Vulnerability is usually seen as weakness. The definition of vulnerability is a state of being exposed to the possibility to attack. Given this idea, it is no wonder that we gravitate away from anything that makes us vulnerable. We like to be strong. We like to put ourselves in situations that don’t make us vulnerable. We only ever want to be stronger and more protected, not more vulnerable.

A few weeks ago, I asked a friend that I see usually once a week to brunch. We see each other often, so you could say we are developing some closeness. She said she wanted to talk about something, so after we finished brunch at a place with a cool diner decor, we went to a local park.

Jac went on to tell me that a few things I said to her the last time I saw her made her feel bad. She described what happened and how it made her feel. I told her I was sorry and didn’t mean to make her feel bad. I didn’t defend myself, and at the end of the conversation, I checked that she felt seen and validated, and we hugged. 

This feels really reasonable while reading it but most people avoid what they perceive to be as conflict at all times, and all costs—even at the cost of the friendship itself. For one, Jac’s delivery was perfect. She held the friendship as the centerpiece in the conversation, meaning she decided to have the conversation instead of avoiding me, didn’t purposefully try to hurt my feelings, exaggerate, or any of the things many people do when sometimes trying to communicate what bothered them in a way that is more ego-driven than with the intention of protecting the friendship.

But all of this said, it did make me feel some sort of way that Jac said that I made her feel bad. As a fairly self aware person, I was able to highlight that I felt this way because I did something that made my friend, someone I care about, feel bad. I felt bad because I made Jac feel bad. 

This just means that I have a conscience and am caring which is good, but nonetheless, the feeling existed uncomfortably and had to be felt. 

The next thing I felt though, was vulnerability. I am a person that likes self improvement in all aspects of life, including being a good person and friend, and becoming more spiritual. Nothing about the way I live my life is meant to harm, and that’s by design. Knowing that I made Jac feel bad made me feel imperfect. It reminded me that I am not perfect (I do struggle with perfectionism). It reminded me I am not impenetrable. I am not outside of hurting someone even if I didn’t mean it, even a friend. I felt bad. I felt vulnerable.

And, I also felt like that was okay. Whew.

Jac and I continued our day together, and then I went home and spent the rest of my day with my husband, and when I woke up the next day, I woke up with this renewed outlook on life. I honestly couldn’t shake the feeling even if I tried. I just felt so vulnerable that Monday. And not in a bad way. Like I had been holding up a shield, and suddenly, realizing it had been penetrated, I got to put it down. This was less in my head and more a physical sensation of a release of tension. There was this very sudden release, similar to the one you feel when you are carrying something and finally get to put it down. 

And, that too felt like it was okay. Not just okay, but deliciously real. Beautiful.

I don’t remember what I had planned to do that Monday but I felt enraptured by this feeling of my own imperfection, my own vulnerability, as if it were something to simply marvel at. Oh what a feeling! In a way that Jac could not have anticipated, she gave me the permission to not be perfect, to not be strong—further accentuated by the fact that the way Jac communicated did not make me feel like I was personally defective. I felt so okay being imperfect and vulnerable that day, a huge deal for someone who’s primary wound is the belief that only a perfect performance will cause people to love you. 

I felt so vulnerable I could shout it from the rooftops. Because I felt so vulnerable, and yet still lovable, I felt amazing. I felt so free.

Free to be myself. Free to be a human—a human that forgets things, or messes things up, or doesn’t always say the right thing at the right time, or gets their feelings hurt, or doesn’t always know what to do. It was a beautiful thing that led to many other beautiful things.

I am off Instagram. I have been off Instagram since late June, and a variety of things have happened as a result but get this—I genuinely feel like I am starting to experience more body sensation. It makes sense. Due to social media, our brains are either consumed with viewing it or consumed with the things we witnessed on it. Thanks to social media, we are a lot less present than we used to be. 

It makes sense that I am feeling more present, and it is not crazy that in being more present in my life, I am starting to feel my body sensations more. Perhaps I had been so in my head, as an ego-driven human who is interested in philosophy, psychology, epistemology, metaphysics, and spirituality, that I had even forgotten about my body. It’s true—the more I have entertained these ideas, the less interested in the physical, and yet losing my Instagram took me right back to my human body, which apparently was something I deeply needed. Being in my body feels great.

Emotions aren’t just in our heads. We sometimes forget that the body experiences emotion, the way you feel butterflies in your stomach when the person you have a crush on waltzes by, or the way your heart can drop to the pit of your stomach when someone does something that shocks you. We have intellectualized them so much that we have forgotten that emotions are actually physical sensations.

I was awe-inspired by this feeling of vulnerability because it is not a body sensation I feel often. I had no idea that in my desire to expand my mind over the years, I had fortified against my own abilities for feeling. Maybe my own wound got the better of me. People who struggle with perfectionism believe they have to be perfect to be lovable. No matter how much I work on this, sometimes, I still find myself face to face with that insecurity again. Perhaps my desire to be more loving and more full of light is another expression of that idea. Jac helped me see that I can be imperfect, and therefore vulnerable, and still loved. It was an amazing sensation in my body, to feel vulnerable—to even feel weak. I basked in the feeling that day.

The novelty of the feeling made me wonder what other human experiences I am missing out on because I, like most people, only want the good in the world. We want the day but not the night, we want the good but not the bad, we want the beautiful but not the ugly. It was so gratifying that it made me realize that to know the shadow of anything is actually not that bad, but in fact, the shadow of anything must exist for the light to exist. My vulnerability was not so ugly, and not unworthy of love. Why had I been so afraid of it? And if I was, what else have I been afraid of that is not that bad? What other shadows are there to be embraced?

This is why in a yin yang, there are two dots of the opposite color on both sides, meaning that the duality must exist for any one thing to exist, but also, that each side has a little of the other in it to exist too. Paradoxically, this is how all things that are opposite are also the same. Opposites need each other to exist. 

I saw a lot of yin yangs that day with Jac. It started with a few dogs with interesting faces, each with a perfect line down the middle of the faces with black on the left side, and white on the right. I saw a bunch of yin yangs that week in strange ways and places, most of them actual yin yangs and not just things that resembled it. It culminated when my husband and I left with some friends for a weekend trip to a place just outside of Mexico City called Tepoztlan. 

A bit of a hippy town, it was the first place the Dalai Lama visited when he came to Mexico. There were a lot of yin yangs. The amount was actually uncanny. But, we had no plans to be there earlier that week. We decided the day before. I was where I was meant to be.

I was in the pool of our friend, Alfonso, an older gentleman who lives by himself. I was playing in the water alone while my husband and our visiting friends were hiking Tepozteco, the great mountain of Tepoztlan that has a small pyramid sitting on its steep slopes. That was when I figured out what the yin yang meant, and what that had to do with this feeling of vulnerability.

People often say the yin yang is a symbol of the balance of masculine and feminine, but it’s not just male and female, it’s the duality in everything. 

The way black cannot exist without white, day cannot exist without night, male cannot exist without female. It’s not the idea that there are two of everything, it’s that for each the existence depends on the existence of the other, as horrible as that may be. Peace is in opposition to war. Death is in opposition to life. Hate is in opposition to love. We need each to understand and experience the other. 

Put more simply, fish do not know what water is. To do so, we’d have to put them in the air. The opposite’s existence allows us to experience anything, and vice versa.

But water contains air. In that way each side of the yin yang needs the other to exist which is why each contains a little of the other, and we shouldn’t be afraid of anything. It’s a lot like the Black and white people of the United States. Talking to another friend of mine also a few weeks ago, she shared with me that most Black people in the United States are so mixed, and many Black women breastfed white children, in a way all Black people in the US are related to all white people in the US. Each has a little of the other. This is quite literally like a yin yang.

I was in the pool, standing in the cold water, and for the first time, I was enjoying it for its briskness. I realized cold is warm because warm wouldn’t not exist if cold didn’t. This thought held in my heart kept me warm and I actually found joy from how enlivened my senses were in the cold water. It did not feel that cold. I felt amazing and so alive. Alfonso brought me a virgin pina colada at that moment, knowing that I like them, and told me he thought this was the most perfect temperature of the water. I relished my life on this fine summer day in Tepoztlan and smiled and smiled over and over to myself. 

I played. Usually, I see pools as a way to cool down on a hot day, and promptly get out, but not today. I started to move the water around me and realized I could more easily move the water when I pushed it at the same time in both directions. It doesn’t make sense when I say it aloud, but it worked. The left hand moved right, the right hand moved left. That’s when I realized that but by pushing in both directions I pushed in the same direction—the center. Moving them in opposite directions brought the water to the same place. Unity in the middle.

By pushing in both directions I could more easily manipulate the water. It is by the perfect balance—the perfect unity of duality—that the water felt really safe, fun, and malleable. Left became right and right became left, and the water in my hands in the pool seemed to be in perfect harmony. The yin and the yang became the yin yang.

It’s not in balancing different things, slicing and dicing them more supposedly to further understand them, and then putting them on the same scale, that we will find equilibrium. It’s in unity. The unity of all things. 

Jac’s kind but direct comments brought a vulnerable feeling in my body that made me feel real. But her comments also reminded me of the importance of having a body, even as a spiritual being, even in a spiritual experience, because the physical and the spiritual exist in duality too, meaning one must experience both to truly have an experience of either one. 

The physical is an important part of spiritual ascension. I can like contemplating the secrets of the universe but I still need to be here on earth to really understand them.

Jac gave me a huge gift that day because she taught me a lesson that I was looking for—which is that there is purpose to this physical world because we need it to understand spirituality. 

There is a great deal of value to our bodies and being present in them. Without bodies, we wouldn’t be able to eat cookies, smell flowers, or hug. There is a good reason to want to experience being human. It is a nice experience, this being human. We shouldn’t keep our head up in The Cloud or the clouds as much as we do. 

If the opposite of vulnerability is invulnerable, impenetrable, and strong, then no matter what, there is a certain kind of strength in being penetrable and vulnerable. It is only by being vulnerable can we even experience what it means to be invulnerable. And since each contains a little of the other, then there is a great deal of strength inside of being vulnerable, that we can only access by being vulnerable. And that is what Jac gave me that day.

Lately, I have been feeling so integrated into my body, so safe in the world despite my known vulnerability because I know it’s natural for everyone to contain both “good” and “bad.” Including me. Because I know there is duality in everything and everyone, I suddenly feel so much more kind, compassionate, and understanding to myself for my shadow that undoubtedly exists. My body feels good and real because I finally see the value in it, and as a result, so does my spirit. From vulnerability, I have finally arrived at feeling in perfect unity with myself, and it feels so good.