David Whyte is a featured presenter at the Wake Up Festival and author of the Sounds True audio learning program What to Remember When Waking: The Disciplines of an Everyday Life. His latest book of poetry is Pilgrim.
In an Insights at the Edge podcast interview with Sounds True publisher Tami Simon, David speaks about waking up as being present through the “constant and inescapable nature of your own vulnerability.” By turning toward the part of us that is open to the world whether we want to be or not—and not shying away from it—we discover a place inside, initially tender, where we are able to meet a precious, unlooked-for aspect of the exposed heart. In the wake of this contact, we can then cultivate that initial sense of what at first seems like a weakness into what David calls “robust vulnerability.”
Tami Simon: David, you speak about a sense of alienation that so many of us feel, ways that we don’t fit in or don’t belong, and that by exploring this in an authentic way, that it could actually open us up to compassion for other people and a deeper appreciation for what it means to be human. Rather than this being a problem that we did not somehow manage or remedy, you refer to this sense of alienation as “a core human competency.”
David Whyte: Yes, it is a competency, Tami, because it opens up a real sense of vulnerability. I’ve often said—and I speak in all different kinds of worlds, from the corporate world to ashrams and religious communities—that one of the things that you do feel in many transplanted Eastern communities, whether they are yoga communities or Eastern communities of any kind, is that the whole approach to that abstract called “enlightenment” is misunderstood as a kind of achieved “fortress self,” a state where you will know exactly what to do all the time and that perfection may be possible.
The hope is for a spiritual gold medal to hang around our necks. As far as I can see, it may be exactly the opposite. Enlightenment might have something to do with understanding the constant and inescapable nature of our own vulnerability.
Once you actually turn toward vulnerability, not as a weakness but as a faculty for understanding what’s about to happen, you have the possibility of transforming a life in a way that is quite extraordinary. If instead of physically tightening whenever you feel a sense of being touched at the core, you actually teach yourself to turn toward it—and I mean really, the physical sense of vulnerability in the body, that tightness you might feel when you’re in the presence of someone who is a bully, a social bully, or that vulnerability when you’re risking your artistic charms out in the world—something quite extraordinary starts to open up.
I work with this dynamic with hard-bitten executives at the top of international financial companies—that is, the need to redefine vulnerability, especially when you think that a good leader always has to create a real conversation and a real conversation comes from making a real invitation. There is no real conversation without an invitation and no real invitation without vulnerability. Think for instance of the vulnerability of not having all the answers, simply admitting it and asking other people to join you in a sincere attempt to find the way.
TS: Can you share with us, David, how you’ve become more vulnerable in your own life, and how this vulnerability expresses itself?
DW: Well, I would say especially in close relationships with my wife, my daughter, or my son. There are evolutionary dynamics in all of us that constantly and erroneously reinforce the necessity for having an answer to everything. And this of course comes in spades when you are a father or a mother. But it can also come when you’re with a friend, and you’re doing well in your life, and they are not, and you find that you temporarily have all the answers cornered and, of course, things turn around the next year, and the shoe is on the other foot; they are the ones who seem to have reality cornered.
With regard to the family, after a while, I gave up trying to be the font of all wisdom with my daughter and found it much more rewarding to look for edges of vulnerability where I could ask for her perspective. My wife says this is one of the greatest gifts a father can give to a daughter: to simply ask them how they see things. I think she is right.
For instance, there was one day when my daughter and I got into a little spat with one another, as you would as a self-respecting father and daughter, and the conversation ended with me just telling her that she had to do something and that was that. She charged upstairs, of course, and there was that wonderful and eternal sound of the bedroom door slamming upstairs. There was the possibility that I could have just left it there and said, well, she can just do it because in the long run, I know better. But I realized that this was not a real conversation and that I had not made a single invitation to her in the exchange.
The whole dynamic is connected to something else that is one of the central difficulties of parenting: that as a father or mother, we are constantly attempting to relate to someone who is not there anymore. They are growing so quickly and becoming someone else before our eyes, and we don’t want to believe it. We don’t want to have missed it. The vulnerability is in the heartbreak, the fact that they are growing away from you, and they are no longer the person who needed you in every facet of their life. The conversation stops in a mother or a father when they can’t face the heartbreak. The only way to open the conversation is to turn to the very grief itself.
After I collected myself, I made tea and invited her down in a more affectionate, invitational way, and we sat with the tea and the English biscuits, and I said, “Charlotte, tell me one thing that you want me to stop doing now as a father, and tell me one thing that you would like me to do more of.” And that created, out of nowhere, a beautiful moment. Her head came up, and she looked at her father intrigued, as if seeing me for the first time, and it really opened up the sense that I was trying to actually speak to her from where she was in her life now and not someone that I was forcing her to be.
It was a lovely, healing moment, and it came just out of catching myself instead of trying to reinforce the image of the parent who knows and protects the child from everything and changed it to a beautiful, proactive not-knowing. That would be an example of moving toward that edge of vulnerability.
In the workplace, that vulnerability might look very different. It’s not the same kind of vulnerability you would have with an intimate partner at home. Usually, vulnerability in the workplace has to do with simply admitting that you don’t have all the answers and therefore need everyone’s help around the table in order to ascertain what the real pattern is and the best way of going out to meet that pattern. That is really necessary in today’s overwhelming organizational world, where everything is always about to fall in on top of you and it is so easy simply to get one’s head down and try to become the best lone, courageous bulldozer amongst a lonely herd of other invulnerable bulldozers.
Every area of your life, all three marriages in your life—marriage with another person, the marriage with your work, and the marriage with yourself—all call for a different form of vulnerability, and it’s our job as individuals to find out what the contact point is, where we get to touch the not-knowing in a deeply inward and, at the same time, beautifully practical, outward way.
