Vulnerability & Courage

continued from Confessions….

For now, as I have been sharing…this Christmas season has been a tough one for many reasons.  I am uncertain of why just a few short weeks ago I felt so confident and assured of where I was going and how I was going there.  And that isn’t really gone, but something bigger has flown in my face these last several weeks….the grief of all that I have lost not only in these past few months…but for all of my life.  The tears just seem to come at the drop of a hat these days – sometimes from a spark I hear in a song or in watching Felicity and realizing how stinking hard and painful growing up really is.  Sometimes the tears just come from seeing how much my friends really do care about me, from knowing while I carry the life that I have made…I am not alone by any means.  And sometimes the tears just come for no apparent reason at all…they just start flowing.

I can remember hearing people talk about this type of grief…yet with all that I have been through in my life I cannot say I have ever experienced this type of “normal” grieving process.  This feeling of being so “lost”, not knowing quite where to turn or where to head…it is all a little too overwhelming at times.

Then, then I hear God share with me that just like everything else I have experienced these last few months – these tears are part of the process, part of the journey.  That it is so good to not try to numb these feelings of sorrow, loss, anger, hurt, bitterness and others…but that in allowing them to flow out of me, it is like allowing the muck, the grime that I have stored up in my heart to flow out of me, literally.  With each tear, there is a little more space for the good and the right to enter into my heart.  That by allowing myself to really feel the pain, to think about why I am in pain…I am also allowing myself to feel the joy, the happiness, the peace and comfort that I will have at certain moments as well.

I picked this idea – the idea of feeling the good and the bad – up from Brene Brown’s talk that I shared last night.  If you haven’t watched it – I highly encourage you too…it will be one of the best 20 mins of your day that you will spend.  In the talk, she shares about where we get the word “courage” from…it comes from the route word “couer” (sp?) which means “heart”.  She goes on to say that to live a whole life, you have to live it whole heartedly….having the courage or the heart to be vulnerable.

This entire idea of being vulnerable keeps coming up in my life…in sermons at Sanctuary, in books that I read, in my Life Skills class.  It appears that it is the key to learning how to heal…that instead of pushing away from vulnerability in order to look brave and strong…that when you open yourself up to being vulnerable – that is when you appear most brave, when you show your true strength.  

Boy, I know that I got this so wrong in the first half of my life…yet I am determined to push myself out of my comfort zone and learn how to be vulnerable in this next part of my life.  

I wanted to share a few of the things I found last night after watching Ms. Brown’s talk…and will put these on my “Practice Joy” page for I know that they will be instrumental in helping me learn and hopefully teach others to do just this.

Brene Brown’s website

Hopeful World Publishing

They host online “classes” to help you learn how to live with heart and how to be vulnerable.  My journey with them just started today with this class