Protective Services

You try to mask your vulnerability, but at some point it's sure to get the better of you. Then what do you do?

By Sally Kempton

Dan does not like to think of himself as vulnerable. He's a surgeon, a person who faces life and death every day. He started yoga and meditation as part of a stress-control program, and he loves the practice. But recently he's been noticing a big shift in his perspective: The people on his operating table have stopped looking like abstractions, or collections of organs. Instead, he's been feeling tenderness, a recognition of their pain and fear. "These people look so...vulnerable," he told me. "It makes me feel all soft and raw." He stopped for a moment, and I saw tears in his eyes. "I have to say it: I feel so open that it almost hurts sometimes."

I knew exactly what he meant. When I began studying with my teacher, the energy generated in meditation sometimes left me feeling weepy and raw in just that way. The sight of a homeless guy on Broadway would turn my heart into a kind of empathic swamp; a co-worker's irritability would feel like a physical blow. Other times the feeling of inner tenderness would simply melt my sense of separateness. Discarded newspapers in the gutter looked alive, and every stranger on the street met my eyes. No one told me that opening the heart could feel so double-edged—sometimes unbearably sweet, at others like exposing a wound or taking the lid off a Pandora's box of old, unprocessed grief and fears. Nor did I realize, until years later, that fielding these feelings of vulnerability is not optional, or even personal only to me; rather, it's an actual part of the yogic process.

Yoga, after all, is not an escape from life but a way of taking yourself into life's pulsing heart. It will inevitably lead you to your own vulnerability, to your raw places. But vulnerability also opens the door to love, grace, and the deepest forms of healing. Your vulnerability, scary as it can be, is inseparable from your capacity for intimacy and creativity and love.

Here's the caveat: The practice of opening to vulnerability is not for wimps. It's an advanced practice, requiring strength, discernment, and boundaries—all qualities your yoga practice will give you, if you give it time.

No Barriers

The most open person I have ever met was my teacher, Swami Muktananda. When you looked into his eyes, you seemed to meet no barriers at all; he would meet you at the deepest place you were willing to go. At the same time, I've never met anyone with such strong boundaries and such a take-no-prisoners attitude toward challenging situations. He embodied the lines of the 17th-century poet-saint Tukaram Maharaj: "We servants of God are softer than butter, but we can cut diamond." His softness, paradoxically, was made possible by his hardness. The energetic strength he had attained through yogic discipline and his skill at containing his energies and turning them inward had created a vessel of absolute protection.

The spiritual journey often looks like a dance between the two distinct poles of vulnerability and boundaries. It's a continuing dialogue between the impulse to soften and open and the impulse to contain and protect. The two apparent opposites turn out to be equal partners in the process of embodying spirit and heart.

So the question for Dan was, how could he keep his professional casing and yet stay in the feeling of openhearted connection? Or, to put it another way, how do you protect yourself from the dangers of vulnerability without sacrificing its gifts? You begin by looking at the origins of vulnerability and understanding the path it typically takes.

Original Vulnerability

The developmental journey of every human being begins in utter vulnerability. If you're lucky enough to have caring parents, your original vulnerability is met with kindness, and as a result you develop a basic trust in the goodness of the universe. But even when you have great caregivers, infancy and early childhood are filled with inevitable losses—your mother's temporary absence, weaning, the birth of a rival in the form of a younger sibling. These losses teach you about the world and help you to recognize your unique individuality, but they also accentuate your sense of vulnerability.

A growing child's natural response to basic vulnerability is to draw boundaries and seek protection. Attempting to protect yourself against vulnerability is a crucial aspect of the human journey. It's how we survive as individuals. Some protective strategies are necessary, good, and healthy; others, not so much.

A student named Roger, who grew up in South Central Los Angeles, told me that from an early age he learned to outrun pursuers from the local gangs and became so tough and fearless that at age six he bit a playground bully who tried to take away his lunch. My friend Coleman, on the other hand, grew up in a well-to-do family in Indiana and learned to survive his parent's stony emotional detachment by becoming the family jester.

You may hide your vulnerability behind your skill and competence, your work ethic and talent. You might hide behind a mask of coolness or even anger. You might internalize vulnerability, identify with it, and use your sensitivity as a kind of shield, like my friend who could always disarm my anger by claiming that it scared him.

Protection strategies

When these self-protective strategies harden, they can turn into an impenetrable ego that cuts off your growth or even inadvertently produces the very situations it was originally created to avoid. "You're scared of being abandoned?" says the voice of such an ego. "No problem. I'll make sure you're the one who does the abandoning"—and there goes your marriage. Or it takes the stance of the victim, convincing you that your problems are caused by an ever-changing cast of people who have it out for you.

The ego's protection racket may involve a spiritual practice or a religious belief, an expectation that it can be saved by some form of orthodoxy or by positive thoughts. The strategic ego may convince you that you'll be safe if you have a great job or a mate who loves you, if you own your own home, or, in our celebrity-focused culture, if you're famous. Then, when you fail at the task you've given yourself, you will feel as if you've lost everything.

One classic protection strategy is the closed community—your own version of Baghdad's Green Zone, where walls and gates, literal or figurative, keep out intruders so that you don't have to interact with anyone who isn't part of your tribe or cultural family. You can convince yourself in myriad ways that vulnerability is for others: the unlucky, the homeless, the undisciplined, the poor, the sick or disabled, the victims of genocide or hunger in distant places. Vulnerability is for the designated "victims," while we, the lucky ones, keep our distance and—while giving money or support—cling to our belief that somehow things will always turn out OK for us. Until, that is, they don't.

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