If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in the petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can’t survive.
Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.
Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.
What makes you vulnerable makes you beautiful.
The willingness to show up changes us. It makes us a little braver each time.
Staying vulnerable is a risk we have to take if we want to experience connection.
Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.
Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.
You either walk inside your story and own it or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.
Vulnerability is not about winning, and it’s not about losing. It’s about having the courage to show up and be seen.
Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.
Joy, collected over time, fuels resilience – ensuring we’ll have reservoirs of emotional strength when hard things do happen.
When you get to a place where you understand that love and belonging, your worthiness, is a birthright and not something you have to earn, anything is possible.
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.
That’s what life is about: about daring greatly, about being in the arena.
Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language – it’s from the Latin word cor, meaning heart – and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.
Mindfully practicing authenticity during our most soul-searching struggles is how we invite grace, joy and gratitude into our lives.
I’m never more courageous than when I’m embracing imperfection, embracing vulnerabilities, and setting boundaries with the people in my life.
I believe a joyful life is made up of joyful moments, gracefully strung together by trust, gratitude, inspiration, and faith.
Men walk this tightrope where any sign of weakness illicits shame, and so they’re afraid to make themselves vulnerable for fear of looking weak.
Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous.