A couple of years ago a friend of mine sent me a link to Brené Brown’s Tedx talk on 
vulnerability. I was really impressed with her delivery and the gist of the message, but when she reached the end of the talk, I felt like she left me hanging.
She talked about vulnerability and how important it was and how her study of vulnerability had really opened her up and changed her life. But I wanted more clues about how she had gotten there–other than talking to a therapist–and I needed more suggestions on how one could learn to be more vulnerable.
I wanted to call her up and say “let’s talk and can we work together and see if we can come up with some practical ways for people to access their vulnerability?”
I thought about how much my practice of building chi through tai chi, qigong, meditation, feng shui (and doses of other Restore Your Soul practices) had made me internally stronger and more willing to open up and be vulnerable with others.
Before I had enough chi or life force, every time I would get to a certain place of openness and vulnerability with people I would shut down and not go any further.
In relationships, what this looked like was that I would either walk away or push somebody away just at the point where I was about to open up to a new part of myself. I know now that I really disliked the discomfort of being vulnerable.
Overall, this method of push and move on wasn’t really working for me. It left me feeling very lonely. I felt lonely even knowing that I had a lot of people in my life who cared for me and I them.
When I started consciously building up my life force, I finally made the connection between the fear of vulnerability and the feeling of being lonely or separate.
If you remember, our life force energy or chi is stored in our kidneys and so is the emotion of fear. This was done on purpose, as we humans need a little fear to stay alive and avoid danger. It is our internal warning system.
But if we have too much fear, it becomes pathological and it starts to override our need to connect. If we fear for our personal survival too much, the immediate knee jerk tendency is to start to push people away to protect ourselves from danger.
What I learned when building my chi is that when you have more chi, you have stronger kidneys. And when the kidneys are stronger we feel less fear, less need to push people away and therefore less separate or alone.
So many people feel lonely even though they are surrounded by others. I would love for that to change.
I believe that if we give as much effort to our own ‘personal sustainability’ as we do to being ‘green’, we could have a lot less lonely people in our world.
I have seen in the lives of people that I’ve worked with and in my own life that when we manage our own energy and practice building chi, we increase our life force and sustainability in our daily life. I know for me, I am more available for my friends, family and community to share my time, my attention, my energy, and my love.
Join me as I elaborate more on how we can create a sustainable world through the hidden key of managing and building our life force energy or chi at TEDx Grass Valley to be held at The Center of the Arts on December 2, 2012 from 4-9pm
Note: If you can’t make it to “The Hidden Key to Build a Sustainable World,” check back here to watch the video after the event. 
