For a set-aside practice that supports the real-time & informal practice described here, see
Opening Awareness by Charlie Awbery.

2. For an in-depth exploration of Embodied Awareness practice, see
Already Free by Bruce Tift.