In 2011, with my usual extreme caution, I signed up for 10-day silent meditation retreat in Central Massachusetts. I learned at this meditation retreat that I am completely insane. I knew that, but maybe not as thoroughly.

Anyhow, I learned to sit with all the emotions that came up, continuing to focus on my anchor, and not run out of the room. My meditation teacher drew my attention to the fact that at some point in every 45 minute sit I did want to run out of the room in sheer panic.

If a certain member of my family was alive, I’m sure she would say to me, as she did about every therapy I tried, “And you like that?”

I kind of do. The point of sitting with discomfort is to crack the armor that builds up around our hearts. I learned from the late Donald C Foley that if you live with your heart wide open and you let the people you love know that you love them with a childlike rare openness and vulnerability, when it’s time to go out, intensive care will be filled with the 50 people who all think they are your best friend.

And so I read books like Outrageous Openness and Living with Your Heart Wide Open. The titles should be something about how courage is not about running into fire but about sitting with your own human experience and letting it crack you open to more and more love and more and more light every day of your life no matter how much pain and panic that costs.

I was bullied as a kid, so I long to be badass, and I have cultivated badass, like I have cultivated cool. And while I still enjoy those things, I am more and more aware that strength is about being vulnerable enough to connect, because connection is what saves us from being assholes.

Today I went to the beach and I felt connected to everything: ocean, sand, sky, people, my own body. I felt surrounded by love and not lonely and I realized I’ve always gone to the beach looking for exactly that, but today was the day when I could finally let it in fully.

This is the point in the post where I now make a joke because I have made myself so entirely uncomfortable with all this mushy crap. Apparently, living with your heart wide open means embarrassing yourself over and over again.

I’ll probably get used to it. Or not.