Being Vulnerable

A few weeks ago I met a fellow blogger for a live interview. We knew each other from the Internet for quite some time and we both thought it could be an interesting idea to meet each other in real life too. I always try to balance my online relationships with real life encounters.

I won’t talk about the interview though, in this post, but rather about something that came up during the interview. At some point, as I was answering questions and opening up to the whole interaction process, my friend told me something surprising:”You are surely opening a lot, Dragos. Aren’t you afraid of being vulnerable?” Nope, I wasn’t. And I gave him a few reasons (you can go ahead and listen to the interview, it’s in Romanian, though).

Part of my answer for being vulnerable was an image that is still circling inside my head: vulnerabilities are like handles. Whenever you open up and leave some spots of your inner being open to the light, you’re offering to the other person a bunch of handles. They can literally get access to you through those handles.

Now stop a little and think about handles. Where do we find handles in the real world? In tools, of course. We interact with our tools through handles.

And here comes the interesting part, the one that keeps spinning this image inside my head: you can either use, or abuse a tool. You can use a knife to cut your way out of the jungle, or you can use it to cut somebody else (or yourself).

Every time you open up to somebody, you create an opportunity. You offer a handle to the other person. You start an interaction. And, of course, you can be either used or abused by the other person.

Vulnerabilities And Abuse

Many people choose to avoid vulnerability after being abused. I also used this strategy. Why open up, if you can get bitten?

And then I realized there are other approaches too. For instance, avoid abusers.  Yes, it may take some time until you realize somebody is trying to abuse you. Yes, you may get hurt in this process. Happens. But in time you’ll get better at identifying those abusers.

And you’ll see how avoiding them, while still maintaining your vulnerability, will create some sort of invisible shield between you and them. And that’s because you are continuing to be genuine, authentic. And when you’re authentic, everything in you is working as it should be. Your intuition. Your capacity to take action. Your senses and your memories.

When you’re disconnected, when you close up, you can’t function properly. You don’t have enough data to feed to your intuition. Not enough info comes to your senses. You’re handicapped by your own decision to block all the entrances.

But as long as you keep yourself open to new experiences, you will realize that being abused is simply not possible anymore. Nobody can’t do anything to you, unless you agree. If you feel you’re abused, you can just move away. Turn your handles to the other side. Or even better, turn your handles to somebody who can really appreciate you and do something nice with you.

Competition versus Connection

A lot of the weakness associated with vulnerability comes from the “competition” approach. This is especially frequent in business or sports. If you are vulnerable AND you are in a competition, than your chances to lose that competition are dramatically increasing. This is why all the businesses are focusing on hiding, masking or eliminating their vulnerabilities. An incredibly huge part of a daily business operation is focused on how to hide your vulnerabilities from your competition.

In all honesty, this is a very good thing to do. If, and only if, you are in a competition.

But when what you’re after is connection, then being vulnerable stops being a liability. It becomes an opportunity. In fact, you can’t even create a connection without being vulnerable. You can’t use a tool without grabbing it first by its handles.

As a general approach, connection is a better place to be than competition. We’re all craving for connection. We’re opening up to our friends, to our loved ones, to people we trust. And we do this because we want to offer our handles to them. We’re telling: “here I am, offering something to you. My love, my support, my knowledge. Use it.” And, most of the time, if the connection is really working, we get back something valuable too. That’s what a connection is, after all, a two way highway.

But if you don’t offer your handles to the world, you’re simply useless. You can’t offer anything. Your lane is blocked, nothing runs on it. You may feel secure, but you’re not contributing. And our real sense of happiness comes from creating, from sharing, from contribution. Not from security.

Security gives us contentment, at best. And as much as we’d want to replace happiness with contentment, deep down we know this is not possible.

***

People are not afraid to be vulnerable, they are afraid not to be abused. And they are right. This is a real risk.

But the other alternative is also real. Believe it or not, your vulnerability may give to the other person the chance to do something beautiful together with you.

And you have no way to know this, until you open up.

How Not To Feed Your Daemons

Everybody has daemons. And I’m not talking about those small, dormant, discrete programs running in the background of your computer (I know a few programmers are reading this blog so I thought to cut any ambiguities from the start). I’m talking about real, active and powerful forces which are acting in a disruptive way.

Sometimes those forces are taking the form of people. Abusive people who are restricting your choices, violent people who are constantly threatening you or simply unknown persons who are abusing you all of a sudden. Sometimes, those forces are inside you. Addictions, compulsions, irrepressible actions which are dragging you down without any opposition from yourself.

Whatever the form, those forces exist. And they play their part in our lives.

Meet Your Daemons

When faced with those forces, some people choose to take the victim position: “Why me? Why am I confronted with these forces? I’m not deserving this. There must be a mistake.” Nope. It isn’t. As unexpected and undeserved as it seems, that situation is there. Playing the victim won’t make it disappear.

Other may choose to take the karma position: “I lived many lives and in some of my lives I did some ugly stuff to somebody else. Now it’s time to pay my debt”. A daemon would then be the way life forces you to pay whatever you own.

Other way to see them are like teachers. They’re here to point you to some very specific areas in your behavior which needs adjustments. It may be that those areas are so hidden, so hard to be perceived by you, that the necessary force to point your head into that direction should be out of proportion. It may be that you’re avoiding to learn some lessons, or you’re ignoring them. Then, disguised as daemons, those forces are pushing you to become more humble, more quiet or more helpful. Somehow.

In my experiences, these positions are following a certain hierarchy. The victim position is the first level, followed by the karma position and then, after you’ve been both a victim and debtor, you can’t find any plausible explanation other than there must be a lesson to learn. I followed this pattern too. First, the victim and the complaining, then the karma part, then the lesson part.

But, and here comes one of the most incredible discoveries I made in the last few months, you can face the same daemons again and again even after you’ve been through all those levels. Yes, you overcame the victim position and you can take it in your face. Yes, you paid your karmic debt, even with interest. And yes, you learned your lesson again and again. And still, you’re facing those unstoppable, ugly and destructive forces.

The truth is there isn’t any logical explanation for their existence. For a while, those victim, karma and teaching explanations are good. They keep you sane under pressure and they give you a little bit of mental comfort. But after you’re above all those levels you realize that, as frightening as it sounds, those daemons are out there  (or inside yourself) for the same reason you are here: they have the right to be. They have their own life. They have their own choices. They have their own existence.

Yes, their temporary role may be to point you to some vulnerabilities in your life, yes, they may act like karma triggers, and yes, they may teach you some tough lessons, but they’re as alive as you are. And I’m talking especially about people here. Because it’s easier to spot that in people. Many daemons are manifesting intermittently through other people (I guess in some areas this is called “to be possessed”) and you can sense them manifesting long after all your lessons have been learned. Those people don’t realize they’re carrying with them other energies. They don’t even know they’re daemons for you. They think they’re doing the “right thing”.

That’s frightening. It really is. But it’s also liberating, in a subtle way.

Because it suddenly puts you in a position where you gotta take action. You gotta make and maintain some boundaries. You gotta protect yourself. You really do, otherwise you’re going to be consumed. You’re going to cease to exist.

What Keeps A Daemon Alive?

At this point, and that would be the second discovery I made in the last few months, a fundamental question exploded right in my face. If daemons are alive and have their own existence, what keeps them alive? They’re part of this universe so they must obey to the same rules. In order to be alive and act as they act, they have to feed themselves with something.

If at this point you’re going to think “are we going to see a Twilight trailer now?” you’re wrong. I know the most common icon of a daemon is a vampire, and, to some point, it’s a correct image of a daemon. But the fact that you must feed a vampire somehow is the only resemblance with what I call daemons. The rest is just literature, movies and gibberish. So please, don’t read away if you’ve been drawn here by a vampire-like vibe in this article. Because if there is one, it’s completely unintentional.

Back to my question, after a few weeks of playing back and forth with it, the answer emerged. Clear and elegant. Simple and surprising at the same time. Because I realized the correct question was not “what keeps a daemon alive”, but “who keeps a daemon alive”. And if you look at it this way, the answer is obvious: YOU. The daemon is fed by you.

To be more precise, by your reactions. Let’s try some examples here.

Suppose you’re the victim of an abusive partner. He or she may abuse your time, your affection, your body or your money. Whatever the object of their abuse, they keep doing it for as long as you

1. allow them to connect with you
2. react to those interactions, releasing some energy

So first you must accept to play that game and second, you gotta allow them to make an impact. Be sad, or frustrated or angry. These are the energies that are actually feeding the daemon inside your partner. The more you release them, the more he or she will continue to do what it does to you.

In a magic and almost epiphanic way, I witnessed this a number of times in my life. Never been able to put my finger on it, so to speak, but looking back (without any anger) I can see it clearly. Every time I avoided connection with some of my daemons and preventing any energy to be released, those daemons disappeared. Interestingly enough, they only disappeared from my life. In their own circle of life, they found other sources of food. And they’re continuing to feed themselves off of other people hate, sadness or anger as we speak.

How Not To Feed A Daemon

So, after making some knots and pulling some strings, after putting together all my experiences with my own personal daemons, I was finally able to share my experience in making a daemon hungry (and eventually making him disappear from your life). It’s not a manual. It’s just sharing my personal experience.

1. Identify The Daemon

That’s the toughest part and it takes some time to master it. Because, as I said, those daemons are not manifesting 100% of the time. Or if they are, we’re talking about icons of destruction like Hitler or Stalin. Most of the time, these daemons are taking the form of repeated behavior, habits or approaches from some people around you. The closest the people, the easiest to identify those groups of actions.

In other terms, this would be the stage in which you’re trying to assess what exactly is making you an abused person in that relationship. It’s something like: “well, my partner doesn’t have a job, so I have to work for both, but at the same time my partner doesn’t really do anything to get a job”. You may be in love with that partner, but the fact that he or she is putting you on an abused position (being the only support of your common life) may be the sign of a daemon manifesting. That would be the “I’m living off of your resources because I’m too lazy/scared/negligent to create my own resources” daemon.

Another example is when other people are questioning (or even destroying) your accomplishments. Again, they may be “normal” people but they’re constantly trashing your life, your successes, your breakthroughs. This would be the “I’m minimizing your life because that makes me feel better” daemon. In this case, it may be that your success is so visible that it scares other people out. Doesn’t really matter that you’re not intending to scare them, they’re just scared and they’re allowing to that daemon to manifest.

2. Assess Your Behavior

If you’re sure that you identified the correct daemon, it’s time to pass it through the 3 levels test, the victim, the karma and the lesson.

But first, try to see if that’s a real situation. Most of the time, the daemons are pointing to real life situations, stuff that you’re currently doing, or that you’ve done in the past. They’re able to track you down because you’re leaving a visible trail. Try to see if you’re really abused or it’s just your imagination. It takes a lot of time to clear all the potential confusions, but it’s an important step in making your daemon hungry. Because if they’re referring to a real life situation and you didn’t take care of that, they’ll have all the rights to come back and hunt you again and again. It’s like raising a flag: “hey, I’m an egotistic bastard, come and hunt me”.

But if you’re 100% sure that you’re innocent, go through the 3 levels test.

First, the victim. If people are abusing you, get rid of the victim behavior. Yes, they may shout at you. Yes, they may throw ugly words at you or do painful stuff. Stop questioning “why me?” because this won’t go anywhere. Take it right in your face. And move on.

Second, the karma. Do you feel like you deserve this, in a subtle and reconciling way? Do you feel like you’re actually owning something to somebody? If the answer is yes, pay your debt. But don’t get too comfortable paying debts. Any debt is limited in scope.

Third, the lesson. Can you see the process from the outside? Can you see what triggers the daemon and what validates his approach? If yes, it means you learned your lesson. And if the daemon still comes after you, then it’s because you still throw some food at him.

3. Avoid Contact

Ignorance is highly underrated. I wrote it before and I will write it again: the art of ignorance should be taught in schools. The first and fundamental step that you must take in order to get rid of your daemons for good: avoid contact. But it’s also the most difficult to take and here’s why: daemons are not manifesting 100% through people, as I already said, it’s just parts of the people which are under that control. So the most common reaction is to avoid the person altogether. Which will not work as expected. You’re throwing the baby with the bath water, as they say.

You gotta learn to ignore only the daemon part. And that’s the hardest one because you’re dealing with a person as a whole, not with a few discrete parts. It’s difficult to make them understand that you created new boundaries. But that you’re still willing to engage with them in interaction as persons. It’s difficult for you to do it and it’s confusing for them. But it’s fundamental.

At this point, the daemon will start to worry. Without an outlet for his traditional actions, it will start to act erratically, making the person who are hosting it even more confused, unsure and vulnerable. It’s sad to witness this from a distance but I suppose it’s also a necessary healing process. Usually, it can ends in only two ways: either the daemon finds himself another outlet, either the person itself gets rid of the daemon. The last one being the most uncommon.

4. Re-channel Energies

But what makes this contact avoidance even harder is that you’re not living in a world composed only by two entities: you and the other person. You’re living in world made by thousands of connections, many of them common between the two of you. So, you may try to avoid the direct contact with that person, but their energies may reach you through other persons. For instance, you may have common friends or partners. Or, and this case is excruciatingly painful: you have a child together. That child will become the innocent carrier of those daemonic energies and start to move them back and forth between you two without even knowing it.

So, what can you do when you avoid contact with the parts you’re not willing to deal with anymore, but you still get those abusing energies? The normal answer is sadness, frustration or anger. Those emotions are pure energy. And that energy will get back in the subtle field of energies, feeding the daemon as he or she expects. So, avoiding contact is not enough. The only chance to make the daemon go away for good is to re-channel those energies. Not reacting is impossible. That will be the equivalent of being dead.

But as you face the abuse through other messengers and identify its source, you can choose how to react. You can re-channel your responses. Instead of anger, choose physical exercise. Instead of sadness, choose joy and laughter. Instead of frustration, choose party. Yes, you reacted. But your reaction was on a different frequency. The daemon couldn’t get it. They’re fed with sadness, anger and frustration and if you choose something different, it means you’re actually condemning them to starvation.

A Hungry Daemon Is A Weak Daemon

But it’s also a furious one. A daemon ready to do anything to get a little bit of energy from you. So, the weaker your daemons are getting, the more desperate their actions to re-connect with their preferred source of food will be. Keep that in mind whenever you’re ready to think: “starving a daemon it’s not a good strategy”. It’s actually proof that what you’re doing is getting results and the daemons are becoming really, really hungry.

***

So, daemons are real. They’re feeding with our anger, frustration and sadness and they’re playing only the game of abuse. Most of the time, they’re pointing to our real flaws, our real mistakes, our real stupid steps. Most of the time, they’re just a finger pointed to our own problems.

But, once you solved your problems, you realize they’re as real as you are and they have this habit of getting addicted to you. Yes, you may have been played the victim, yes, you may have had some karmic debt, yes, you may have to learn a hard lesson, but after you’ve been through all these, after you solved your own problems, it’s time to stop. It’s time to kill your own daemons by starvation.

And then move on.

Flashes

I lived in communism for 19 years. It was an interesting time. Seeing it from now makes it a little bit different, as in a lesson we had to learn, but at that time, being there and living it was pretty nasty.

One of the things that were pretty common during communism was poverty. The vast majority of people was poor. And poverty created some of the most unbelievable behaviors in human beings.

Helping Flashes

For instance, in order to make money, the Police started to put cars with radar control devices in the most unexpected places. The reason was not to make you slow down while you were driving, but to actually “get you”. The radar control cars were actually hidden behind the trees, placed right after a road curve or behind other similar cars on the side road. Everything  they could do in order to  disguise the presence of that car.

No wonder it was very easy to get caught for speeding. In fact, radar controls cars were almost part of the roads in communism. And you know why? It wasn’t the ticket they were supposed to give you, but the bribe the policemen expected. The real reason was not a more fluid and secure traffic, but pocket money for the policemen, who, as everyone else, were poor. Only they had a little bit of tolls to create some pressure. The ticket was really high and nobody risked trouble with the authorities, so they were giving a small bribe and they were free to go. During those times, being caught by the radar control car and bribing the policemen in order to avoid a ticket was normal.

But, you know, even in the worst conditions, people have this ability to adapt. When there is a constraint, and that constraint is really bad – and avoiding the radar control cars was pretty important for every driver – usually you find a way around it. Introducing flashes.

Every time a driver spotted a radar car, after he passed it, started to flash for the drivers coming from the other side of the road. Like this, they were warned. They knew that in a few hundreds of meters, or even kilometers, there was some police car waiting. And they slowed down. Flashing was a fantastic communication tool. It was almost a code. Nobody, even communism, couldn’t do anything against it.

Although the Police knew that all drivers are signaling to each other, they had no way to stop it. So, when they placed a radar car, they wouldn’t keep it in the same place for more than half an hour. And only the first drivers were caught. After a half an hour, for dozens of kilometers behind and ahead the radar car location, every drivers was already warned. So, they have to move to a new location. That was one of the reasons they were so present, they have to move from place to place because they were busted so fast.

Aggressive Flashes

Times changed. 20 years ago communism was replaced by a – more or less savage – capitalism. People started to earn more. Differences appeared. In communism everybody had the same type of car. In capitalism people started to have faster and more powerful cars. But the roads remained the same, narrow and filled with holes.

And another interesting thing happened. The guys with faster cars needed more space. If you had a slower car and another guy, with a faster car was behind you, you had to move away. To give room. To let the other one pass. And the fast drivers used flashes in order to make you aware of that.

I don’t know if this driving habit exists in other countries (from my experience, it isn’t) but in my country was incredibly popular. And still is. On the highway, is not uncommon to see in the rear mirror a fast growing car signaling you with light flashes. Go away. Make room. I am more powerful than you and I’m taking the road.

Although I drive quite a powerful car, I’m not a huge fan of “get away” flashes. On the contrary, I find them almost abusive. It’s prone to accidents and it induces a feeling of competition, totally unnecessary on public roads. To be honest, I kinda dislike the guys who are flashing me to move over.

The Light

As you may already guessed by now, this post isn’t about cars, being them slow or fast. Is not about communism or capitalism either. In fact, this post is about light and the way you use it.

In both cases the drivers were using the same thing: light. In the first case, to help, in the second, to abuse. There was this choice they made each time: first time, to support others, second time, to force and dominate. Each time they used the same tool: light. Each time they used it in the same way: flashing. Only the meaning was different.

There’s nothing inherently bad or good in or around you. You make it good or bad with your choices. You give it meaning. Without you, light is just light, nothing more. It’s you who make it alive and give it a certain quality. You can chose to support others and create, or you can chose to abuse and defeat. The environment is the same for everybody, we’re all acting in the same universe.

There’s no difference between you and other people, except your choices. You have access to the same pool of tools as everyone else. You’re not exceptionally gifted, not humiliatingly deprived by anything but your choices.

Your car may be slower or faster, that’s not the point. The point is how you use your car, what you do along the way. Are you building up something so powerful that can be used by everybody, making the world a better place? You create something so valuable that is easily recognizable by everyone on earth, while enjoying your trip? Or are you rushing faster and faster straight to the end of the journey, forcing everyone else to obey you?

How do you use your light?