Collective Healing - the Gift of Shared Vulnerability

Imagine if our emotions were totally welcome. Always and everywhere. Imagine complete freedom to be instinctively honest in our expression. Truly real and authentic. Imagine people no longer apologising when they become tearful. What if boys were allowed, just as girls are, to respond to their sensitivity and tenderness. Growing into the full scope of our emotional capacity is critical to our maturity. Our independent and collective maturity depends on it.

All the travesty of the world plays out in direct proportion to the degree of emotional repression held throughout humanity. Whatever we try and bury inside will always find it’s way out, one way or another.

The way we relate to our own emotional expression is what we each individually contribute to the collective planetary environment. What we repress causes strife and what we heal contributes ease. With every degree of opening in each single person, the collective is positively influenced. And the more we see it happening safely around us, the less we will fear it.

There’s something deeply liberating in witnessing another moving unapologetically through raw emotions. It has a way of extending a palpable invitation for us to connect with the same threads of our own buried suffering. Seeing others face the same issues we struggle with can offer a safe lead in that we might never choose if we had to examine ourselves directly.

Personal growth retreats and group workshops are some of my favourite places for this reason. From just one person dropping their guard and opening to a vulnerable exploration, the ripple through the rest of the group can be profound. The witnesses can experience their own immediate transformation and also be opened to slowly unwind further over many subsequent days. It just takes one brave soul to initiate the process for themselves and the cascade of many can follow.

The liberation is extraordinary when we are willing to drop self consciousness and choose realness, no matter who’s around.