Keith Mitchell: Exclusive Interview
Keith Mitchell: What I was speaking about at that point, is that you are really a gladiator in this game and your mindset has to be: “I can conquer all, I am the alpha male”. So you are this machine, you are performing, and the next second you are helpless on the ground, that’s such a big difference. I had never been in this position, so I didn’t really know what to do. I had never been hurt and I had never been laid on my back and added to that, I had no feeling, I couldn’t move. Then you think: “What’s wrong with my body? Will I be able to walk?” What came to my mind is: “This is embarrassing, get me out of here”. I saw these movies in my head like “Kill me, I am helpless”.
OMTimes: How does being vulnerable feel to you now?
Keith Mitchell: It feels amazing. First and foremost, vulnerability to me is being open, open to experience. The things that stop us from having the experience or embracing what is truly inside of us and not suppressing it, is to let go and be able to absorb it all. What happens a lot of times through our conditioning is how we have been made to see ourselves and perceive ourselves. We resist the softer stuff because our society has made vulnerability into a weakness, but it’s not, it’s an empowerment. It’s about being open and the only way that we can understand and have empathy is related to being vulnerable, they go hand in hand. You can’t understand empathy without understanding vulnerability. When I am looking at our fellow men, it gives me an inclination of understanding, why there’s a disconnection from men to men, from person to person and from culture to culture. It’s all about the real connections and when I started to grow in my life and peeling the onion, I started to recognize something – My parents for example have been married for 38 years, but the real connection and to be able to speak the truth. I think that is difficult for people, they just don’t do it, like in relationships, whether it’s intimacy, whether it be just the real truth about marriage. We say we love these people in our circles but we give them no information for creating the best opportunity to excel in life, we give them no truth about life.
