Being with What Is: Having the Courage to Go Deeper

“We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.” — Brené Brown

This started out as a newsletter, an update to people in my network of beloveds after a period of quiet darkness. A blue period I only alluded to obliquely and wrapped in my signature rose colored, “don’t worry, I got this”, optimism (as evidence, see photo above). An experience that might have stayed largely hidden were it not for the response I received, the courageous and contagious vulnerability that flowed back to me from those I love. And some that I loved but barely knew and now know a great deal more. A response that — despite all my sharing on this journey of Contagious Vulnerability — surprised and humbled me.

Many of you reflect how easy I make the authentic, uninhibited soul baring look. The truth is that each time I write one of these Medium pieces or send out a newsletter I wonder if its contents are really worth sharing, worth drawing the attention of others to, worth anyone’s precious time. Whether there’s too much me and not enough we to be of value. Questions which at their core point to the wound around worthiness that I share with my mother and continue to tend to.

What to me had been a simple check in was clearly something more. It invited me to explore my experience more deeply and to share it more widely in hopes that it may offer value to you too. If you were one of the recipients of that email, you may want to explore this piece as it goes deeper and offers more than the original. And if you were one of the courageous beings who took the time to share your hearts with me, know that I have been moved and changed by your soul’s expressions. Your emails have brought greater aliveness and joy than I have felt in some time. They have helped me to reconnect with my inner knowing and find my voice again and for that I am profoundly grateful.

The truth is I have been in a funk for the past six weeks. Sadly, not an uptown funk or a James Brown funk and not one of the funks whose noise you want to bring in. No, the funk I’m talking about and experiencing is one of the darker ones. A high pressure system that has been sitting on me like a gloomy, immovable storm cloud. A brooding weather pattern that has been clouding my consciousness and darkening my heart, steaming up my rose colored glasses and separating me from myself and those I love.

At the dawn of 2022, my intention was to savor this new year — to be with and find joy in whatever the universe had in store for me. Savoring is a wonderful intention when everything is awesome. It’s a lot more challenging to savor when life feels like a never-ending series of unfortunate events. Events that are unfolding both at an individual and collective level.

January 2020.2 was a month of ennui — and on reflection, the last several Januarys have been like this for me. It was in January 2020, well before the truth and shape of the year that continues to live on in infamy revealed itself and all its catastrophic potency. I was confronting fear, the darkness within, and a loss of joy, before the dark nights of the soul began to come in never-ending waves and I entered what felt like the dark goo phase of my own metamorphosis. All this before March when the shit really got real and the global pandemics started to rear their ugly heads in a multi-headed monstrosity that would have made a Hydra blanch and cower.

January 2020.1 wasn’t much better. After coming out as the Vulnerability Doula in late 2020, I retreated inward and went quiet, perhaps cowed by the boldness of my latest unconventional “I am” expression. I stayed that way until the end of January 2020.2 when I left the sound of my own silence and shared my experiences about navigating our turbulent times. On reflection I resonate more with the lunar calendar and will be celebrating the beginning of the new year in alignment with the moon from here on out. Who’s with me?!

Which brings me back to January 2020.2. To reboot my aliveness and mark the lunar new year and to prepare myself for the beginning of my 57th trip around the sun on March 4th, I challenged myself to a month-long detox cleanse for the entire month of February. No media — no TV/Netflix, no social, no news — and an elimination diet that meant cutting out caffeine, sugar, alcohol, meat, dairy, processed foods, and gluten for the entire month. I started and ended the month with a week of Ayurvedic kitchari with intermittent fasting. For the middle two weeks I did a two-week juice fast capped off with a liver and gallbladder flush. Wow, did I feel shiny and new when all that was over! It had the desired effect of shifting the ennui and returning my aliveness, making me feel years younger as I marked the beginning of a new year of life.

Then the disruptions started! After a fun, belated birthday celebration in the East Bay on March 11th, I came home to a very dark house and tripped on one or more of the cats who were having a meeting about a mouse friend they had trapped while I was out. I landed hard and broke my fall with my right palm, breaking the radius on my very dominant hand. Ever the queen of the silver lining, I thought, no worries, I got this! It’ll be an opportunity for neuroplasticity as I learn how to operate one-handed with my non-dominant limb! I also found it amusing that after decades of being told by acupuncturists (and more than a few of my romantic partners) that I’ve got ridiculously strong yang energy for a woman and years of cultivating my yin side, the universe decided I needed to accelerate the process of yin-yang balancing and took my overly dominant right side out of the equation entirely.

Just two weeks later, just as I was finding some level of groove as a southpaw, I went to another fun, belated birthday celebration, also in the East Bay (note the theme here!), and contracted Covid after two years of successfully keeping that beast at bay. I’ll be honest, my mental wellness took a major hit as the virus took hold and I spent the better part of a week in bed feeling low. The virus itself wasn’t all that bad — kind of like a cold, a flu, and a nasty headache walked into a bar — but the impact on my emotional health, that was another story entirely.

Then at the end of that same week, just as I was emerging from the fog and starting to feel like myself again, I got word from my homeowner’s insurance that they would not be renewing the policy that protects me and my beloved sanctuary, the Compound of Joy, from catastrophic loss because they deemed the wildfire risk too great. Apparently Nationwide is not on my side after all. I am happy and beyond relieved to report that I did find a good neighbor in State Farm and was able to replace my coverage but not before my mental wellness took another hit and I was pushed back down into the dark abyss of disconnection and despair.

What a long, strange, tumultuous year it’s been — and we’re only three and a half months in! A year of learning to be with what is — and finding reasons for joy and reasons to connect — even when what is isn’t a basket of sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns. What I’ve found on this journey is that the antidote to life’s challenges is authentic connection with other beings on their own courageous journeys. The challenge is that the last thing I want to do when I’m feeling low is to connect and share. The cure is well known to me and yet it takes a Herculean effort just to connect to and reflect on the truths of my experience much less to give voice to them with others.

The truth is that the impetus to share the newsletter that started this exploration came from outside. A dear friend had invited me to offer a weekly space for Contagious Vulnerability on Zoom to her community. Her kind invitation catalyzed me not only to publish a by donation weekly experience on Eventbrite so that she could share it with her network. It gave me the energy I needed to reconnect. To crawl out of my long, dark silence and isolation and share a personal update along and an invitation to convene with my own network, the web of hearts that I’d become disconnected from as I navigated my recent life challenges. The response to that email was in turn the catalyst for this exploration and a profound source of healing at a time when it was desperately needed. Your emails, calls, and texts reminded me of an essential truth that I’d become separated from. The truth about why I write.

I write to connect.

I write to reflect, to make sense and make meaning of my experience, both the dark and the light.

I write to find wholeness and healing, to reweave a web of belonging from all the disparate pieces of me.

I write because I know that even when I feel completely lost and alone that I am not alone in feeling this way, that the world is struggling right alongside me, separated by a chasm that courageous vulnerability can bridge.

I write because what is true for me is true for we.

This is why I write. This is why Contagious Vulnerability. We are all suffering alone, often in silence as we face and find ways to endure life’s challenges. And equally, we are often celebrating and experiencing the joys on our life’s journeys alone and in silence. And the same is true for everything in between, for all the emotional states along the spectrum of our human experience. Regardless of what we are feeling in any given moment, our authentic experiences can be opportunities for deeper connection — with ourselves and each other. And yet we keep most of our most profound experiences and our reflections about them to ourselves rather than having the courage to share them with others. When we do have the courage to share we open up an ocean of potential for curious exploration, connection, reflection, and so much more. We find joy and aliveness in this vast sea of unknown, unexplored possibilities if we dare to wade into its depths.

Won’t you join me? Won’t you share what’s on your heart with me or with someone, anyone, to experience the simple but powerful magic of authentic connection? To help make vulnerability contagious?