In writing to her, I remembered times when I’ve spoken the true words of my own heart.  I’ve never regretted that speaking.  I have, however, experienced times when I longed to speak – but something held me back.

Everyone has that experience at one point or another.  And of course, what holds us back is fear – fear of our own  vulnerability.

In a TEDx Houston talk last year, Dr. Brené Brown talked about fear, vulnerability, and the human desire for connection.

In reflecting on her talk, my experiences, and what my client is working through, I saw that in being held back by fear from speaking those true words … we suffer exactly the painful consequences we fear:  separation from others, lack of connection, lack of intimacy.  The irony is clear.

As Brown describes, those who can take the step forward into vulnerability – those who recognize, either consciously or instinctively (or both), that vulnerability is required in order to have the connection we all yearn for – those are the people she calls “whole hearted,” the people who experience most fully the joys as well as the sorrows of real connection.

What heartfelt words are you holding back?

What if you were to relax into your natural vulnerability and speak those words – with no expectation of the response you’ll receive?

(On March 24, Jon and I are hosting a free teleclass on Becoming a Whole-Hearted Person. It’s available only to those who have joined the Finding Another Way mailing list – which you can do by clicking here.)

Here’s Brown’s talk:

I often have no clue what I’m going to say to clients.  I’m often surprised when I hear it.  But this one had me wondering if I’d lost my mind.

Opening to it in the quiet space that ensued while my client was taking it in, I quickly realized – yes.  This is absolutely real and true.

Fear arises out of an impulse towards safety, self-care, and love.

It’s sometimes necessary.   I’m glad to feel fear when I see a car bearing down on me.  It gives me the jolt of adrenaline I need to jump out of the way.

And it’s often misguided.  Our biological and emotional response to fear began when we needed to run in order not to be something’s lunch.  Today, that run response is often counterproductive.  And our feelings of fear often arise out of misperceptions about ourselves, other people, and our experience.

That doesn’t change the reality, though.  Even when it’s misguided, it’s still an attempt by a very deep part of yourself to take care, to preserve, to protect…to love.

Seeing that can make a big difference in how you respond to your feelings of fear and anxiety.

That may seem like an odd thing to do on Christmas, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself.  It’s been a while since I’ve taken on a project like that.

What I noticed afterwards – aside from how sore I was from crawling around on the floor and inside cabinets and getting up and down about a billion times! – is … there hadn’t been any hurry.

I love projects like this.  But always in the past there’s been a powerful feeling of hurry up, do it fast, get it done.

And that’s resulted in a number of mistakes - such as the time I cut my knee open kneeling on a shard of ceramic tile.  I’d been in such a hurry to get the bathroom floor tiled that I hadn’t cleaned up after myself.  Scraps of ceramic tile are – as I discovered when I could suddenly see my kneecap – very, very sharp.

This time, I wasn’t in a hurry.  I had the internal space to be careful, to take my time with each step, to consider what might go wrong and take steps to avoid mistakes, and to clean up after myself as I went.

And the project went beautifully.  Sure, it took a while – this was the first dishwasher I’ve installed, so I expected it to take some time.  But all my plumbing connections were tight on the first try (that never happens!), and every time I ran into an apparent block, I was able to patiently, and without hurry or frustration, work around it.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized why.

I’ve never understood it in the past, or even been consciously aware of it, but I see now that this sense of urgency has always been driven by fear.

This time, I wasn’t afraid.

I wasn’t afraid of making a mistake, getting it wrong, not knowing something important.

As I’ve allowed my belief that I am somehow wrong to come into the light of day and be met, it has gradually dropped away.  And it seems my fear of getting it wrong and of not knowing what to do is also dropping away.

No longer am I trying to prove to myself and to everyone else that I know how to do things I’ve never done before.  No longer am I trying to do everything perfectly the first time, without any mistakes.

Which, in the delightfully ironic way these things tend to work, has meant that I have so much more capacity to get it right, and to work out what to do.

And that, I’d say, is the real Christmas present to myself.

He was talking about how when we put a name to something, we immediately think we know what it is.  But, he said, when we name something we actually stop seeing it.  Instead, we see what we think or believe about the name.

I looked out the car window and was suddenly blown away by the miraculous beauty of something that I had always called “a eucalyptus tree.”  Seeing it without attaching its name, I realized that I was actually seeing it for the very first time.  And there was another one, and another one … lined up by the side of the road, and all completely unique and amazing.

When you see without names, whatever it may be you’re looking at, you see what you’re looking at. 

Try it for yourself!  What’s your experience?

It moved like it might be alive, but if it was alive, it was wounded. 

My immediate thought:  Oh, please be a leaf!

I didn’t want to have to deal with – or ignore – some unfortunate, damaged creature.

It wasn’t a leaf.  It also wasn’t anything alive.  It was a piece of a shoe - heavy enough that the wind couldn’t pick it up, but light enough that the wind was playing with it and making it move just a little.  Just enough to make it look, to me anyway, like a wounded animal.

As I passed it, I realized that what I’d asked for – for it to be a leaf – was not at all what I really wanted.

What I really wanted was for it to be dead.  (Not necessarily a dead animal, of course.  Just not alive.)

And then I realized how easy it is to ask for something that I think I want, but which isn’t at all what I really want.

How confusing that must be to myself, to the people around me, and to the world as a whole.

And how difficult to actually get what I want when I’m not even asking for it.

Then I notice that I’m only frustrated by my own obvious delusion that they should be any different than they are.

Why “obvious” delusion?

Because they’re not different than they are.

You know how it is when you walk into a room filled with people.  There you are, and you’re going to be spending the next few days (or even just hours) with these people.  And you look around and immediately start drawing conclusions about them.

And that’s exactly what I did.  Over the course of the first hour or so, as we introduced ourselves and talked about why we were there, I – well, not to put too fine a point on it, I made judgments.

That person looked superior, as if she knew better than everyone else.  This person was a bliss-ninny, smiling and nodding at everything the workshop leaders were saying.  He was too uptight to be real.

And so on.

But then something amazing happened.

Over the course of the weekend, I realized that none – not one – of those people were what I’d imagined.

I realized that my judgments were based on things like the shape of someone’s mouth, or the way someone’s eyes were set into her face.

And I realized how each of those judgments was a projection of my fears and expectations outwards, onto other people – but they really belonged to me.

I was afraid of being judged, so I saw judgment in the arrangement of someone’s features.

I was uptight, so I read uptightness in another person’s body language.

As I follow a new and different path in my life, I’m anxious about what my family and friends will think – and so I judge others for being immature seekers of bliss at the feet of a guru. 

It belongs to me. 

And when I take back those projections, seeing others as they are instead, I see the absolute beauty of each person’s individuality.

I become free to see who they really are, instead of what I’ve projected.  In that freedom, I may or may not “like” them – I may or may not want to stay in contact with them, hang out with them.  But there’s no doubt about how brilliantly they shine, how amazing they are, and how astonishing it is that each person is utterly unique and absolutely who they are.

I’m free to fall in love with every one of them.

And with everyone I meet in any moment.

All I have to do is take back my projections.

It brings you absolutely face-to-face, without any possibility of avoidance, with the complete reality that there is no such thing as control, and that any attempt to control is not only futile, but painful.

In surrendering to this, allowing it to be as it is, there is peace.

She’s been getting in touch with a very deep, very powerful intention:  she wants to be free more than anything else.

That sort of deep intention brings tears to my eyes when I hear it expressed.

We went on to talk about taking risks.  Risks in consciously stepping out of deeply ingrained behavior patterns.  We talked about the consequences of taking those risks – and about how when you take a risk like that, standing in what’s true for you and speaking from the heart, you have to let go of your expectations about what will happen.  Because yes, you will sometimes get beautifully, amazingly positive responses … and you will sometimes get hurtful, negative responses.

The thing is, when the risky action is taken from a perspective of I want to be free, more than anything else, it doesn’t matter what response you get – whether it’s apparently positive or apparently negative.

What matters is that the action itself, no matter how risky it feels, is rooted, deeply rooted, in the intention to be free.

In that intention, we turn back to ourselves and begin to remember what it’s like to be whole. 

What it’s like to be free.

Tell me what it’s like to exert yourself physically.

Explain the feeling of sun on your face – or what it’s like to stand in the rain.

There are no words.  Even when we try to describe these things, the words we choose are often apparently paradoxical and contradictory.

The sweet-tart taste of the orange; the physical exhaustion that feels like strength; the ways in which the sun can be gently warm or pack a punch of heat; the easy gentleness of a spring shower and the breathtaking pounding of a summer storm.

Anyone who’s experienced these things knows exactly what the words mean.

If you haven’t, the words don’t quite make sense.

And every orange is different.   Each long hike, run, bike ride, or effort in the garden is different.  The rain and sun never fall on your face the same way twice.

We like to believe that we can describe experiences with words and understand them with our minds.  But what’s really happening is that we have enough of a shared experience – almost everyone has eaten an orange, after all – that we can agree that yes, these words convey enough about the experience of eating an orange for us to understand each other.

Can you explain what it means to be happy, sad, angry, peaceful?  Can you tell me what love feels like?

The work we do here at Finding Another Way takes us all into new experiences – new realizations of what it means to be who and what we really are.  The spoken and written words we use to help guide our readers and clients (and ourselves!) into these new awarenesses are only guides.  Just like the descriptions of an orange – or an attempt to explain love – the words can’t be enough; they can only be pointers, signposts along the way.

In the end, we all have to find out for ourselves.  We each have to have our own experience of eating an orange.