Your words are a matter of life and death (literally)
In a world that shuns vulnerability as weakness, I’m determined to change the narrative in our culture that is being used to dismiss anyone and anything that doesn’t fit the male-driven economic agenda, and therefore destroying life on earth altogether.
I take pride in the courage I’ve had in sharing and admitting my vulnerabilities, even in the public space.
However, over the past 7 years of this journey, something has arisen in my experience that needs addressing.
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How we deal with failure
In the Resilience workshop I often taught at The School of Life, there’s a bit from Carol Dweck about the Growth Mindset that distinguishes it as one that sees failure as a verb, “I have failed” — as opposed to a noun, or an identity, “I am a failure” in a Fixed Mindset. And it makes the point in a very simple, rational way that’s easy to understand.
But perhaps it’s not quite enough to FEEL the difference between HAVING failed and BEING a failure.
Even in the class How to Fail, we address various ways to look at failure and setbacks that don’t reflect on our identity but actually allow us to see these as events that allow us to learn, grow, even laugh and bond with each other.
Again, approaching this intellectually is fine and good, but — it misses the mark about what really happens when we hit a major setback or failure.
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Who we are and what we do
In 2017, I felt depressed for a little too long and decided to seek therapy. And immediately, I was assigned with a diagnosis that I didn’t see coming. My best friend didn’t understand why I couldn’t see this as a direction to find relief from my symptoms rather than as a death sentence. Which is exactly how it felt to me.
And the reason was simply because of the words that were used. They were nouns, not adjectives or verbs. It wasn’t something I was DOING — it was something that I HAD, something that I WAS. It was a label not of my symptoms, but of my entire personality.
To a psychologist, a personality is just a collection of traits and habits. To a person, a personality is who you are and how you experience the world. It’s your entire subjectivity. It’s a reflection of your entire life and perspective.
And being told there’s something wrong with it is like saying there’s something wrong with YOU as a person.
It assigns a judgement to your identity.
In spiritual terms, this personality or identity is not an absolute truth, it is a construction that the ego creates to protect itself and us from the world. So far, not so different from the psychologist, right?
However, when this identity becomes the filter through which both, you experience the world, but also the world around you assigns value to you, it starts to become something more integral.
It starts to infect who you are objectively, and not just subjectively.
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Identity matters (literally)
I’ve always believed that the name that parents assign to a child has a great impact on its sense of self. Everything is vibration, and therefore, sounds and their vibrations have an impact on us — and the sounds and vibrations that we begin to identify with and respond to as our given name have a great impact not just on our sense of identification — but on the vibrational state that we default to and resonate with. So, if you have a strong name with strong sounds, you might feel physically and mentally stronger than if you had a name made of softer sounds. This is reflected as well in the gender identification of names for boys vs girls, and the socially assigned gender roles.
Similarly, if we start to identify with BEING a failure rather than simply experiencing it or encountering it, this can start to impact the vibrational state that we identify with.
For a simplified understanding of how vibrational states work: think for a moment of the difference in energetic quality of your body and mind when you are 1. angry 2. sad 3. joyful. Probably, you experience anger as a kind of heated, expansive energy; sadness as a cold, contracted energy; and joyfulness as a light, free energy. Now imagine yourself as a glass of water, and translate each of these states into how the particles of water would act in each case. How might you draw the movement of the particles of water in each case? Perhaps you’ll start to understand how these relate to vibrational states — some are denser, more contracted, tighter together, while others are looser, more open; some are more agitated, moving faster, and others are more calm, moving slower.
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When I was already depressed, receiving a diagnosis telling me something was wrong with me (beyond that I was feeling depressed) reinforced the vibrational state I was in from something I was experiencing to something that I was. Instead of seeing it as an event, it became an identity, part of who I was.
Moreover, it started to become the lens with which I engaged with the world — as someone who WAS somehow disabled, rather than being highly capable. As that state started to absorb into my sense of self, it started to become an integral part of me.
And then, it also started to become how people started to assign value to me.
The vibrational state got locked in. It became my default state.
Why? Because of the power of language.
Language isn’t just powerful on the level of understanding and reason — it’s even more powerful on the level of vibrational resonance.
I was in a workshop with master ashtanga yoga teacher, Gregor Maehle, a German who learned Sanskrit in order to be able to interpret the ancient texts directly rather than relying on misinformed traditions and teachers. He explained the purpose of chanting in Sanskrit. He said, Sanskrit is a physically attuned language, it is designed to be in perfect resonance with nature. And the human mind is like a radio, that can interpret signals it receives depending on how it’s tuned, so if it’s poorly tuned, it will catch noisy, messy signals; and if it’s well-tuned, it will catch harmonious, coherent signals. So chanting in Sanskrit is a way of tuning the mind and body to be able to receive more coherent vibrational signals.
This is also why Sound Bath Meditations work, and why music can have such a huge impact on our mental and emotional states, and also why living in an environment with constant noise can destroy our inner peace and coherence. All sounds have an impact on our mind and body, and their capacity to receive, interpret and create signals.
Language, then, isn’t just a tool of communication. It’s a tool of design, of programming, of creation.
It’s a tool that can shape our reality, internally as well as externally. The words and names and sounds that we identify ourselves with are the ones that resonate with our inner sense of being — and therefore, perpetuate our sense of who we are in the world.
Language becomes a shapeshifting entity that transcends between our private, inner world and our public, collective, outer world, our society and community. It’s a bridge between who we are inside, and how we are perceived outside, in an eternally mutually influencing relationship. Who we are shapes our reality, and our reality shapes who we are.
Our language is a reflection of our culture at any given moment, and what we value as a collective. It reflects the experiences that we share commonly, and find worthy of identifying. It is the original tool of conception of the world we create with our hands, after our imagination comes up with an idea. Language becomes the fundamental keystone to our constructed human reality.
And what we don’t have words for, or don’t talk about commonly, is all relegated to what we don’t deem important. (For example, everything that modern western science has not assigned research efforts to, and that is, therefore, “woo-woo”. Or, for that matter, anything that is not economically valuable, such as indigenous wisdom.)
In other words, language is a reflection of what we collectively accept as our reality.
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So what does it have to do with vulnerability as a strength, not a weakness?
You see, the way we talk about vulnerability, failures, setbacks, in our society — in our organisations, in the economic world, even in our private communities — has an impact on more than just the individuals that dare to admit these vulnerabilities.
Because by judging the people who speak of their vulnerabilities and failures as BEING failures rather than as HAVING or EXPERIENCING failures, we aren’t just contributing as a society to destroying their individual mental and emotional health further, and relegating them to an identity of disability — we are doing much worse, for all of us as a collective.
We are creating language and identification of anything that is weak, vulnerable and economically unviable as lacking value, as being disposable and dismissible, as dysfunctional and useless.
NEWS FLASH: that includes all our wildlife (I learnt we only have 4% of it left on earth), all indigenous tribes and cultures, all pregnant women, all children, a huge number of plants and animals and insects, and also, all people who don’t fit the norm of employability and productivity as defined by a very narrow, singular perspective of neocolonialist capitalism.
Is it any wonder that we are destroying the life systems of our planet when we clearly don’t value LIFE itself?
Life isn’t and can never be a straight line of growth. Life is created from dynamism, from ups and downs, nights and days, pain and pleasure, growth and recovery, summer and winter, living and dying.
And this is what I have always been trying to highlight by talking about my own depression — to remind us (and yes, myself too) — that depression and death are a normal part of life. That we should stop treating them as anomalies and start accepting them as moments of recovery, of rejuvenation, of rebirth.
Because when we assign depression and regression the identity of failure and disability, we don’t just affect the individual, we are actually shaping our society and culture actively.
When we treat people who openly talk about their vulnerabilities and failures as not to be trusted, as unreliable, as incapable of dealing with life or challenges — we actually are signalling to ourselves, to our children and to our colleagues that we aren’t allowed to be human — or even, ALIVE.
When we idolise people who seemingly have never stumbled or failed, we are signalling in our language and culture that we value constant success, measured by economic productivity or superhuman feat, and thereby are automatically dismissing and devaluing everyone who is actually embracing life, and doing the harder work of respecting its ups and downs.
When we call those HEROES who always WIN, we perpetuate a competitive culture that values ONE leader (or GOD!) rather than a collective collaborative ambition that allows more of us to thrive, at our own pace, valued for whatever we contribute.
When our mental health systems tell those who don’t fit the normative capitalist productive mental and emotional patterns that they have a PERSONALITY DISORDER or are NEURODIVERGENT, we signal that we don’t have space in our society for those who think or feel differently than the average majority who have been pressed into a desired shape through formal and cultural education.
When we admire someone for being CREATIVE but then also dismiss them for being TOO EMOTIONAL, we are once again only valuing them as economically productive beings, while dismissing their aliveness as LIVING beings. (As is reflected in the economic status of artists who haven’t reached the coveted position of being instruments of good financial investments.)
In fact, ALL of our language systems in the current society our designed to value only that in us that serves the economic systems, completely disregarding and disrespecting all of that which SUSTAINS our ability to be productive or creative.
And this is causing MASS DESTRUCTION of our global systems — because our economy doesn’t sustain life — it is LIFE that sustains our economies.
And we are sucking the life out of living beings without any overview of how this is going to turn out in the (not-so-) long run.
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Imagine a better world.
Imagine a world where we truly embraced life, in all its facets, light and dark, heavy and uplifting — and truly RESPECTED the embracing of life.
Imagine if we lived in a world where we accepted life as a relay race, rather than as a sprint: we’d have some people taking a break in preparation for their next lap, resting freely without guilt or pressure because their rest was accepted as a deeply essential contribution to the collective win — and some other people who were actually pounding the pavement temporarily, giving their all knowing full well that when they ran out of juice, they could take their turn to recover freely, too.
Imagine if the division between these two kinds of people wasn’t based on their gender, race, culture or other birth-determined ability.
Imagine if in this world, people didn’t even see themselves as individuals but as a part of the whole — and not just the human whole, but the Earth whole.
Imagine a world where death and depression were respected as someone holding space for the heaviest and hardest parts of life rather than as failures.
Do you feel your soul expanding even as you imagine it? Do you feel the load lifting off your chest as you think of a reality where you weren’t just allowed to experience lows and setbacks, but were actually respected for it?
Do you feel the vibrational state of yourself and of this world itself?
I do, as I’m sure you do, too. Let’s create it together, starting now:
Let’s create a new reality
Repeat after me, out loud, with full attention to the quality and strength of your voice when you say this:
I am NOT a failure. I am NOT weak for being vulnerable.
I AM a human being experiencing the gift of life, I AM on a journey filled with joy, pleasure, pain and struggle. I AM precious and valuable BECAUSE I am vulnerable and mortal.
I AM truly alive when I accept — AND RESPECT — the life within me that ebbs and flows, that rises and falls, that expands and contracts.
And, I AM committed to respecting ALL life in the same way. I AM and will continue to be in awe of the beauty of life in both, its resilience and fragility.
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Welcome to the new world, and your new self, my friend.
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