“The way to live is with vulnerability and stop controlling and predicting.”
Check out this fabulous TED talk on living with courage and vulnerability.
Brené Brown points out that ‘Courage’ comes from the Latin word, Cour, which means heart. And it originally was used to describe those who told their stories with their whole heart, accepting the good and the bad.
Wow. How much of ourselves are we willing to accept, much less to share? For me, I have to ask myself, do I ever use food to block away the parts of myself I have trouble accepting? The feelings? The memories? The hopes or needs that I deny or the desires that I ignore? The answer is very clearly a ‘yes’ for me. Of course. And that’s all part of the journey, I suppose.
I’m a health coach and still notice the frustrating struggle of negative emotions and building stress and then just wanting to avoid it, to push it away, to stuff those feelings down with another bite or a pastry or tea. Yet I know even healthy food, when eaten when my body isn’t hungry, becomes unhealthy, and it is yet another thing to feel ‘bad’ about, and the spiral continues.
So I can stop, observe, halt the judgment, and then allow myself to see that relationship to food as a ‘signal’ and nothing more or less. It is a signal that in some area of life I have an opportunity to live with both halves of my heart – with courage. I can journal it out, share it, pray about it, blog it, talk with a coach, a colleague or a friend. I’m trying to learn how to even accept those frustrating aspects of myself and hand them over to God to transform so that they can just be another part of my experience of being human.
It’s a tall order, having the courage to be vulnerable, to be imperfect. The liberation to be whole though, now that is true freedom. Freedom to be ourselves and not have to stuff any ‘undesireable’ parts away with food or compulsion or self-hatred.
In what areas of life do you want to be more courageous and release into the light?