Quotes About Vulnerability

It takes hundreds of nuts to hold a car together, but it takes only one of them to scatter it all over the highway.

I don't know how to drive a car. The only thing I can do is act, but it's not something I even feel comfortable doing.

Driving a car, you are in danger of killing; walking or standing, of being killed.

The noncook is in a helpless position, much like that of the car owner who can't change a tire and has to depend on mechanics to keep his automobile running.

A car's not the right place for showing off to a girl—the bed's the place for that. The consequences of a mistake there are more upsetting, but less tragic.

I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.

You can't make anyone love you. You just have to reveal who you are and take your chances. (105)

Whatever character you play, it gives you the chance to expose another side of yourself that maybe you've never felt comfortable with, or never knew about

But when the tables are turned and we feel wretched, that softens us up. It ripens our hearts. It becomes the ground for understanding others.

Although it is embarassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you're sneaky, all the ways hat you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways.

Tonglen (sending-and-taking) practice also helps cultivate fearlessness. When you do this practice for some time, you begin to realize that fear has to do with wanting to protect your heart: you feel that something is going to harm your heart, and therefore you protect it.

You might consider that you yourself are an arrogant person or you might consider that someone else is an arrogant person, but everybody who has ever felt even a moment of arrogance knows that arrogance is just a cover-up for really feeling that you're the worst horse, and always trying to prove otherwise.

That's when our understanding goes deeper, when we find that the present moment is a pretty vulnerable place and that this can be completely unnerving and completely tender at the same time.

The truth is that when we really begin to do this, we're going to be continually humbled. There's not going to be much room for the arrogance that holding on to ideals can bring. The arrogance that inevitably does arise is going to be continually shot down by our own courage to step forward a little further.

But fortunately for us, the soft spot—our innate ability to love and to care about things—is like a crack in these walls we erect. It's a natural opening in the barriers we create when we're afraid.

We fear losing our illusion of security—that's what makes us anxious.

Reaching our limit is not some kind of punishment. It's actually a sign of health that, when we meet the place where we are about to die, we feel fear and trembling. A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us.

we might realize that we are on the verge of something. We might realize that this is a very vulnerable and tender place, and that tenderness can go either way.

Second there is relative bodhichitta, our ability to keep our hearts and minds open to suffering without shutting down.

Chögyam Trungpa had an image for our tendency to obscure the openness of our being; he called it "putting makeup on space." We can aspire to experience the space without the makeup. Staying open and receptive for even a short time starts to interrupt our deep-seated resistance to feeling what we're feeling, to staying present where we are.

We're able to see how we run and hide and keep ourselves busy so that we never have to let our hearts be penetrated.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh.

So the next time you encounter fear, consider yourself lucky. This is where the courage comes in. Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.

THE only reason that we don't open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don't feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else's eyes.