By Amaya Gayle Gregory
You know what you are afraid of, don’t you? You may not have seen it consciously but deep inside you know. It’s the reason your diaphragm tightens, leaving a band around your chest, your heart aches seemingly without reason and your mind bends towards escape. On some level, you know where this is going, and you can’t imagine going there.
Naked vulnerability is unthinkable. Going there consciously, eyes wide open, heart exposed and still beating, is ludicrous, impossible. It is the antithesis of how you’ve lived life to this moment. Why, it would mean … letting all the hurt in.
It’s already in. It’s the reason you have to work so hard to keep from feeling it. You know that too.
Our vulnerability is the kicker, isn’t it. Whether through loss, through illness, or our death, life takes us there. We are going to experience it without our carefully constructed barriers. That’s the reason we do everything we can to prolong life, not because life is so great — it’s a mix and you know it — but because absolute vulnerability isn’t something you want to experience.
Oh lord, let me die in my sleep!
Maybe, if you’re lucky, all the stories you’ve told yourself about death and dying are right — or wrong — depending on the quality of the stories you tell yourself. You could get lucky and hop skip over the vulnerability bit.
Even so, even if you’re healthy up to the last minute before you drop from a heart attack, there will be that tiny window of discontent, of not knowing, of pure not-knowing, of utter vulnerability.
Why not get it over with? Now?
Why not remove the steel plate between you and life and let vulnerability be. It actually felt like a steel plate to me, hence the analogy. To open and feel all the childhood hurt, the adolescent angst, the adulteries of life, to slowly tick through them, conducting a life review and letting it all in, opening to the hurt of your loved ones, your neighbor, every sentient being who has ever and will ever take form, is freeing in ways I could never have penciled in.
That’s why you don’t. You’d have to let all of life matter. It feels safer to be wise, to transcend this insane world, to feed yourself stories that let you sleep at night, that cushion you from the shock that vulnerability portends … and every religion, every spiritual practice, everything you can think, can figure out, everything you add on to the beauty, the preciousness of your naked vulnerability is nothing but a cushion., protecting you from your magnificent, authentic, raw realness.
You see it, don’t you. You see how these strategies craft and maintain your identity. Perhaps it’s worth it. It seems to be, because you’re still using them … but just maybe it isn’t. It wasn’t to me. It came to a point where the strategies failed to deliver. They never had. I just finally saw the failure, the futility, clearly, the years that I employed the same strategies — sometimes exactly the same, sometimes in a new shape and form — with the same desultory results.
Maybe awe lies just beyond the shock. Maybe all the pain you cannot feel is the holy grail, is the portal to being a true human, a human as we were meant to be. Maybe once you risk it all, open to feeling it all, it all changes. How could you know other than by turning around, turning towards and saying, ‘Okay life, I’m willing.’
There is no appropriate bio for Amaya Gayle. She doesn’t exist other than as an expression of Consciousness Itself. Talking about her in biographical terms is a disservice to the truth and to anyone who might be led to believe in such nonsense. None of us exist, not in the way we think. It’s actually much better than we can imagine. Ideas spring into words. Words flow onto paper and yet no one writes them. They simply appear fully formed. Looking at her you would swear this is a lie. She’s there after all, but honestly, she’s not … and she is. Love a paradox and life is nothing, if not paradoxical. Bios normally wax on about accomplishments and beliefs, happenings in time and space. She has never accomplished anything, has no beliefs and like you was never born and will never die. Engage with Amaya at your own risk.
