The Shyness of Love
...we are shy most especially with the deeper self that lives below the surface
There's a form of shyness where we're willing to move through it; where we see shyness as a kind of invitation. There is also a background, unconscious shyness where we refuse to investigate what might have broken our hearts in a previous epoch of our life…
Shyness is fundamental to human maturation, learning and in the end, self-compassion. It is the hallway of presence and an understanding of this much maligned quality undergirds a really practical understanding of what occurs when we meet with invitations that at first seem beyond us. Shyness is always a diagnostic of the fact that we are in the presence of something that we desire at a very deep level.
Perhaps we have a particular art form that we're good at, an instrument that we have fallen in love with, or a person that we realize is both exciting and a real and possible horizon in our life. There is also the particular shyness we have for our own deeper self. If we take note of the false sense of presence which is manufactured every day on our television or computer screens, we see that most people in the eye of the media have had to manufacture a false, shy-less form of identity which is constantly pretending to have an understanding of everything. If we are in the media in any way, we are in danger of having any shyness beaten out of us by way of this pressure to pretend to know, myself included.
Especially in today's world, shyness is a deeply unfashionable quality: all the more reason then to understand that understanding shyness is a great practical moment for us when we try to step into the next phase of our life; the practical necessities of understanding what we truly care about, what we love in this world beyond our understanding, what we feel we deserve in this life, what we want to pursue, cultivate and build our maturation around.
Look at the way we are shy most especially with the deeper self that lives below the surface, the way we find it difficult to come to terms with what we really care about and how much, underneath it all, we desire what we care about. The refusal to understand this deep sense of care is the root of all drug addictions, anger and self-sabotage.
We do get very shy of our own vulnerable, heartfelt longings and manifestations of our love for a person, an art form, a work, a community, or for the land. As human beings, we can't quite believe how much we care for things, and so a lot of human behaviour, especially, I might say in the masculine psyche at midlife, has to do with covering over the vulnerability of shyness, of creating an armoured personality that won't admit to the vulnerability of something about to occur that we care deeply about and that is going to break us open in a marvellous, but troubling way.
This is the New Year; a time where we make promises and when we often give ourselves a good telling off in the mirror, but how many times have we made false promises that are not connected to a real foundation inside ourselves, or have promised something that is an impossibility as a way of keeping us safe from fulfilling something deeper? Every now and again, we make a promise at New Year that we keep and that transforms our life. These transformative promises have something to do with starting very close in to the way we are not only made, but the way we need a particular thing at a particular threshold in our life – a real foundation we are often shy of identifying.
Often, false promises are made when we have not fully caught up with the present threshold of our maturation; when we are pretending to care about things we used to care about, but that we actually stopped caring about a long time ago. With this realization, we find a need to let go and to catch up with our present desires – to find out which desires have transformed into a different shape in our life. We may no longer be the person who wants that something or someone we once shaped our identity around. It can come as quite a shock – the sense of uncovering a person inside us who wants something completely different, and at this point we are often shy of that person just emerging, who wants something new; we’re often shy of ‘Starting Close In’. However, like Dante in the dark wood, sometimes in the midst of feeling lost, we find the foundation from which we will step into our new life.
The invitation is to the centre of the body – the physical nexus inside us that tries to hold all the outer moving physical emanations that surround an individual human life. There is a part of us that, although it has an imaginative core, takes a very physical form of trying to sit at the centre of whatever pattern we are surrounded by – trying to meet that pattern as fully as it can. We could say the act of maturing is the act of keeping up with that changing, enlarging pattern as we grow into our surprising life. If we're maturing properly, we see further and more deeply; we feel more deeply at each new threshold. There's some diagnostic around joy, far-seeingness and presence which tells us that we're on the right track – we are seated in the body and we're also paying attention to what is around us.
We stop building defences as a form of insulatory shyness. There's a form of shyness where we're willing to move through it; where we see shyness as a kind of invitation. There is also a background, unconscious shyness where we refuse to investigate what might have broken our hearts in a previous epoch of our life – we refuse to feel the vulnerability. So in the very exhortation to ‘Start Close In’, we can be very shy of just turning inward to find out who is actually here now.
If we are willing to move through the shyness and fully inhabit the voice that emerges from us at the very edge of the unknown, we start to overhear ourselves say things we did not know we knew. It is the voice that is in constant conversation with the unknown horizon that marks the next threshold of our self-understanding. From the perspective of our everyday strategic mind, we do not know how we’re going to negotiate our way there, but the deeper consolation lies in the fact that when we are in that conversation, everything begins to make sense.
From that very personal inner sense of presence and even joy we can allow other people to have their joys. In inhabiting our voice, we can allow other people to have their voices. We don't see them as competition to what we have to offer. Why? Because how could anyone replicate the particular, authentic conversation that we have with reality, with the world, or, in grander terms, with the universe, with creation? Who could replicate that? No one. It's impossible. What we hold in our hearts and minds, the constellation of qualities we hold from our inheritance, our growing, our DNA, and the particular experiences and traumas of our lives have never existed since the beginning of time: they create a conversation which has never existed, and never will until the end of time.
Almost always, ‘the step we don’t want to take’ involves some kind of invitation. It's an invitation by itself, but it's also an invitation to an invitation. There is a conversational nature to reality and a real conversation is always a real invitation of some kind of otherness: a state that we are not inhabiting now. It is interesting to think, that when there is no invitation in a conversation, there is almost always no conversation. One of the things we get shy of is both understanding what the new invitation is that we have to respond to, which somehow we know is going to break our heart open and lead us on the path of vulnerability, but then also the way that invitation is going to ask us to make an invitation ourselves to the world in turn, that in some way is going to make the world also vulnerable, or people who inhabit our world vulnerable too.
We're often shy of making real invitations partly because when we make a real invitation, we have to live up to and into it. Other people will respond to our invitation in a larger way than we want them to. This makes us very shy of the power of making a real invitation and therefore of beginning a real conversation. The invitation is just the beginning of a conversation. It puts us into the vulnerability of having our foundational notions about the way things are going to play out changed completely. So much of the way we can be productive and successful in life has to do with making invitations that we’re initially shy of making, partly because we don't know how to make the invitation and partly because we intuit that the invitation is going to lead us to break out of the shell that we built around ourselves, and partly because it's going to bring people into our life who have other notions, plans and ideas than our own.
The central threshold of change is where we finally admit to what we previously did not. 'Admit' means to come to terms with, but it also means to let in. We can be quite shy about cracking the door to see who or what is there and we can be very shy about opening it and asking, ‘Will you come in and sit down and slowly transform my life?’ We can't believe the depth of the invitation that we're feeling. When we fall in love with a person, a work, a place, a possibility, we feel not only a depth of invitation, but a whole horizon of the future opening up. It's often a future we did not feel we could deserve. One of the diagnostics of falling in love is the willingness to feel that we might deserve what we've just begun to invite so shyly into our lives.
—summary of the January 7th session from the January 2024 Three Sundays Series, The Shyness of Love.
Recognizing my fragile
expression of shyness
the curious questioning
nature of myself
facing inward
I hear the spell
the hidden magic
a whole sensibility
The Shyness of Love is a breathing essay Sir, I appreciate your photo as well, it’s really expressive with a lot going on. Geraldine
A profound symphony of words describing the beautiful and uncomfortable journey of daring to discover your true self over and over again. My heart thumped along in resonance. Thank you 🙏