What if you could harness the power of vulnerability to ask for what you need or express your emotions without fear of rejection? Small actions — like sharing your feelings or celebrating your own achievements — may seem more daunting than it appears because of emotional vulnerability.
Sometimes, vulnerability can manifest itself in your body’s physical reactions. You may feel your muscles tense or that pit drop in your stomach. You may feel your breathe quicken when you openly share your thoughts, emotions, and needs. You may feel your nervous system freeze, you may feel like you’re unable to speak. You retreat. And in some instances, it may feel like you’re losing a part of yourself.
Being vulnerable is scary. After all, it has the power to change your life.
Listen to this episode “Infinitely Curious” with Katerina Batzaki and learn how unpacking human vulnerability and stepping into uncertainty impacts our day-to-day actions for the better. Listen to Professor Rene Brown on the power of vulnerability and why accepting it, can help build a quality, life-changing relationship with ourselves that could transform fear into belonging. Listen to our exclusive interview with Greek South African artist and filmmaker Penny Siopis on her lifelong historical journey into vulnerability, empathy and shame in both Greece and South Africa. In her 2016 work, the “poetics of vulnerability” Siopis attempts to materialise the feeling through art and film making. Penny Siopis showcased again her vulnerability once more this time in Athens at the National Museum of contemporary art by combining 8mm and 16mm home-movie footage with text and sound, to shape stories about people caught up, often traumatically, in larger political and social upheavals of a very particular time and place. Her films speak to questions far beyond their specific historical origins: colonialism and apartheid, madness and modernity, migration and globalization.
Produced and presented by Katerina Batzaki