Dr. Brené Brown is a researcher professor at the University of Houston, Graduate College of Social Work, where she has spent the past ten years studying a concept that she calls Wholeheartedness, posing the questions: How do we engage in our lives from a place of authenticity and worthiness? How do we cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection that we need to embrace our imperfections and to recognize that we are enough -- that we are worthy of love, belonging and joy?
Below is her talk at TEDxHouston on wholeheartedness and vulnerability:
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9 comments:
what if we are not "enough" what if things are reeling and crashing down all around us and there is no stability/balance in sight or hand?
I loved this presentation! Something in the content reminds me of Schopenhauer on compassion, among many things. It also reminds me of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, something I'm going to write on soon.
Again, there are things in this (and in Judith Butler) that also lead us back to the stoics, to Seneca in particular. I also think of ideas of creating a better world and the idea that that world wouldn't be for us...that we don't deserve a better way of living, of dying.
Great Michael! I love where your going with vulnerability. It's a key part of my approach to power and politics. "Power" is too loaded, and too transcendental. What we need is an analysis of vulnerability, which brings it back to bodies and their relationship to other bodies and the ways they armor themselves against those others.
Anon - then better to go out fighting, non? We are "enough" because we are: because there is nothing else beyond us. We are enough because we have to be. We are the limit of ourself and we are all we have to work work, except...
There is the background: a grounding-ness or suchness (tathagata) to reality - the flesh of the real - that always provides coordinates for making one's way: because it encompasses us and is entangled in our every movement, and because it is in us.
This (reality as such) is our home. We are not aliens. There are no aliens in a cosmos or plane of existence that is consistent.
Arran- I like to think the talks bring me a little closer to humility. Humility and empathy - very creaturely states of affection.
I'd like to here more about the connection to the stoics and Seneca.
Hey J, thanks. I think Arran makes a good start in the direction of 'the politics of vulnerability' in the comments to the theorizing vulnerability post below. We should all do some thinking about that issue.
Vulnerably touches on all areas on inquiry especially thinking and trying to design around the notion of "sustainability". To sustain that which is vulnerable requires specific sets of sensibilities, understandings and tools to be put into action on this particular planet.
A full scale analysis of vulnerability is what I am moving towards in my own ontographic researches. Such knowledge can help us build more sustainable and ethical worldspaces.
Here, I think we may hit a difference in our positions at last. Although maybe in the end only one of tone. I prefer not to think in terms of "sustainability". My heuristic remains nihilist, it is already too late. The post-nihilist move is to say, very well...what next? I tend to think of the problem in the way of a man who has a terminal illness but also has a prognosis of months to a year left to live. We need to think in terms of remission and palliative care. What would it mean for our societies to enter remission? What would it mean for us to provide a palliative care of the Earth? These are background questions that lurk for me...ones that I can't quite think.
Those are interesting thoughts Arran. On some level what you say here seems to be decidedly still nihilist. Which is to say that you have no hope at all. The earth is dying and we are already doomed. But, again, this state of mind is very much centered in nihilism. I think the post-nihilist move is integrating an awareness of finitude and entropy and the limits of meaning (acceptance ) and then taking a step beyond the ego-driven pessimism (mourning, depressive stage of grief reaction) into a type of possibilianism, or creative freedom; a will to meaning in the face of cosmic horror. Even the hopeless optimism of Bacon is better than perseverating too long on the abyss of being.
To be clear, by sustainability I don't mean some type of perpetuation of the same stupid human tricks of current social organization, because nothing stays the same and, as you suggest, the time of civilization may be soon at an end. What I am thinking about here is a type of moving equilibrium or sustaining 'anthropological machine' that allows our species to continue to exist and evolve and explore despite the calamity that is being. And I don't think cosmic obliteration/extinction is a certainty. There are no certainties. I think post-nihilism is about taking the opportunity that nihilism affords. It is a yea-saying despite the eternal reoccurrence of death.
A palliative care context can certainly involve plenty of yea-saying. So the patient is dying, does this mean she must remove herself from the world? A woman I know has lived 15 years past her predicted time of death. Today, she is still dying but she's a mental health activist. Palliation isn't identical to a despairing resignation.
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