by Heather Plett | Feb 17, 2016 | connection, growth, holding space, Intuition, journey, practice
“But it hurts if I open it too much.”
That’s what I hear, in some form or another, every time I teach my Openhearted Writing Circle or host openhearted sharing circles.
People show up in those places hopeful and longing for openness, yet wounded and weary and unsure they have what it takes to follow through. They want to pour their hearts onto the page, to share their stories with openness and not fear, to live vulnerably and not guarded, and yet… they’re afraid. They’re afraid to be judged, to be shamed, to be told they’re not worthy, to be told they’re too big for their britches. They’ve been hurt before and they’re not sure they can face it again.
And every time, I tell them some variation of the following…
An open heart is not an unprotected heart.
You have a right, and even a responsibility, to protect yourself from being wounded. You have a right to heal your own wounds before you share them with anyone. You have a right to guard yourself from people who don’t have your best interests at heart. You have a right to keep what’s tender close to your heart.
Only you can choose how exposed you want to make your tender, open heart. Just because other people are doing it, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for you.
Yes, I advocate openhearted living, because I believe that when we let ourselves be cracked open – when we risk being wounded – our lives will be bigger and more beautiful than when we remain forever guarded. As Brene Brown says, our vulnerability creates resilience.
HOWEVER, that doesn’t mean that we throw caution to the wind and expose ourselves unnecessarily to wounding.
Our open hearts need protection.
Our vulnerability needs to be paired with intentionality.
We, and we alone, can decide who is worthy of our vulnerability.
We choose to live with an open heart only in those relationships that help us keep our hearts open. Some people – coming from a place of their own fear, weakness, jealousy, insecurity, projection, woundedness, etc. – cannot handle our vulnerability and so they will take it upon themselves to close our hearts or wound them or hide from them. They are not the right people. They are the people we choose to protect ourselves from.
Each of us needs to choose our own circles of trust. Here’s what that looks like:
In the inner circle, closest to our tender hearts, are those people who are worthy of high intimacy and trust. These are the select few – those who have proven themselves to be supportive enough, emotionally mature enough, and strong enough to hold our most intimate secrets. They do not back down from woundedness. They do not judge us or try to fix us. They understand what it means to hold space for us.
In the second circle, a little further from our tender hearts, are those people who are only worthy of moderate intimacy and trust. These are the people who are important to us, but who haven’t fully proven themselves worthy of our deepest vulnerability. Sometimes these are our family members – we love them and want to share our lives with them, but they may be afraid of how we’re changing or how we’ve been wounded and so they try to fix us or they judge us. We trust them with some things, but not that which is most tender.
In the third circle are those who have earned only low levels of intimacy and trust. These are our acquaintances, the people we work with or rub shoulders with regularly and who we have reasonably good relationships with, but who haven’t earned a place closer to our hearts. We can choose to be friendly with these people, but we don’t let them into the inner circles.
On the outside are those people who have earned no intimacy or trust. They may be there because we just don’t know them yet, or they may be there because we don’t feel safe with them. These are the people we protect ourselves from, particularly when we’re feeling raw and wounded.
People can move in and out of these circles of trust, but it is US and ONLY us who can choose where they belong. WE decide what boundaries to erect and who to protect ourselves from. WE decide when to allow them a little closer in or when to move them further out.
How do we make these decisions? We learn to trust our own intuition. If someone doesn’t feel safe, we ask ourselves why and we trust that gut feeling. Sometimes we’ll get it wrong, and sometimes people will let us down, but with time and experience, we get better at discerning who is safe and who is not.
We also have to decide what to share in each level of the circle, but that’s a longer discussion for another blog post. For now I’ll simply say…
Trust your intuition. Don’t share what is vulnerable in a situation that feels unsafe. Erect the boundaries you need to erect to keep your tender heart safe. Let people in who have your best interest at heart.
This article has been voluntarily translated into Farsi.
If you want to explore your own open heart, you’re welcome to join an Openhearted Writing Circle, or consider booking a coaching session. For a self-guided journey to your own heart, consider The Spiral Path, which remains open until the end of February.
Interested in more articles like this? Add your name to my email list and you’ll receive a free ebook, A Path to Connection and my weekly reflections.
by Heather Plett | Feb 11, 2016 | Uncategorized
Last week, I bought a new journal. I am mostly a rush-in-buy-rush-out kind of shopper, but with journals it’s different. I take journal shopping very seriously, because a journal isn’t just a blank book – it’s an intimate partner that will see me through a lot of joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure. I need to like how it feels in my hands, like the texture of the paper, and like how it lies open in front of me. And I prefer a little variety – I never buy the same journal twice. This time I went with soft vintage leather that wraps around and keeps its contents cozy.
The first thing I entrusted my new journal with is this:
Today I resolve that I will only take responsibility for the baggage that belongs to me. I will work on whatever is mine to work on. I will not take responsibility for anyone else’s anger, fear, grief, joy, success, etc.
I wrote that because by the end of my last journal, it had become more and more clear to me that I needed to address my pattern of taking on what is not mine to take on.
Even though I’ve learned so much about what it means to hold space for people, and I spend quite a bit of time talking about listening without judging, walking alongside without trying to fix, empowering without trying to control, and guiding without inserting our own egos, I still get stuck in a decades-old pattern of taking responsibility for baggage that is not my own.
Not sure what I’m talking about? Consider the following scenarios and ask yourself whether any of these reflect your own patterns:
- Your teenage daughter doesn’t hand in an assignment and instead of recognizing that she is old enough to take responsibility for her own mistakes, you fret about how you have failed to teach her good organization skills. Or maybe you defend her to the teacher, giving an excuse for why it couldn’t be finished in time.
- You apologized for forgetting to pick up something for your partner, but he/she won’t let go of the anger, so you apologize several times, rush out to pick it up (even though it’s late and you’re tired), or over-compensate by making his/her favourite meal for dinner – anything to try to fix the anger.
- Your friend is passive aggressive and unhappy and she always makes you feel guilty for not having enough time for her, so you regularly give up your rare free time to go for coffee with her and listen to her long list of complaints.
- You’ve written something online that somebody responds to negatively and even though you really believe it to be true, you delete it because you don’t want to offend anyone.
- An impatient driver keeps honking at you, and even though there’s a lot of traffic and you don’t feel safe, you rush to make the turn to avoid annoying the other driver.
These are just a few examples of the many ways that we take on other people’s baggage. We often do it at the risk of our own safety, our own happiness, and our own health. Instead of letting them carry what is theirs, we take responsibility for fixing their anger, making sure they’re happy, and avoiding offending them.
Most of us have such ingrained patterns that we don’t know why we do it or where it came from – we barely even know we do it until our growing self-awareness makes us see it. Perhaps we picked it up from our parents’ patterns, perhaps we’ve always just assumed that that was the role of a person of our gender, or perhaps we’ve been lead to believe that that’s the only way we have value in the world.
At the heart of it is always our own discomfort, fear, and lack of self-worth. We are afraid that if we don’t fix someone’s anger, then they will reject us. Or we’re afraid that if we offend someone or say no to them, it will mean they won’t like us anymore. Or we’re sure that if we don’t help other people succeed then it will make us look bad.
When we take responsibility for other people’s baggage, we make it about us rather than about them. It’s now about OUR discomfort, OUR fear, and OUR lack of self-worth. In a strangely paradoxical way, it’s a self-centred act, even though it usually appears to be a self-sacrificial act.
We try to fix other people because we want our own lives to be easy and free of fear.
But we’re not doing anybody any favours when we do this. We’re not doing them any favours because we’re denying them the opportunity to take responsibility for their own issues. We’re taking their power away by taking their responsibility away. And we’re not doing ourselves any favours because the stress of trying to control the way the world around us functions will kill us.
What can we do about it? We can choose to detach. We can choose to return the responsibility for the baggage to the person who owns it.
That doesn’t mean that we are no longer compassionate or supportive of other people. We can support without taking on the burden. We can hold space for people. We can hold them accountable for their own choices and their own emotional growth.
And in doing so, we take back the responsibility for our own fear, discomfort and lack of self-worth that got us into trouble in the first place. Because just like it’s not our job to fix them, it’s not their job to resolve whatever’s going on for us.
I’m working on that in my own life by writing about it in my journal, talking to people who get it, and practicing it daily with baby steps. If you need help processing your own intentions to take responsibility for your own baggage and nobody else’s, perhaps you need a new journal too. Or maybe you need a coach who understands because she’s on that journey too.
I encourage you to consider how you need to let go of other people’s baggage, because the more we learn to do it, the more freedom we have and the more freedom we give them.
Note: If journal-writing is of interest to you, you might find some support for it in the upcoming Openhearted Writing Circles.
by Heather Plett | Feb 3, 2016 | grief, growth, journey, parenting
(Trigger warning) When I was just a little older than my oldest daughter, a man climbed through my bedroom window and violently took what didn’t belong to him – my virginity. I fought back, but he was stronger than I was and he held my own scissors over my head.
One of my memories from that hellish week was the shock on my dad’s face when he admitted that he – a lifelong pacifist – was suddenly aware that he was capable of murder.
Yesterday, I learned that the followers of a pro-rape misogynist pick-up artist are planning to meet this weekend in a mall near my home – a mall that my daughters frequent. Rage suddenly consumed me and I knew that I, like my father, could kill a man for hurting one of my girls.
Just after reading that article, I read another one by Melissa Harris-Perry in which she shares a story of a man threatening her in the lobby of a hotel. She froze, remembering her own rape and slipping into “the trance of survivor submission”. The only thing that jerked her back out of it and allowed her to fight back was the sudden awareness of her nearby students. Her students saved her, she said. She fought back because of them.
The combination of the two articles left me shaking and in tears. I was glad it was dark in the van as I left to pick up my daughter up at the pool. She didn’t know that my eyes were red – she only knew that she had finally succeeded in getting all the way through her synchronized swimming routine without faltering and she needed me to celebrate with her. And then, when a story came on the radio about Harry Potter, her passion for the half-blood magician filled the van and she chatted the rest of the way home. One of the things she told me was that Draco Malfoy was not a monster like everyone made him out to be, he was just misunderstood.
My daughters, like Melissa Harris-Perry’s students, save me again and again.
Later that evening, I was thinking about the many conversations I have had with a dear friend whose son, though he made some mistakes in his lack of understanding of girls, is not a monster. And yet now, because those girls painted him into a monster, he awaits the court’s decision about the seriousness of those mistakes.
And I realized that those young men who plan to meet in the mall to talk about how to pick up girls, are not monsters, they are somebody’s sons. And they make mistakes in their fumbling attempts to find affection. Perhaps they are the Draco Malfoys of their schools.
And suddenly, I don’t want to bring my rage to the mall, but rather my mother-love (and maybe milk and cookies). And I want to sit down with those young men, look them in the eyes, and say “how have you been so wronged by the world that you can only imagine getting what you want by taking someone else’s power away?” And then I want to offer them some tough love and tell them my story of how it feels to have a man treat you like that.
Sometimes it is rage that changes the course of the future, but more often, in my experience, it is love.
by Heather Plett | Jan 31, 2016 | Uncategorized
This is my friend Rosanna. She is fierce and funny and a little bit wild. She is also really, really smart, and has amazing skills as a poet and radio broadcaster. She has a national radio program and I get giddy every time I hear her voice on the radio, because she’s so good and because it makes my petty little ego feel puffed up to be friends with such a smart person.
This was us on Friday night at King’s Head Pub. We were being a little bit silly and a little bit fierce and our friend Angela snapped the picture mid-gangsta-hands-motion.
Rosanna and I are both moms raising fierce daughters. And we’re both writers and career women. And we’re both fiercely committed to social justice. And we both live in the same city and were both raised in rural parts of the same province. And we both like to get a little silly on a Friday night over wine.
But there’s one big difference between Rosanna and me. She is Indigenous and I am White. Her ancestors were the original inhabitants of this country and mine were the settlers. Hers were the colonized and mine were the colonizers.
Rosanna and I met last year when her face on the cover of a national magazine made her the unwilling poster child for racism in our city. Our city had been called the most racist city in Canada and both of us felt the need to do something about that.
When I read the article, I felt heartsick about it and determined to make a contribution to change in our the city, but didn’t know how to respond. I wanted to use my skills as a facilitator to gather people for conversations, but I didn’t want to do that alone. I didn’t want to be one of those “great white hope” leaders who takes the spotlight away from the people who deserve it. I wanted to do it in partnership with an Indigenous person, and so I waited for the right person.
Rosanna turned out to be the right person. When Rosanna posted on Facebook that she wanted to gather people around the dinner table for conversations, a mutual friend connected us, a few other people stepped in, and suddenly we had an event planned. We hosted over 90 people for a good meal and even better conversation. And then we did it again.
In the process, I learned a lot about what it means to be an ally. I made some mistakes, and tripped on my own privilege a few times, but I stuck with it, believing it was the right thing to do. All the way through it, Rosanna was gracious and forgiving (and funny to boot) and never made me or any of the other fumbling white people feel shame over any misguided words or wrong-headed actions.
The little troupe of women who pulled the conversations together came to call ourselves the Justice Ladies League. We even had badges and we wore them at the bar while we plotted our next attack on injustice. We talked about serious stuff, but damn we had fun together.
Life got busy and suddenly months had passed since we’d held our last event or been silly over drinks together. When the one year anniversary of the magazine article rolled around, we remembered how much we liked each other, so we planned a spontaneous reunion of the Justice Ladies League at the King’s Head Pub.
That reunion was this past Friday night. I was late leaving the house, so I drove instead of taking the bus. That limited me to only one glass of wine, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t up for some fun.
At the end of the evening of catching up, laughing, and pretending we were bandits ready to wreak havoc on the city, four of us left the bar while Rosanna went to join a few other friends at another table.
I drove home, safe and sound and thought not much more of it, until this morning when I checked Facebook and discovered… this is what happened to Rosanna on the way home from the bar…
Suddenly I felt that same sickening feeling I’d felt when I read the Maclean’s article. This is what happens when you’re an Indigenous woman in our city. This is the risk you take just trying to take a cab home on a Friday night.
There are over 1500 missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. Even though she is smart and funny and a published poet and a national broadcaster, my friend Rosanna lives with the daily awareness that any day, she could become one of them.
That sickening feeling in my stomach was partly because I knew that this would not have happened to me. If I had taken a cab home and done the same thing Rosanna did, the cab driver would almost certainly have kept silent and driven me home. There’s no way I would have ended up at the Main Street Project and there’s no way police officers would have considered taking a cab driver’s side over mine or sending me home without protecting me from an abusive cab driver. Because I am white. Because I am privileged. Because I live in the predominantly white suburbs. Because he wouldn’t have assumed that the colour of my skin meant I was a drunken trouble-maker.
I need to go further with this story, because it’s important. After I saw Rosanna’s post, I felt guilty about not giving her a ride home. If only I’d stayed a little longer. Or if only I’d been in the cab with her.
I felt the sting of shame over my own white privilege. Why do I have the right to drive home safely or even take a cab without worrying that I might not make it home? Why has it never occurred to me to warn my daughters about cab drivers when they come home from the bar?
I shared Rosanna’s story on Facebook, and people responded with appropriate outrage, but then something else happened. Some of the people who responded were doing so because they felt badly for ME – because I’d worked hard to challenge racism and had to face something like this. “Keep up the good work, even though it’s discouraging.”
But the work wasn’t about ME. And the story wasn’t about ME. And if it was, then my ego was getting in the way.
I had a sudden memory of the article my friend Ericka shared awhile ago about white women’s tears. The article talks about how white women’s tears in response to stories of racism turns the spotlight onto themselves and makes people feel compassion for THEIR emotions rather than pointing their compassion in the direction it should go. By showing too much of their own emotions, well meaning white women co-opt the story.
I found the article challenging at the time, because I’ve always encouraged authentic emotions and wouldn’t want to tell a white woman to stop if she was feeling genuinely heartbroken over the story of someone’s black son being murdered. I knew, for example, that I had shed tears at the vigil for Tina Fontaine (a young Indigenous woman whose body was found in the river), and that didn’t feel wrong.
But now, as I found myself wanting to share my emotions over the bullying Rosanna had received at the hands of the cab driver and police officers, and my own guilt for not driving her home, I was doing the very thing the article warned against. I was co-opting Rosanna’s story and inviting people to feel empathy for me instead.
No, I didn’t mean to do that. I only meant to support my friend. But sometimes it’s the well-meaning things we do that cause the most damage.
Ugh. This ally stuff is challenging!
What if I just deleted my post and didn’t share anything? I could pretend I hadn’t seen Rosanna’s post and go on with my nice easy life. Who would be the wiser? That way I wouldn’t risk any blunders and I wouldn’t need to expose my white privilege.
But Rosanna is my friend! How could I ignore what happened to her on an evening when I’d been with her? I couldn’t and it really wasn’t a temptation at all.
The only thing I could do was to put my discomfort on the line, risk making a few blunders (and admit them), and honour this friendship that matters to me. Because the risks I take in speaking out and challenging people are insignificant in the light of the risks my Indigenous friends face every day.
So I said this on Facebook… “I appreciate all of your words AND I want to say that I didn’t share this because ‘poor me – I work so hard and nothing changes’. If I make the story about me, that brings it all back to my own white privilege. This is about the reality of what Indigenous women have to live with every day. I bow gracefully out and make the story theirs.”
The truth is, I may lose followers out of this, and I may get some backlash, because it happens every time I write about racism, privilege, feminism, etc. – especially when I admit my own blunders. But again, the fact that I can even consider staying silent is a mark of my privilege.
(As you can imagine, I’m also struggling with the irony of saying I don’t want to make the story about me and then writing a whole blog post about it.)
But I have a platform and I have a voice, and silence doesn’t feel like an option. Silence doesn’t feel like true friendship. And Rosanna is worth a whole lot more than that.
So please, if you learn anything from this story, don’t make it about me. Don’t pat me on the back for telling the story, because I did nothing courageous. I don’t need the ego strokes or the reinforcement of my privilege. Instead, use Rosanna’s story to galvanize you to look into your own heart, challenge the racism you see around you and in you, and find a way to be an ally for the marginalized members of your own community.
And, if you want to know truly courageous truth-telling, read the poetry book Rosanna wrote with her mom, about her mom’s residential school experience. And read other stories that challenge you. And talk to the people who are facing this kind of struggle every damn day. And ask them how you can be an ally and stand with them against injustice.
Do it for Rosanna and do it for her daughters and do it for Tina Fontaine. And do it for my daughters and your daughters and our city and everyone who feels unsafe because they are not part of the dominant culture.
Because if we don’t challenge the racism, wrestle with our own privilege, and listen to the stories of the marginalized, then nothing will ever change.
Interested in more articles like this? Add your name to my email list and you’ll receive a free ebook, A Path to Connection and my weekly reflections.
by Heather Plett | Jan 29, 2016 | calling, connection, fearless, growth, leadership, Passion
In 2004, Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As the founder of the Greenbelt Movement, she mobilized thousands of women to plant millions of trees across Kenya. Besides planting trees, she was instrumental in freeing political prisoners, protecting women’s rights, and creating a more democratic election process.
I knew some of these things about Wangari Maathai, but before I read her biography, Unbowed, I had no idea just how much she’d had to struggle through nearly every step of her journey. For starters, her husband divorced her because she was “too strong-minded for a woman” and he was “unable to control her”. From then on, in a patriarchal society, she was forever branded as obstinate divorced woman who didn’t know her place and shouldn’t be trusted.
That didn’t stop her, though. She felt strongly compelled to work for the environment and for women’s rights and so she stuck with it through multiple imprisonments, repeated death threats, and almost every obstacle possible. For most of her adult life, she was fighting a corrupt government that wanted to silence her. When nobody would rent office space to her organization because they’d become too controversial, she opened her small home to a staff of eighty. When the death threats became too plentiful, she went into hiding but refused to stay silent. When mothers were protesting the unjust imprisonment of their sons, she slept with them in a church for months on end. When the government was fostering conflict between tribes, she met with them in secret to try to bring them back to peace.
What compelled her to do all of that? She had a PhD and a professorship – she could have chosen to live out her days as a mild-mannered professor. Why did she risk her life again and again for what she believed in?
She simply couldn’t see any other way to live.
“Many people assume that I must have been inordinately brave to face down the thugs and police during the campaign for Karura Forest. The truth is that I simply did not understand why anyone would want to violate the rights of others or to ruin the environment… What people see as fearlessness is really persistence. Because I am focused on the solution, I don’t see danger. Because I don’t see danger, I don’t allow my mind to imagine what might happen to me, which is my definition of fear. If you don’t foresee the danger and see only the solution, then you can defy anyone and appear strong and fearless.”
I was thinking about Wangari Maathai this week as I coached my clients. Many of my clients also feel compelled to do hard things. One is preparing to run for politics, even though she knows it will be the hardest thing she’s ever done and she will get beaten up along the way for being an idealistic woman. Another is studying to go into the ministry, even though she’s already butted her head repeatedly against the patriarchal church and faces a double whammy of discrimination as a disabled woman. A third is determined to finish a book that’s taken her twenty years to write, even though she’s over seventy and has every right to take the easy road at this stage of her life. Still others are advocating for human rights, following non-conformist paths into work that nobody understands, and daring to heal from abusive pasts.
What makes these women do what they do even though they know it will be hard? When I ask them this question, they usually just shrug and say “I just feel like I have to. It doesn’t feel like I’ll have a fulfilled life if I don’t at least try.”
For those of us following a path to authenticity and our own calling, there will invariably come a time when we find ourselves compelled to do really hard things. When that time comes, we know that if we don’t make the choice to go through, something inside us will die.
It might be the risk of quitting a job or ending a relationship or walking away from an opportunity or standing up for justice or caring for an autistic child or giving up our material goods or fighting a broken system or protecting the oceans or planting vegetables or writing a book or becoming a poet. The hard things in our lives might not seem like hard things for others, but for us it takes all of our courage to stay the course and face the fallout.
Why do we do it? Because we have no other choice. Because something inside us compels us. Because we don’t want to die unlived lives. Because, like Wangari, we choose to focus on the solution and not the obstacles.
It’s a little like natural childbirth. Once your body decides it’s time to go into labour, you have no choice but to go through. When my second daughter was born, close on the heals of the first, the first labour pain brought back a rush of memory of how hard it had been the first time, and I said out loud “I change my mind. I’m not having this baby!” But I really didn’t have a choice. This baby wanted to be born and my body knew it had to let that happen, no matter how hard it was going to be. And when the labouring has done the work of opening the cervix, and the compulsion to push comes on, there is nothing our minds can do but follow along on the course the body feels compelled to take.
And sometimes we feel that compulsion to do the hard thing even when we know the outcome is almost certain failure. We still have to do what we have to do, or we die. When I was told that my third baby had died in utero, I didn’t know how I’d find the strength to go through what my body had to go through to birth him. How can one go through excruciating pain without knowing there is a hopeful outcome?
And yet… I found the strength. I had to. My body gave me no other choice. And it turned out that what the social worker had told me was right… “The birth will be hard, but there will come a day when you won’t regret going through it, because at least then you will know that that this baby is real and you have a right to grief him.”
Sometimes we do hard things even though we’re pretty sure they’re doomed for failure. Wangari Maathai has been instrumental in planting millions of trees, but in the time those trees were being planted, just as many were being cut down. One might wonder whether the end game was worth the struggle. And yet, she simply knew she had to do it. Because it was the right thing to do.
Another woman who does that in our country is Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party. She knows that, every time she gathers a slate of candidates to run for election, there’s an almost guaranteed certainty that all but one or two will fail. And yet she keeps doing it. Because it’s the right thing to do.
In her book, So Far From Home, Margaret Wheatley talks about those people who just keep doing hard things, even though they know the pain of repeated failure.
“My great teachers these days are people who no longer need hope in order to do their work, even though their projects and organizations began with bright, hope-filled dreams. As ‘the blood-dimmed tide’ of greed, fear, and oppression drowns out their voices and washes away their good work, they become more committed to their work, not because it will succeed, but just because it is right for them to be doing it.”
And so, we strap on our boots and prepare to do the hard work. Because it is right for us to be doing it. And we know that even a painful joy is better than no joy at all.
Note: If you are seeking your path through the hard things, you might find some support in The Spiral Path which starts on Monday.
