We start out our lives being completely vulnerable. As young children, we’re completely dependent on our caretakers for our survival. We would simply not be able to make it if we were to be abandoned at that age, so we unconsciously develop a persona that does everything it can to ensure our membership in the tribe.

This persona consists of a fragmented collection of subpersonalities. Each of these try to numb our anxiety, shame, and anger in scripted ways. They tend to seek comfort and the satisfaction of our basic needs. While that can be useful in itself, it often relies on attempts to control others, and to control how other people see us.

In Latin, ‘persona’ means mask, or character in a play. Our persona masks our true nature in an attempt to adapt to our environment and protect us from our vulnerability. It is therefore both a mask and a protective armour.

In adulthood, when we become powerful enough to maintain healthy boundaries, this armour has outlived its usefulness. More than that, it gets in the way of living a purposeful life. Having the persona in place has several consequences:

• When showing up as we truly are, and become vulnerable, our persona kicks into high gear as it is programmed to protect us from feeling shame and fear of rejection. This feels highly uncomfortable.

• Our defences operate continuously, and keeping our armour up consumes a lot of our energy.

• The processes that make up the persona now become patterns of sabotage, and form the primary obstacle in our pursuit of purpose.

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.”

— Brené Brown, The Power of Vulnerability

The word ‘vulnerable’ comes from Latin vulnerabilis, meaning ‘wounding’. Being vulnerable means being willing to get hurt, to take the risk of getting injured, facing uncertainty, or incurring a loss. Being adults means that we are strong enough to take a hit every now and then, knowing that that doesn’t kill us. It takes courage to show up and be seen, and to embrace imperfection.

We were all wounded in some way early on in life. Our persona functions to prevent us from getting wounded again in the same way, because of an unconscious belief that we could be annihilated if it happened again. While this might have been true for the child, it is not true for the adult.

This is why our defences kick into high gear when set out to lead a purposeful life. It’s why we need to embrace discomfort to grow into our true selves.

Embracing integrity means taking responsibility for doing our own shadow work, instead of blaming those who have wounded us. Our caretakers usually did the best they could.

Practicing vulnerability and integrity brings you closer to your own center, which is where your power is. It’s about learning from failure, never about perfection. It’s a step-by-step process, and each step requires the courage to deal with the emotional discomfort.

Guess that’s why they call it the Hero’s Journey.

I have some good news to share about that, and also some bad news.

The good news is that purpose and wholeness are indeed intimately related, and that you’d be getting both of them. The bad news is that you have to stop lying if you are serious about your purpose.

How come?

Wholeness is a measure for how you are organized internally. It’s the degree of your structural integrity. The better your parts are aligned and cooperating, the more wholeness you experience. The more you are internally fragmented, the more your self-expression is distorted.

Sabotage

We’re all fragmented to some degree, and while we don’t notice that fragmentation directly, we do experience the effects. It shows up in various forms of sabotage, such as addictions, perfectionism, scattered attention, or holding back.

Sabotage is a distorted expression of your purpose, caused by fragmentation. Wholeness, therefore, is not just a nice feel-good effect of true purpose manifestation. It’s a prerequisite.

We do as we are, and we are as we do. That means that our actions follow from the way we are structured, and that in turn our structure is affected by our own actions. Our actions follow from our choices, and each choice either increases or decreases our fragmentation.

Shadow Work

There is a lie, a false belief, at the root of every form of sabotage. Shadow work is the ongoing process of getting to the root cause of your sabotage, detecting the way you have been deceiving yourself, clearly seeing the truth that is buried within the deception, and shifting your behaviour accordingly.

Every change in behaviour is a restructuring, a change in who you are. The direction of these changes is wholeness, integrity, trustworthiness. The result of cultivating integrity, is that you can’t help but express your true purpose. What else is there to do?

The vessel trough which you manifest your purpose requires maintenance and repairs. It’s the inner work to complement your outer work. As far as I can tell, it’s completely up to you how far you want to take it. But for your purpose to be expressed authentically, you have to have integrity. That’s just how it works, technically.

So purpose and wholeness go hand in hand. There is one more key ingredient, however, and that will be the topic of next week’s post. Thanks for reading, and be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already!

Let’s take that apart, and then put it back together again.

Egocentrism is a developmental stage where the ego does not have the capacity yet to take other people’s perspectives. Children usually grow out of it by the age of four or five. When thinking of selfishness, we usually mean something similar: a lack of consideration for other people.

I would call that a shallow way of being selfish. The opposite of shallow selfishness is altruism, where you care for others at your own detriment. Neither of these seem like a good balance of care to me.

So how about adding a third option to selflessness and shallow selfishness? Let’s investigate what deep selfishness looks like.

Have you ever noticed that all your experiences have only one thing in common? Whatever was going on, it always involved you, even when you were being altruistic. So it’s safe to say that some aspect of you is central to your own life. How are we to make sense of that?

Weirdly, we have something to learn from our Solar System here. For a while, people thought that the Earth was the center of the universe, and that everything revolved around it. Then the Renaissance happened, and Copernicus argued that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

The Copernican Revolution was a paradigm shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric model. On a slightly smaller scale, a paradigm shift that you can make individually, is from an egocentric to a self-centric mode of selfishness.

What I’m suggesting, is that you’re a miniature Solar System, and that you have a center that everything in your life revolves around. That center is your own Sun. It’s where your light shines brightest. It’s your essence, the locus of your purpose, and the wellspring of your power. What do you think happens when you consciously start orienting your entire life around that center?

The word ‘orientation’ is derived from orient, which means ‘east’. That’s where the Sun comes up. So navigate your life based on where your Sun is, which is at your own center. Not anybody else’s. Yours.

The more self-centered you become, the more you’re expressing your own uniqueness, freely offering your gifts to the world. That’s why being deeply selfish is the most generous thing you could possibly do. Serving others by serving your own deepest needs.

How? Get to know your self intimately, and hone in on your center. It’s not an easy journey, and it’s a matter of choice. I’m available in case you’d like some help with that.