Quotes About Vulnerability

But Lottie staggered on the lowest verandah step like a bird fallen out of the nest. If she stood still for a moment she fell asleep, if she leaned against anything her eyes closed. She could not walk another step.

The shortness of life! The shortness of life!' I've only one night or one day, and there's this vast dangerous garden, waiting out there, undiscovered, unexplored.

It's a terrible thing to be alone -- yes it is -- it is -- but don't lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath -- as terrible as you like -- but a mask.

What is most important to understand about dysfunctional families is that in keeping the family "secrets," we are harming ourselves and diminishing our ability to be honest and open-hearted with ourselves and others we care about

Sometimes it seemed to him that his life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.

Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.

It wasn't so much that he minded telling Leslie that he was afraid to go; it was that he minded being afraid. It was as though he had been made with a great piece missing - one of May Belle's puzzles with this huge gap where somebody's eye should have been. Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.

To give up having to be right, having to prove someone else wrong, having to have the last word, having to be understood - that is the mark of a person who is capable and truly ready to create a loving relationship that will last and flourish over time.

I open myself fully to give and receive love.

Allow yourself to undertake this journey exactly as you are. Be free to be your imperfect, messy, unenlightened self as well as your magnificent, extraordinary, fabulous self.

noticed it at first by the profound feeling of being exposed

can begin tending to the soft spots of your own tender heart, causing a bittersweet breakthrough in your ability to love yourself even when someone else refuses to. When you use the sheer force of your sorrow to crack open your heart, it promises to drop you down into a deeper capacity for compassion and care for all living beings. You become initiated into your own humanity

When you're willing to be with your experience, simply naming your feelings and needs without frantically trying to get rid of them, you're practicing what Buddhists call "mindfulness." It is neither passive nor active, but a deep honoring of your own humanity as you come to terms with the vulnerabilities of having a heart that loves.

True love feels perfectly safe to explore and admit one's weaknesses, because doing so is not an admission that one is bad or inferior in any way.

Every way that you've given away your power, denied your own deeper knowing, put someone else's feelings and needs before your own, stayed embedded in a victimized story, or settled for less in life—all of it is now up for review. You have nowhere to hide. Life has broken you open and it is violently, mercilessly forcing you to evolve, to develop, and to grow. In

the heart of all attachment is fear regulation

Unfairly, nature seems to have designed it so that the one person in the whole world who can best calm us down when we're terrified is unfortunately the same person who is terrifying us.

To give up having to be right, having to prove someone else wrong, having to have the last word, having to be understood—that is the mark of a person who is ready to create a loving relationship that can last and flourish over time.

And you don't have to be perfect before, during, or after doing this course. Just stay authentic and risk telling the truth—first to yourself and then to others, because that's where the healing happens.

Love is the wrecking ball that is pulverizing every relationship of record that isn't wide enough or brave enough to let real love in. —Daphne Rose Kingma

For love, by definition, happens when it is safe to be flawed in the presence of another. Think

When we open our hearts to each other we allow grace to enter. It is as simple as that. And suffering--events that break open the heart--can become the refiner's fire that leaves us fully open to the truth about love and compassion.

Civilization is a fragile veneer. Beneath is chaos.

Troubles that lurk in the darkness of our own thoughts often feel gigantic. It's not until we expose these shadowy monsters to the light, by telling our friends, that they shrivel to a more manageable size. Whatever your problem is, you'll not be free of it by hiding.