I want to tell you a personal story, one of those pivotal moments that had a profound influence on the person I became and the work that I do in the world.
In my senior year at Naropa University, I took a class called “Senior Project Seminar” that spanned both semesters and included the same small group of people for the whole thing. We did SO much deep sharing and connecting work in that year, but the highlight for me was “The Bloodroot Project.” We shut ourselves into one of the large halls on campus for an entire weekend, and we each had 30 minutes to give a presentation that somehow expressed the main themes of our personal growth and development at the time. One woman invited us all to paint her almost-naked body, one man led us through improv comedy/theater games that landed us all in tears, in a pile, holding one another in the center of the room. It was immensely beautiful to be allowed so intimately into one another’s inner lives.
I had the hardest time figuring out what I was going to do, and it didn’t really come all the way together until the last minute. In an earlier semester, in a class called Gestalt Psychology, I had my first experience with eye gazing. I sat across from a classmate and looked into their eyes without saying a word. It was only a moment later that tears were streaming down my face as I recognized just how deeply afraid I was of their criticism and judgment, just how hard I was trying to keep myself safe and be liked, and especially, how ashamed I felt, how convinced I was that there was something wrong with me, and how terrified I was that they would see it.
So the only thing I could think of as I contemplated my Bloodroot Presentation was that there was so much I wanted to say to each person in my class, so many parts of myself and my experience that I was hiding from them out of fear, so many ways in which I was performing, trying to control what they thought and felt about me. The word “genuine” had been haunting me that whole year because I had realized that I wasn’t - and it was the first time I was really understanding the difference between my “genuine” self and the self I had constructed to try to avoid rejection and earn love.
So I wrote each and every classmate a letter where I poured out to them all of my fears, my longings, the ways I compared myself to them, the stories I told myself about them, the ways I performed for them, the love I was trying to get from them, what they meant to me, and on and on. This was well before Brené Brown made vulnerability cool and it felt like I was disemboweling myself. I bought a huge pile of red and pink card stock paper and cut big hearts out of them. I folded up my handwritten letters, sandwiched them between two hearts, and used pink and red embroidery floss to sew them up.
The heart-shaped letters were all I had on the morning of my Bloodroot Presentation and I had no idea what I was going to do with them. But when I got into the hall, I noticed a huge pile of gomdens in the corner (gomdens are firm, rectangular meditation cushions). Immediately I knew what to do. When it was my turn, I asked everyone to leave the hall and I used all of the gomdens to erect a huge, semi-circular wall in the corner of the room. I built a tiny peep hole in the wall so that I could see everyone on the other side, but they could not see me.
When everyone came back in, they sat close to the wall, waiting. One by one, I threw out my heart shaped letters. On the outside, I had only written their names and the phrase, “Read me aloud, please.” Hardly anyone managed to get through their letter without crying - and neither did I. Curled up behind my huge wall, clinging to my giant teddy bear named Cuddles, I felt like I was taking the ugliest, most despicable, most unworthy scum of my being and smearing it all over them, but of course what happened was that everyone saw themselves reflected in my letters and their own hearts opened both to me and to themselves.
When all the letters had been read, I began to dismantle the wall, one gomden at a time. As I did so, memories came rushing back to me from middle school and high school: moments of hateful and hurtful bullying that had caused me to build the wall in the first place. I’d never told anyone what had happened to me when I moved to Nebraska in the 7th grade, or how ugly, worthless, and alone I felt at that time. I spoke many of the memories aloud as I tore down the wall.
When I was about half way through, I picked up steam and started punching and kicking the cushions - and at that point, my classmates all got up, rushed the wall, and helped me tear the rest of it down, which then evolved into a spirited pillow fight. I had never felt so naked or so vulnerable, but I also had never felt so loved or accepted either. It was one of the first times that I remember being loved for my true self as an adult (by someone other than Mom and Dad, that is).
I continue to use the principles of the Heart-Shaped Letters in my life, my relationships, and my work. I discovered that all the stuff I thought made me “wrong” was actually the stuff I had in common - with everyone. I also learned that there is immense power to be found in telling the truth, not the false truth of what I imagine I “know” about others, but the profound, powerful truth of whatever happens to be true within and about ME in this very moment. That voice of inner, authentic truth has become my unfailing compass in all my life’s decisions and relationships.
Below is a list of prompts I've created to guide you should you want to try this out for yourself. The neat thing about the letters is that you don’t have to send them - even just writing them can shift everything for you, and that ripples out into relationship in ways you might not be able to predict. Choose a person/relationship in your life that feels troubled in some way, someone with whom you’re having a hard time connecting. Whether that’s your boss or a colleague, a partner, a friend, a family member or child - it doesn’t matter because this is primarily for you.
A really, really, really important distinction, however, is between false truth and true truth. You can never ultimately know for certain what is going on inside another person. You can’t be the final authority on their thoughts, emotions, intentions, motivations, values, or state of being - at all. When you try to know this or assume you can, you speak false truth - and there isn’t any real power there. But the truth of YOUR experience, your thoughts, emotions, intentions, motivations, values, and so on… there is incredible authority, power, and truth to be found in speaking it bravely, vulnerably, and clearly.
Another important distinction, one that will make your communication both more honest and more powerful, is to describe an actual feeling whenever you use the phrase, "I feel ____." Often times, we say things like, "I feel judged." But "judged" isn't a feeling - it is your speculation about what another person is doing inside their mind. And because of that, it can't be real, powerful truth. Instead, the truth is, simply, "I feel afraid, sad, and angry."
This is a chance to deeply consider how you are really experiencing another person, what you really think and feel, what your true and genuine responses are, what’s actually happening in the relationship between you two, and so on. And it will give you time to more thoughtfully craft your language, which we rarely take the time to do, finding ourselves later in a moment of conflict without knowing how to express what’s true for us.
With heart,
Crystallin
Prompts for Heart Shaped Letters
My vulnerability shows up in our connection as…
I’m wanting…
I’m afraid of…
What I’m hiding/concealing from you is…
What would be really scary for me to reveal to you is…
What I’m protecting myself from is…
I perform in connection with you by…
What I hope you think/feel about me is…
What I think you think/feel about me is…
The story I tell myself about you….
The qualities I attribute to you are...
The kinds of experiences I anticipate having in connection with you are...
The place where my story draws me to you is…
The place where my story pulls me back from you is…
When I believe my own stories, I feel ____, and my impulse is to ____
What I’ve been to hesitant to share, or what I haven’t yet had the words to tell you is…
What our relationship means to me is…
What has me hold back in our connection is…
What’s hard for me in our connection is…
I think the ways we’re similar are…
I think the ways we’re different are…
What I imagine you get about me is…
What I imagine you might not get about me is…
What I imagine I see in you that you don't yet see about yourself is...
What I imagine your blind spot is...
If you could see yourself through my eyes, you’d see…
What would help me be more open and connected with you is…
(Use with caution) The part of myself that I don’t like, that I have a tendency to project onto you is…
I compare myself to you when…
I see my mother in you when...
I see my father in you when...
I see (some important figure from my life) in you when...
