How Vulnerability Is a Spiritual Superpower
- 12 minutes ago
- 8 min read
Regina Eastman is an inspiration in the field of Wholeness. She is the founder of Ariel Grace Integrative Therapies and holds a Master of Arts in Applied Psychology. She is a Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapist, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, and a Body and Energy Worker.
Dearest reader, though this piece is called an “article,” it is also an offering, a heartfelt hello. This feels especially true because it is my first official global writing assignment for Brainz Magazine. I have sat with my own vulnerability, choosing my words with care so they may resonate in the hearts of those reading. I feel tender because I hold my work, helping others help themselves, as both a great honor and a responsibility.
First, a sacred truth, we all belong. We belong. Period. And belonging is an embodiment of feeling, not solely a concept.
In today’s world of over-business, nonstop chatter, and distraction, many of us feel lost and are quietly searching for belonging, most importantly, belonging to ourselves and, from there, naturally, to all of life. When we begin to turn inward and ask what we are actually doing, experiencing, and creating in life, we arrive at a turning point. This is often where we encounter the feelings we call vulnerability.
Vulnerability is a felt-sense doorway to the heart of what matters
So how do we find our way back home and experience true belonging? The way home lies in being vulnerable with ourselves, using vulnerability as a doorway to our sacred heart. Vulnerability, simply put, is leaving the familiar territory of how we understand ourselves and stepping into new experiences. It is the precursor to emotional, spiritual, and worldly growth and understanding. When we allow vulnerability to open the door to the heart, we discover a deeply spiritual space, ready to be explored and claimed.
Living from our hearts, in right relationship with the mind, gives life its richness and depth. Having heart offers us a connective meaning that runs through everything. The heart is an electromagnetic, conscious being and a powerful ally when we pay attention and follow its messages.
What can we do with our vulnerability once we are willing to go through it?
Once we arrive at this doorway, then what?
I often encourage those I support by saying, “It doesn’t matter where you begin, it only matters that you do.” By the time we’re asking questions about meaning, belonging, and direction, we’re usually ready to risk vulnerability. Yet vulnerability can be deeply uncomfortable. We’ve been culturally and collectively conditioned to see emotions as problems and vulnerability as weakness. This belief alone keeps us moving farther from our heart center and its innate intelligence.
When we begin to inquire about returning to our heart and its calling, vulnerability naturally arises. With it come questions, not just to be answered intellectually, but to be lived into and known from within.
One of the most important questions we can ask is, "How does fear, dressed up as vulnerability, stand in the way of coming home to my heart?" And closely related, "Where did this fear begin?"
Everything is in relationship, including fear. Our experiences shape our beliefs about ourselves and the world. When fear becomes a primary driver in our lives, it stands as a constant obstacle to the hearth and home of the heart. Disconnected from our heart’s wisdom, we feel lost. It is important to note that the sense of being lost is a natural part of the process of coming home to one’s heart. Being lost is part of the path home.
How to navigate the unknown sea of vulnerability
In my experience, a powerful key to coming home to ourselves is working with the self while also receiving support from someone who can truly hold space, offering a quiet, witnessing presence, embodying compassion, and reflecting wisdom so that thoughts and feelings can be safely explored.
With compassionate and trauma-informed support, we can begin by asking, and feeling into, questions such as:
Where and how do I reinforce fear in my life?
What am I doing, or what patterns of belief and behavior keep me disconnected from my own heart?
Perhaps we spend too much time on our devices, consuming information that fuels and perpetuates fear, hides our boredom, and makes us even more restless. Maybe we notice we’re repeating relationship patterns, cycles of suffering that look strikingly like our past, even though each relationship began with elation, hope, and promise. Some of us feel weighed down by responsibilities and reach for habits that numb us more than they help.
It’s worth asking, "Have we adopted the belief that certain actions and outcomes, achievements, income, and external success are supposed to equal authentic happiness?" And if so, have these beliefs led us down a path where we feel lost or, at best, only fleetingly happy?
We always have a choice, and we are responsible for each one
Here, I say again, remember, you belong. Whatever we choose, our choices either reinforce or challenge something within us. Reinforcing what is familiar requires little effort, it is woven into our habits, schedules, and conditioning. We can become more mechanical than organic, simply continuing to “do what we do.” And while these habitual patterns continue day in and day out, something feels off, gnaws at us, or leaves us still unhappy.
Choosing what challenges us, however, calls for courage, and for the vulnerable state that accompanies true change. In stepping into that challenge, we begin to discover our superpower. May you find yourself entering into courage, especially if you have felt you’ve lost heart.
Another sacred truth, life includes pain. From my own life and in my work with others, I have seen how unprocessed pain takes a toll, mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Many of us attempt to go around pain, numb it, deny it, or stay in it so long that it transforms into something else entirely, suffering. When we do not move through our pain, it waits for us.
When we experience suffering, we often want the world to be different, circumstances to change in our favor. A Buddhist sentiment about suffering suggests that when we want the world to be softer for us, instead of wrapping the whole world in leather, we need only apply leather to our own feet. This points us back to responsibility for our experience, and it gently reveals how often we avoid that responsibility simply because of discomfort.
Even though the sources of pain differ from person to person, pain is pain.
Challenging our self-talk and approach when feeling difficult emotions
When I ask people how they wish to address their pain, many say they want to “get rid of it.” They feel stuck and believe they cannot move forward.
I invite them to consider that pain is a form of energy, and that this energy is part of their full life force. To get rid of pain entirely would be, in some way, to get rid of a part of oneself. This is yet another way we can lose heart with ourselves.
If we can be open-minded and willing to be vulnerable, if we can meet our pain with gentleness, a path toward healing will begin to reveal itself. It’s an inside job, literally. Facing pain, and our fear of it, is the path back to the heart, to its wisdom, warmth, and guidance about how to move forward.
This is where support truly matters. Many turn to self-help books, videos, podcasts, and practices. These can be deeply helpful, yet we often use them in isolation, unaware that we’ve also been conditioned to be fiercely independent and self-sufficient. These qualities quietly mean that asking for help or support is, too, a vulnerability.
Having another human being to guide, support, witness, encourage, and gently challenge us is often key to restoring our flow and reconnecting with our whole self.[1]
Practicing what I preach by going first
A few years ago, in my integrative practice with those I fondly call “seekers,” I began asking about spirituality, beliefs, and practices that bring deep meaning into their lives, their relationship with themselves as feeling, sensing beings, and the degree to which they trusted their senses and intuitions, including their hearts. Most people responded with visible relief, often with tears, and shared how grateful they felt that someone finally acknowledged them as spiritual, heartfelt beings.
Looking back, I see a common thread, I had to step into this dimension first. I needed to risk approaching them in a new and vulnerable way. By broadening and deepening the therapeutic relationship beyond the talking and cognitive stage, those I supported were guided to move into embodiment, or to feel their inner terrain of experience.
The third truth, the body never lies. The body has a felt-sense language. It’s your ally, waiting for you to relate, listen, learn, and heal.
Conversations about ourselves as spiritual, heart-intelligent beings are often uncomfortable and rare, especially in spaces like work, social life, and even therapy.
Yet in therapy and integrative modalities, a curious, exploratory approach to spirit and heart can itself become a doorway to a deeper self. It is a first stepping stone into a new way of being, knowing, and living.
As we begin to relate to difficult feelings differently, and to our own vulnerability in feeling them, each encounter can gradually become more approachable.
Coming home means relating to ourselves in all our mysterious dimensions. When we live from these dimensions, we naturally come home, and there truly is no place like it.
I have seen great changes in my life and in others’ lives by coming home to the heart, and in the changes that were needed to truly live and be alive. Some of these changes have been moving beyond the worthlessness of self and all the compensatory means one works very hard to overcome, and making gentle changes to uncouple productivity from equating one’s worth. I have seen others turn hobbies into professions and redefine what true success means. Others have had to face and feel painful truths of creating unhealthy relationships due to their inner belief of unworthiness, while for years asking “why” they continued to experience being unloved by their partners. Healing from the place of our heart is a sacred process. Nothing to take lightly or go through at lightning speed. We must appreciate where we come from, where we are, and where our hearts call us to go.
In coming home to our hearts, we receive both the sacred opportunity and the heartfelt desire to live from this place, in our relationships, in our work, and in moments of solitude that once felt like loneliness and isolation.
From here, we find ourselves connecting more deeply with life itself. When our hearts are living fully, we naturally connect, and we come to know, from the inside out, that belonging includes every one of us.
For more information and guidance on the importance of vulnerability and the intelligence of the heart, I’ve included an article from Harvard Medical School, the National Library of Medicine, and a previous article from Brainz Magazine.
You may also find more information on me and an extension of who I am through my works of service here.
Read more from Regina Eastman
Regina Eastman, Integrative Therapist/Doctorate of Ministry (c)
Regina Eastman offers the weaving and evolution of her life experiences and academic achievements as a work of sacred service. From early childhood, her connection with nature from both the seen and unseen perspectives, in relationship with her curiosity and sensitivities, Regina has come to the stages of wisdom. Presently, with her candidacy for a Doctorate of Ministry in Engaged Wisdom, these wisdoms are ripe to be shared. She is the founder of Ariel Grace Integrative Therapies, where she invites and supports you in embodying yourself as conscious wisdom, through the physical, emotional, heart, energetic, spiritual, intuitive, and conscious and unconscious dimensions of Self.
Footnote:
[1] The capitalization of “Self” represents the multidimensional being as both human and spiritual.
