The Art of Being Visible: Slowly, gently, peacefully healing the visibility wound

We've done the vision boards, lit the candles, pulled the cards — and still never showed up to the table to play. This episode is for those who are ready to step into the dignity of being seen, while knowing that you don't owe anyone your presence. The visibility wound is one of the most quietly devastating & self-sabotaging things I witness.

Inside this session:
1.Why comfort is not your intuition or an indication of being right — it's just habit, and how mistaking the two keeps you invisible
2. 6 real fears driving the visibility wound — from fear of judgment and being mis-associated to the pain of not being loved as you truly are
3. A gentle, gradual, practical progression for building visibility across body, mind, spirit, and emotions — at your own pace

|

Reference Episodes:

• Episode 35 - When You Can't Believe In Your Own Dreams

▼

🌹 Join the Weekly Delicious Dignity Missives - every week receive exclusive, bite-sized, actionable intuitive insights straight to your inbox.

▼

▼

🌹 Want a free and EASY way to support the show? Please rate or leave a review for this podcast.

Transcript

Dilshad 0:03

This is Delicious Dignity, where we cultivate a self so potent, so clear, so vital, so truthful that our life is all the more luscious for it. Let's call ourselves into being, shall we? Hello, lovely listener. It is so good to be here with you today. For this episode, I really want to start with a picture. I want to paint a picture for you, a scenario. So picture this. You're about to play a high-stakes poker game, and you know that these are high stakes, so you make the prettiest vision board, you light your candles, you place clear quartz crystals, or a mala or a rosary on your third eye, you do a tarot reading, you consult an astrologer, you say some affirmations, you pray to all the deities and all the gods. And then when the time comes for your poker game, you just never show up to the table to actually play. It sounds ridiculous, silly, and almost immature, doesn't it? Yet energetically, this is exactly what we all do when it comes to the visibility wound. We want to win the lottery, but we never buy the ticket. We want a big dream, insert big dream here, but we never really show up for it. And this act of not showing up for something is the visibility wound. It's a form of canceling yourself out of your own life. So now in this episode, what we're gonna do is we're gonna define the visibility wound, we're gonna look into why this has occurred for you, why this occurs for a lot of people, and then of course we're gonna end with the solution or a ritual that you can do in order to slowly, gently, peacefully heal this visibility wound just one small step at a time. Because you know, I feel like this is something a lot of people will not tell you, but I think the visibility wound is so deeply connected to trauma and trauma work that it can really to be seen by another person, to be seen just by yourself, to just be seen period full stop, is so triggering because that's where the trauma is. The trauma only occurred when you were seen. And even for those of us who were neglected and not seen completely, even that there is an act of being seen as something not worthy to be seen. You see what I'm saying? It's the way that life looks back at you that we're really scared of with the visibility wound. How is life gonna look back at me? How are other people gonna look back at me, etc.? And before we go into all those areas I just described, I want to just say to you, you don't owe anyone your presence. You don't owe anybody your visible self. This is not about you showing up because you have to. This is really for those of you who want to be visible, or you can see how your visibility wound hurts you negatively. Well, hurting is negative, but you know what I mean. For those of you who want to be more visible in your relationships, in your business, in your own home, in your own garden, wherever it is, you want to show up to life. It's not just about being visible to other people, it's about showing up to life. And being visible to other people is a part of that. And if you're seeing that you've sort of canceled yourself from life, or you have stopped showing up wherever you normally show up, or you can see how not showing up a particular way has hurt you, this episode is for you. So that being said, we all know that in order to truly live the life that you truly want to live, whether it's with the romantic partner of your dreams, whether it's with your fabulous business, in order to truly live this life, you have to show up for it. There is no other way. Otherwise, we're just sort of waiting for rescue, waiting for someone to notice us, waiting for someone to pull us out of our humdrum. But no one can show up in your own life for you as you. No one can come rescue you in that way, no one's gonna do it for you. So you need to be seen, if no one else but seen by yourself, seen by others, seen by life. And the reason why we sort of cancel ourselves out, there are many reasons, but mostly because we equate comfortable with good, right, and even authentic. We think that when we are comfortable, that is the right thing, that is the most authentic thing. So when we're uncomfortable, we make it wrong. And the one thing that makes us very uncomfortable is being visible. So we tend to run away from it, don't we? But you know what the truth is? The truth is the more visible you are, the more authentic you become. Because now you have, it's almost as if life has become your mirror and you can see it, and you can see yourself in it so much more clearer than if you were in a vacuum. And comfort and being comfortable just means being habitual. It's just a habit. That's all. So discomfort isn't necessarily wrong. It could also mean that you're growing. So I want to tell you that your time is now, my friend. Because there is no such thing as the right time. There is no such thing as, oh, one day I will be ready, and when that day comes, I'll know. There's no such thing as that. There's only the right you that has met life with a full spirit, and that is what creates what we call the right time. And even if there is such a thing as the right time, even if the right time does come along, if it's not the right you, then it will sort of just pass you by, right? Because you're not able to meet it with the same level of matching its own energy to create the right you and the right time. Does that make sense? It's like you almost let it pass you by because you can't meet its energy because you are not the right you when the right time comes along. Your time is now, my friend. We can either listen to our fears and call them truth, or we can rise up and say, I'm a grown adult woman who wants to show up for her life, and that is the truth. You do actually want to show up for your life, don't you? That is the big money truth. Now let's say that you know that you're waiting for some kind of rescue, and you'd like to wait for that rescue, you know, instead of demonizing that, let's just work with it. We'll just call a spade a spade. Let's say that, say it aloud, I'm waiting to be rescued. That's what's preventing me from being visible. I'm just waiting to be rescued in some way. When we acknowledge that, when we just say, I'm waiting to be rescued, we're sort of falling in love with the part of you that feels vulnerable, that feels kind of a little bit tender, if not outright scared by being visible. You're loving yourself through it. So that's one part of the ritual that we will discuss towards the end, but it's about admitting to yourself how vulnerable you feel and how childlike you feel, and how tender and how hesitant you feel when you just say the words, I'm waiting to be rescued by someone, by something outside of me. So let's analyze why we are so uncomfortable with visibility. And before we do this, I want to say how this episode even came about. It came about because I noticed that as I was doing more work with my Instagram account and posting more than I normally do, I realized that I did not want to be visible on camera. I'm very comfortable putting words out there and I'm very comfortable making like words and graphics together, but I'm very uncomfortable with my face and a video of me talking being out there. And at first I thought it's all very acceptable as to why I don't want to be visible. I have a fear of being persecuted, I have a fear of being misunderstood, I have a fear of being projected upon. And that is why I decided that I needed to work on this visibility thing, because it's not so much about posting Instagram reels. I don't need to do that. I don't need to make all these videos just to get attention. I don't really need to do it. But if the reason why I'm not doing it is because I have all this fear, then I need to work on that. So whatever your um your thing is, your Achilles heel is that is making you not show up in your life right now, that is the pathway or that is the method or that is the archway that you will have to walk through so that you can get to the other side of this fear. It's not really so much about the actual thing you're wanting to be visible to, but it's more about that thing being the inspiration to work with your fears. Here are some common reasons why we don't show up. We don't show up, we're afraid of being seen, we don't show up in our life, we don't show up in our relationships, in our career, we sort of hold back, we're hesitant, we're shy, we mince our words, or we don't speak what we really need to say. These are some reasons why. Okay. The first thing is you're afraid of humiliation. You're afraid of being humbled, you're afraid. This kind of goes hand in hand with the fear of being wrong. It's almost as if you're afraid that you're actually an imposter and people will find you out, and therefore you will be humbled, humiliated, mocked for being wrong because how you think and how you see things is just wrong. And you're afraid that people will humiliate you for it. And it goes with the same fear of being mocked. I especially see this, and you you even uh hear it from Marian Woodman, who is one of the most amazing authors on the divine feminine. She talks about how the feminine is often mocked for her thoughts, her values, her beliefs, the way she sees the world, because the world is fundamentally seen through a patriarchal lens. There is this fear of being mocked, which kind of goes hand in hand with the fear of humiliation, but I feel like it's specific to a lot of us who have had a very feminine point of view, or a very loving or compassionate point of view, and we've been mocked for it. We've almost been found to be weak, or we've been found to be too nice because we're just not operating from a patriarchal worldview. A lot of us who love love and who appreciate it for its power, and we love beauty, and we love roses and we love things that are generally considered to be the more receptive or feminine side of life, we're mocked for it. There is a real fear of that. And the truth here is that the reason we don't see enough of it in the world is because everyone else is also feeling like they might be mocked. So we don't see a lot of it. So then we don't do it, and so then there's less of it in the world, and round and round we create the vicious cycle. And then, of course, we are afraid of being persecuted. And this, you know, a lot of literature out there talks about the witch wound. And so many of us women, we have memories of being persecuted as witches. And if we don't have past life memories, we actually have just DNA remembrances of all the women in our DNA, in our ancestry line who have been persecuted just because they were women or because they had a different point of view. Right now we're seeing all over the world women are actively being persecuted, sometimes for just not covering their head. We're afraid of that persecution, so we don't show up. And these are all very real, very understandable fears. The next thing we're afraid of is we're afraid of being wrong. Some of us can often see the counterpoint to our own point. So we're afraid of standing up or standing for something. For example, when I say I stand for the feminine, inside my own mind, I can hear the voices of people saying, feminine is not about gender, stop genderizing, you're rejecting queer people because you're focusing on gender. But what about the masculine side of life? And I can hear that in my mind just because I said I stand for something. So it's almost like I'm made to feel wrong because I stand for something. So we're afraid of being visible for what we stand for, because we're afraid of being considered wrong, or we're afraid we are wrong for it, because we can see the counterpoint to our own argument. Do you see that? It can be extremely crazy making. We have a fear of being misassociated for something. So let me take the same thing. If I say I stand for the feminine, now I see other, usually women, calling plastic surgery Botox fillers as something that the feminine does because that's what the divine feminine is. You know, she's about beauty and she's about freedom to do whatever she wants. And this, quite frankly, nonsense is masking around, masquerading around as freedom and feminism when it has nothing to do with the feminine. Now, of course, we're seeing, now we're seeing that so much of the cosmetic industry was run by pedophiles. But for so long, since I stand for the feminine, I feel like if I'm visible in standing for the feminine, that I will be misunderstood or misassociated for what I truly stand for because of all the other noise that's out there. So that is why sometimes we might not want to be visible because we're afraid of being identified with a particular group of people who also claim the same thing. Like, for example, me with spirituality, I'm really afraid of being associated with the gurus and the whole new age side of the house. Because even though I will talk about the goddess and I will talk about the feminine, I will talk about meditation and spirituality and all these things, I have nothing to do with the new age culture. I'm afraid of being misassociated for that. And I have been misassociated or misrepresented by those groups or being as part of those groups. And I have to constantly say, no, just because I do spiritual work doesn't mean I'm new agey. And I have to make that distinction. Maybe that's why you don't show up, because you're afraid of an existing group co-opting what you value and then being misunderstood for having the same values. The solution to all of this, or a different way to think about this, is you have to stand for what it means for you, to you, what it feels like to you. And that only comes from life experience as you live the things that matter to you. It's also just too painful. It's just too painful when you feel humiliated, mocked, persecuted, you feel wrong, you feel misassociated. And it's painful because what you're sensing is the lack of love. And the lack of love can be extremely painful for us and for a lot of people, especially for people that haven't shut their eyes, shut their ears, shut their mouths. Like for people who are fully awake and fully alive on this planet, the lack of love can feel like a stab in the heart. We want to be loved for who we are. We don't want the hate, the vital, the cruelty that can be thrown at us, especially when it's untrue because it's coming from a place of projection. So a lot of us are just really trying to protect ourselves from the projections of other people because we know that it can turn dark very fast. And these are all very, very real, very valid fears. So if they're all very real and very valid, then how do we get past this, Dilshad? I hear you asking me. And here's the thing: when we're visible, chances are we might get mocked, we might get persecuted, we might be found out to be wrong, we might have to deal with a lot of projections. That's kind of the nature of visibility. However, there are ways to strengthen yourself for that. There are ways to work with it, and there are ways to show up if just only for yourself and for life. What we're trying to do here is just not cancel yourself out of life. Just don't cancel yourself out then. Cancel culture is not just an online thing, it's also an internal thing. We have an inner cancel culture, an inner cancel culture enthusiast inside of us that just wants to cancel our own selves before we have a chance to show up. And that's not good. That just doesn't help us, you know. There comes a time when we want to focus less on protection and more on thriving, less on surviving and more on thriving, less, and it's not because we don't want to protect ourselves and we don't want to consider our survival, it's because we have to get to a point where we've said, I have enough protection. I have enough survival. And this enoughness is what gets us into the thriving part. And visibility, so much of visibility is about thriving, and so much of thriving is about visibility. I know I've said this quote a few times on this podcast, or maybe it was one other time, but do you know that quote by Anais Nin? She says, And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Now that I think about this, this should be our episode's mascot. This this episode's mascot is this quote, let me say it one more time by Anais Nin. And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. If being in your comfort zone has now started to get painful, if being in survival, if being in protection, your self-protection has started to be more painful than change and being visible and being open and coming out into the world, if safety has been reached and you don't need any more, if you feeling the constriction of your extreme self-protection, of your constraints, of all your fears that we just discussed, when that feeling has occurred, then it is time. It is time. Do you know? You know whose voice I just channeled, you know, Rafiki from Lion King and the way he says, it is time. When he's trying to bring Simba to the pride, it is time. That's what I want to pass on to you today. Okay, so the solutions or the rituals that you can do around visibility, what are they? Number one, it's about being visible to yourself, like I said. So if you want to be visible to yourself, and this is something you want to really see yourself, get to know yourself, because otherwise, how can you show up in the world, right? And if you have a good sense of self, it helps you be more situated and more grounded in who you are when you go out into the world. I think that the visibility wound must first start with being visible to yourself. And the way that I would recommend doing it is just sitting in front of the mirror and looking into your own eyes, just for one minute, two minutes a day, however long you want. But I would say just at least one minute a day. Just sit in front of the mirror and look into your eyes. You don't have to do anything, you don't have to say anything, you don't have to say affirmations, you can if you want to. You can say you're lovely, you're gorgeous, or whatever, but for me personally, that doesn't really land. So just gazing into your own eyes for about a minute, and maybe also keeping a soft smile on your lips while you do it. That would just be a simple, sweet practice for you to just look at yourself and be reflected back to. You can also make it a little bit more sweet and cozy and sacred by lighting some candles, lighting a little bit of incense. You can make it a little bit more bold and daring by sitting naked in front of the mirror and looking into your eyes. Remember, this is about slow, gentle, peaceful, and easy, because even though this is not really trauma work per se, it is certainly something that we are working with because we've had trauma, because we can even remember trauma that didn't happen to us necessarily in this life. That is why we go easy, peacefully, and gently in the beginning. Now, the second type of visibility that you might choose to do, this is a little bit different because you can choose what kind of visibility you want to have. Do you want to be visible as a body, as a person? Do you want to be visible for your art? Do you want to be visible in opinions? What exactly do you want to work on? If you want to be visible in body, show up on Zoom with your camera turned on whenever you're on an online meeting, or you can take up a performance art, or you can go to the gym. This is something that I have been working with my visibility wound around is going to the gym and wearing just my sports bra and my gym pants, and just that because I'm I'm really conscious and I don't want to be visible. For my tummy that's become really big because of perimenopause, and I'm actively working on it. But there are parts of my body that, you know, I'm a little bit embarrassed to show and be visible for. So I now go to the gym and I purposely just try to wear a sports bra in my pants. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't, but I at least try. So that's one way I am visible in my body in person. You can also go for a dance class, but this is you being visible as a body to other people and in other places, and you're not sort of hiding or feeling the need to protect yourself. You're just opening up a little bit in some way to be more visible. If you want to be visible for your art, this is one of the most powerful experiences of my life was when I was writing poetry and I decided one day to go to a poetry meetup. And this was in Mountain View, California, and I went to a poetry meetup, and that was the first time I ever shared my poems with another person, another human. And I remember giving my poems to them, fully expecting them to mock me, laugh at me. And every single one of them said how hard-hitting, how incredible my work was, and they wanted me to come back again and give them more hard-hitting poems. And I remember that. And I was so shocked, and it took so much for me to be able to share those poems in the group. And I really honestly thought that maybe they were crap. But after that day, I started to see the value in my own poems. Before it wasn't available to me because the only mirror that I had was the mirror of my own inner critic, reflecting back to me how I was bad, how I was awful, how it was just not good enough or whatever. But until that moment, I didn't have that mirror. So how could I have known the value of my own poems? But now I see the value in them. And even though I don't write much poetry now, it made me confident in my art. So for you, maybe, maybe you go to a poetry slam, maybe you go to a, I don't know, one of those groups of Toastmasters. That's right. Those people who get up and they start talking and they you just get more comfortable being visible in whatever art form you choose. Sometimes there are these uh ecstatic dance groups or events where you just go and you dance with other people. That can also be a way that you're visible in person for your art. Maybe you show a poem to a trusted friend, maybe you show a piece of writing to an editor of a magazine. It's just very small ways that you're just visible for your art. Now, if you want to be visible in your opinions, obviously the easiest way to do that is to share thoughts online. But if sharing a post or a reel is too much for you, you can share an Instagram story instead. And that disappears after 24 hours. And again, we're going slow and steady. If you want to be visible for your opinions, tell your opinion to a close friend or your partner. Maybe you study just a little bit, just two or three minutes of nonviolent communication, and you express your opinion to your partner. And opinions, in a way, are a form of art because they're your art, they're your creativity in the world. So whatever you would do for being visible for your art, you can also be visible in your opinions. And you know, your opinions might actually be the way other people can come closer to you because they see your heart and you can see their heart. You know, another sweet way of doing this? I just thought about this. It's so cute. What you can do is you can leave a review online for a business you really love and state in that review how it helped you, how their product helped you, or how this person helped you. And that way you're being visible for your opinion while at the same time you know that that is helping someone. So it helps you come out in the world a little bit more because it directly calms the part of you that feels like you might be mocked or humiliated or you feel wrong. Because how can you feel wrong for something that you experienced and you're now sharing, and you know that benefits the other person too? That's another way you can do this. You can also choose to be visible in your emotions, and that can be a really difficult one for a lot of us because not a lot of people can handle emotions. And the way you can do that is by letting yourself cry when you're watching a romantic movie that has a sad ending, or letting yourself be touched by something and not being too quick to wipe away your tears, whether that's in front of someone else or not. It's really about small, simple things that you can do to be visible. This part is my favorite, obviously. I'm biased. Being visible to God or being visible to spirit or the universe. This is my favorite, because it's just so much fun. Now, obviously, the universe sees you, God sees you, we all know this. But if you want to just show up a little bit more, maybe you have a back and forth conversation or channeling session with your own intuition. Maybe, you know, one of the things I used to do? I used to build these little fairy gardens right outside my front door for all the fairies to come. So cute. There were these tiny little chairs, tiny little tables. And it was just about me saying, hello, you're welcome here. Welcome to my home. And I would keep these little fairy gardens right outside my front door. And that was me showing up or being visible to the universe and just saying hello. If you want to be more visible to the universe, you could just find a way to say hello in your own language. For me, it was building fairy gardens or doing one-on-one conversation with my intuition like it's a guest, or with a deity like it's my guest, you know, hello, let's have a conversation. For a while, I also would walk out and I would greet the sun every morning and say, hello, son. Sometimes when I'm on a hike, I'm like, oh, hello, tree. Hello, little one, hello, like I greet everybody. And it's part of nature and it's part of the universe. And so that can be a way you just show up to God or be visible to God or spirit. It's just a way of bringing yourself more into the conversation. You can wake out of when you wake up out of bed and you your feet touch the ground, you maybe throw your hands up and say, hello, I am here, universe. You know? It's just about being more visible and watching yourself being more visible. Please don't push yourself before you're ready. I am not going to post videos of myself on Instagram talking until I'm truly well and ready. In the meantime, I'll just take videos of myself and keep them in my own phone's photo album. But I'm still doing the videos. I'm just not posting them. And that for me is enough for now. So let your effort be enough for now. Don't push yourself to be visible before you're ready because that can actually do a lot of harm. And the last thing I would recommend to you is please go back. And if you've already listened to it, go back and relisten to it. I promise you you'll find something new. Go listen to episode 35, when you can't believe in your own dreams. Because that ritual that I gave you in that episode, you could see it as a ritual that helps you be visible to yourself and your own dreams. And that can really help with visibility too. I'm so happy to have shared this episode with you. Really, truly. Okay, my lovelies, may your dignity be visible to you and to everyone who cares to see you. And may your dignity just be visible. Just be so very, very visible. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I loved making it. Until next time, my lovelies. Bye.