Becoming Vulnerable to Ourselves

Considers the Soul, 9 x 12 in., by Tim Holmes

Metamorphosis in our lives comes as the result of a certain vulnerability. Unless one becomes

vulnerable there can be no change. For me, a major lesson is that one should be open to one's life to the degree that whatever the soul wants should be addressed and honored, precisely so that the body doesn't have to take measures into its own hands!

In Kafka's "Metamorphosis" I feel that the main character, Gregor, is the kind of person that refuses to see the realities that pummel him in his structured life until the morning that opens the story, when he suddenly realizes that changes have come upon him that probably have been building in his unconscious for years: he finds himself suddenly an insect! He perhaps could have adapted more readily to his surrounding realities earlier if he had been more vulnerable to his own soul.

I think such vulnerability always affects every one of our relationships. If we are open and consciously available to our own experience we are more likely to have control as changes need to be made. (We will still engage in projecting our own material into the relationship, but the "Other" that we encounter won't clobber us over the head so much as dance with us.) Of course we can never become one with the other, but laying naked in bed with their image is what that vulnerability feels like as the active person (myself as actor) encounter the receptive Other (as partner to me; either the real person I am engaging or my projection upon that person).

I feel art is almost the only way through which we can reach an understanding of the Other. Even our own raw experience has to be translated (through some kind of creative emotional alchemy which I think of as art, or else through psychotherapy) in order for our minds to "understand" that experience and digest it into material that can transform our conscious lives. This is the the great promise of art and literature!