Living Wholeheartedly
November 21st, 2010
I learned so many amazing things at the Life Beyond Cancer retreat this past weekend. I can’t wait to tell you about it all.
The first thing I have to share is Brené Brown‘s TED talk. She came and spoke with us last night and it was wonderful. Her research is about shame and its relationship to vulnerability. She uses her research –– thousands of interviews with people about these subjects –– and uses it to think about what it means to live wholeheartedly. She talks about compassion and connection and belonging.
She talks about the valuable of vulnerability, the ways that our culture discourages us from learning to be vulnerable. This was particularly powerful at LBC, since she was speaking to a roomful of cancer survivors. If anybody knows how difficult and important it is to be vulnerable, it was us.
Please take 20 minutes to watch this video. She is a great speaker. As she says, a researcher-storyteller.
Here is a link to her book. Let’s read and discuss at some later date. Maybe a twitter book chat?
I can’t wait to hear what you think.
This entry was posted on Sunday, November 21st, 2010 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Survivorship, Treatment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
LOVE. This was fabulous. I agree with everything she said, and I push it out a little further (she just touched on this at the end): by teaching our children how to handle disappointment and recover from shame, that both are inevitable but that they are worthy of handling and recovering from both, we increase their feelings of worthiness and their ability to be vulnerable but survive.
LOVE it. Thank you so much for sharing – wish I could have been there!
The Carcinista
maybe next year, sarah? you would have fit right in!
Thrilled to have met you this weekend!
right back at you! we WILL keep in touch.
thank you so much for this. I am in love for the first time in my life. I am 45 years old and it’s absolutely frightening to me. To be vulnerable is excruciating at times and I struggle daily with it but I have sworn to myself that I will not let the fear of being vulnerable send me packing.
This is my first time here but not my last.
You are an inspiration and thank you for posting this. I will sleep a bit better tonight, to be sure.
that’s wonderful! good luck. as they say, better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.