Hello and welcome back to Unleash Your Peace.
My name is Ellie Shoja.
I am your host.
I'm a positive mindset coach,
A personal transformation expert,
A deliberate creator,
And I am your peace trainer.
And Unleash Your Peace is actually your peace training.
It is where every single week we dive into a different topic about the internal world.
We do that over the course of five episodes published Monday through Friday.
The episodes are super short and sweet.
They're under 10 minutes each,
So you don't have a huge time commitment.
However,
They're very potent,
So they will take you inward.
They'll give you something thought provoking every single day.
And we do that because when you go inward,
When you start shedding all of that weight of the unwanted pain you're carrying and you find lasting internal peace,
You simply live your best life yet.
Because when we live from that place of joy and peace and connectedness to our infinite beingness,
That part of us that is non-physical and holds all of our potential,
We don't just incrementally improve the quality of our lives.
We actually exponentially innovate every aspect of our experiences on this physical plane.
We become whole.
We become deliberate creators.
And we live our most authentic lives here on earth.
And we become uplifters in our families and our communities.
That trickles out into the world.
Next thing you know,
We're leveling up as a society,
As a human race.
And that is my wish for all of us.
By the way,
You guys,
This is our 13th week together.
13 weeks we have gone through so many different topics.
We've dove into what you are,
The non-physical being that you are,
The relationship between the physical and the non-physical relationship between your mind and body,
Forgiveness,
Gratitude,
Your life's purpose.
We've talked about duality and contrast,
Religions,
Virtuality,
Love,
Fear,
Your blind spots.
And last week we talked about creativity.
And this week,
Vulnerability.
Now vulnerability is such an interesting topic because most of us avoided like the plague.
We do not want to feel vulnerable at all.
We would rather die a lot of times to feel vulnerable.
And why is that?
Why do we do that to ourselves?
Why is it so uncomfortable to feel vulnerable?
And that is because at the base of vulnerability is that feeling of shame.
Remember shame?
We talked about it during our blind spots episodes.
With our blind spots,
We kind of talked about how we shove the beliefs that bring up shame for us into our blind spots and then we don't ever want to look at them.
So then they become this weird default programming that runs underneath everything else and messes everything up.
It creates a faulty foundation for everything that we build on top of it.
If you miss that,
It's just a couple of weeks back,
Really great episodes to listen to.
You can binge listen to pretty much any week in under an hour,
50 minutes because the episodes are so short.
Everything that makes us feel ashamed makes us feel vulnerable.
And Bernie Brown in her second TED Talk says something really profound.
She says we live in a vulnerable world.
So essentially everything that we do can make us feel vulnerable.
Things like talking to our boss about something that we don't understand how to do.
Talking to our boss about wanting a raise.
Talking to our spouse about something that we want them to do or not do.
Talking to our child.
Anytime we have a difficult conversation,
We feel vulnerable.
Anytime we have to admit we don't understand something,
We feel vulnerable.
Anytime we need to do something that is outside of a comfort zone,
We feel vulnerable.
Anytime we expose ourselves and there's that word expose ourselves to the possibility of being attacked or harmed in any way,
We are vulnerable.
And that attack,
By the way,
Doesn't have to be physical.
Most of the time we are afraid of the non-physical,
The emotional attacks.
And why is vulnerability and shame,
Why are they so difficult for us to kind of sit in and experience?
And that is because they describe how we think we are.
So we think when we experience vulnerability,
We think that we are being bad or unworthy or weak or unlovable.
And by exposing what we think makes us weak,
What we think makes us unworthy or unlovable,
We think all of a sudden other people are going to judge us in that way.
And it is literally the end of the world or it feels that way.
That's why a lot of depression,
A lot of suicide,
Self-harming behavior is rooted in our inability to kind of sit in that space of experiencing vulnerability and shame because we immediately feel weak.
We feel betrayed.
We feel afraid.
We feel unworthy.
We feel unlovable and emotions like that.
But let's look at what happens if we don't experience vulnerability,
If we don't put ourselves out there.
And an analogy that I like to use in this regard is when we have an aversion to being vulnerable,
What we're doing is we're building walls and we're building kind of barricades around ourselves.
So we're building essentially a cage to contain ourselves.
So that cage kind of keeps us in there,
Keeps us in check.
So we keep ourselves in check.
We keep our cards very,
Very close to our heart.
We actually keep our hearts barricaded because vulnerability is the act of living with an open heart,
With an exposed heart.
So when you unexpose your heart,
When you close out your heart,
You are fighting being vulnerable.
And what does that look like?
It looks like this.
You don't express emotions.
You don't express your needs.
You don't express your desires.
You have a hard time even being honest with yourself about what you want and what you need.
You have a hard time being honest with yourself about anything that you might feel any kind of guilt or shame around.
Now this kind of barricading of ourselves is in direct conflict with our desire to actually be seen and to be understood and to be loved.
All of us at our core want to feel loved.
We want to feel like we are being understood and we want to be seen.
However,
When we barricade ourselves behind these walls,
It's very hard.
It's actually impossible for people to get to know us,
To actually see us completely because we are not even showing our full self even to ourselves,
Let alone to anybody outside of us.
That to me is like building a glass cage around ourselves.
And this is the analogy that I want you to kind of walk away with and think about every time you fight being vulnerable,
You kind of shy away from it and you don't allow yourself to go there.
You are building a glass cage around you.
Now this glass cage does multiple things.
First of all,
It keeps people out so people can still see you through the glass so they can observe you.
However,
The glass cage is constricted,
It's restrictive.
So you're not in your natural habitat.
You're not doing the things you would be doing normally if you were living a wholehearted open and exposed life,
An authentic life.
So your behavior,
If you imagine a lion inside a small glass cage,
A lion inside that cage is going to behave very differently than a lion out in the wild.
So that means people don't get to know you even if they stand on the other side of the cage their entire lives.
You can spend your whole life with a person and if you are barricading your heart because you are afraid of vulnerability,
You don't want to experience it,
Then you are living inside a glass cage.
They are not getting to know the real you because quite frankly,
You are not getting to know the real you.
And that is perhaps the biggest price we pay when we fight vulnerability,
When we don't allow ourselves to be vulnerable.
Because guess what?
Even if nobody stands outside of that glass cage to observe you,
To spend time with you,
That glass cage is still there when nobody else is around.
People who are afraid of vulnerability,
They don't stop being afraid of vulnerability when people go away.
They actually have a habit of lying to themselves,
Hiding themselves from themselves.
So they don't even know who they truly are themselves.
So if you don't know yourself,
How is anybody else going to get to know you?
I am going to leave you with that very important question today and tomorrow we'll come back,
We'll dive a little bit deeper into this topic of vulnerability.
But today really just internalize if you have a hard time with vulnerability,
If you have been fighting it all your life,
If you just don't want to go there,
You feel shame,
You feel betrayed,
You feel very uncomfortable and you don't want to go there.
I really urge you to start looking at it from this other lens.
See how you are caging yourself up.
Hopefully by the end of this week,
You will start allowing yourself to be more vulnerable because you'll see the benefits of doing that in your own life.
Now until we come back tomorrow,
Do check out instagram.
Com and find peace unleashed.
Every single day I share a love note with you on Instagram and those notes are purely for the purpose of uplifting you,
Inspiring you and giving you something loving to receive throughout the day.
And if you want to work with me at any capacity,
You're welcome to reach out to me through my website,
It's peace unleashed.
Com.
I am so excited to announce that this podcast is finally available on Spotify.
It's been a long time coming.
I am so happy about this.
I'm so excited.
So if you have been enjoying this podcast,
Do leave a review on,
I believe iTunes.
I don't know if you can put a review on Spotify,
But I'll have to check that out so that other people can find this podcast and take advantage of this incredible resource.
And until tomorrow,
When we come back and dive a little bit deeper into this topic,
I wish you a peaceful day.
