Beauty To Grace

Really Vulnerable

The Strength of a Rose

Many times in our life we feel – I’m feeling stronger in some ways, stronger in myself, but at the same time I feel vulnerable, weaker than other people, and I’m very frightened.

That’s how it is: when you are really vulnerable you feel stronger, not weaker. If you are stronger, you will feel vulnerable. Only a weak person remains closed, out of fear. A strong person is open, open to all: open to death, open to all kinds of winds, open to light and darkness, to the friend and to the foe. A strong man is open, vulnerable, and a vulnerable man is strong. If vulnerability brings the idea of weakness, then it is not vulnerability; you are thinking of weakness as vulnerability. They look alike but they are not. A weak person cannot be vulnerable, that is impossible: the weak cannot afford it. It is a great luxury to be vulnerable.

As your strength grows so will your vulnerability; as your vulnerability grows so will your strength. At the highest peak of strength one is like a child…delicate, like a rose flower. It looks paradoxical but that is how it is. That’s what Lao Tzu means when he says to become waterlike, not rocklike, because water is strong yet vulnerable. The rock looks strong but is weak, that’s why it is closed. It is not fluid. It is afraid: it cannot afford that much risk. So when water and rock come in conflict, logic would say that water will be defeated, but life decides just the opposite.

So just accept it and go with it. It will come to a peak and that peak will be a great experience.

You are not afraid because you are feeling delicate and vulnerable, you are afraid because you are feeling strong – let me point it out to you. This will look strange when I say that you are feeling afraid because you are feeling strong. But when you feel strong, fear arises because now you feel power, and you never know what you will do with the power. You can destroy: you can destroy others, you can destroy yourself. Power is dangerous, it is risky.

People decide to live at the minimum so there is no risk. When you have power there is every risk that you will use it. When you have a sports car which can go two hundred miles per hour, there is risk: one day you will decide to go that fast. The very thing that’s possible becomes a challenge. So people live at a low key because if they know how much they can rise in power, how powerful they can be, then it will be difficult to resist, the temptation will be too much; they would like to go the whole way. Then one does not know what will happen: if you go two hundred miles an hour in a car you never know; hence the fear.

Your fear is not of vulnerability; your fear is of the strength that you are feeling arising. The snake is uncoiling and you don’t know what to do with such power.

Patanjali has written a whole chapter in his Yoga sutras about power, just to help every seeker to walk very carefully in this area, because great power will be available and there will be great danger. Just to warn people, to make them alert, he has written that chapter; it is one fourth of his Yoga Sutras. He has taken great care to describe every possible aspect of power. Why? – because the seeker could be lost; it is better to warn him beforehand.

But with me it is totally different. If the vulnerability grows together with power, there is no fear; if power grows alone without vulnerability, then there is fear, then something can go wrong.

That’s what Patanjali is afraid of, because his Yoga methodology is such that it is against vulnerability. It gives you power but no vulnerability. It makes you stronger and stronger, like steel, but not strong like a rose flower. That is where I differ: my whole work consists in making you strong on one hand and vulnerable on the other hand. They go together; they keep balance, and one need not be afraid. When the balance is lost there is danger, then there is fear.