dear friends,
It’s pretty much impossible to be alive on planet earth today without having read/seen/heard how important it is to develop our ability to persist through rough patches in reaching goals (grit), get back up after life knocks us to the ground (resilience), have a learning disposition (expertise), and work on increasing our power (mental and physical strength). Truth is, these are all are admirable and skillful qualities.
And, yet, these characteristics alone create a fundamentally imbalanced life, like living in a world with all sunshine and no rain. Or all rain and no sunshine.
I’ve spent the last several days sitting next to my dad’s bed in a hospital room at the University of Utah. I’ve seen everyone who works there — nurses, doctors, the palliative care team, physical therapists and cleaning staff — care for my dad in all sorts of ways. And through it all, one critical quality shone through. As I watched each encounter (I’ll spare you the details because I’m a bit squeamish), what became absolutely clear is that being able to act and speak with gentleness is not only a useful skill, but a necessary one. Being gentle, whether in explaining a diagnosis to my elderly father or inserting a catheter, was the only way to get the best result. I suspect everyone who has training in healthcare understands this because medicine and wellness ultimately deal with our humanness at its most fundamental: our bodies are not machines, our minds are not computers, our world is not an AI simulation.
This past week highlighted just how important developing the ability to be gentle is, and yet cultivating gentleness is a radical concept. Our world seems to reward everything but: we vote for politicians who sow seeds of hatred and division, we reward influencers who peddle in righteous indignation and us-versus-them thinking, we give our attention to those who foster fear, violence, aggression and anger.
But I believe that we can create a better life for ourselves, our community, and our planet by cultivating gentleness—toward ourselves, toward others (human, animal and plant alike), and the planet.
At its core, this practice is about learning to sense what gentleness feels like and discerning when it is skillful to put it front and center. In many ways, this is a variation on the traditional Vedanā practice. If you’re unfamiliar with Vedanā, it’s a thousands-year-old meditation practice focused on identifying feeling tones. The basic idea is that all living creatures experience sensations that fall into one of three categories: pleasant, unpleasant and neutral. (If you’re interested in a deep dive, I highly recommend Deeper Mindfulness: The New Way to Rediscover Calm in a Chaotic World by Oxford professors Mark Williams and Danny Penman. It’s a wonderfully engaging book and comes with helpful and doable guided meditations for everyone from beginner to experienced meditator).
So, here’s the practice I rely on in cultivating gentleness in my own life:
(1) Find your gentle triggers. Over the years, I’ve developed a list of things that connect me to a feeling of gentleness: eating homemade popcorn with my grandma while snuggled on her couch, holding a purring kitten, smelling the top of a newborn’s head, babying a pulled hamstring … you get the idea. The only requirement for something to make it on your list is that when you think of it, you automatically feel a sense of warmth and tenderness. You can actually write down your list of gentle triggers (this helped me when I first started), and as you become more familiar with the feeling of gentleness, you’ll find that it gets easier to find your way back to it and summon gentleness when you need it.
(2) Learn to read your internal weather patterns. Have you ever had a day when everything seems to be okay, but you feel lousy? There’s a knot in your stomach or your mind keeps running around in circles about something bad that might possibly happen tomorrow. Or, you wake up one morning and just feel fantastic even though you have one hundred and one challenging things on your to-do list? These are feeling tones, your internal weather patterns. We humans have about as much control over them as we do the weather. That’s okay. Accepting the present moment for what it is, like accepting the weather for what it is – pleasant, unpleasant or neutral – isn’t about blaming ourselves or anyone else. It’s about seeing our world clearly. Skillful living requires honest and accurate assessments of our own internal weather.
(3) Greet the weather with gentleness, whatever that weather may be. We can’t control the weather, but we can meet it with equanimity and dress appropriately. If you put on shorts and a tank top (for the sunny day you want), but it’s snowing outside, there’s a pretty good chance you’re setting yourself up for a difficult day. The same is true when we sense an internal storm or day of glorious sunshine. If you’re feeling grouchy, arguing with the feeling tone, blaming yourself or someone else, or trying to reason yourself out of it is about as effective as wagging your finger at the wind for blowing. But, if you greet the feeling tone with friendly gentleness, as something that simply is, you’ll sense that it’s neither solid nor permanent. Instead of fighting, suppressing or pretending, you’ll intuit your most skillful response. Gentleness opens up space for you to decide whether you need a warm jacket or the lightest, most breathable clothes you own. Being gentle with yourself and the world around you, gives you the wisdom to know whether firmly pushing forward in the face of a setback or taking a pause to reconsider is most appropriate. There aren’t any right or wrong answers, just skillful and unskillful ones.
(4) Stick with it! This is a lifelong practice. Be gentle with yourself every step of the way: whether you get things “right” or you get things “wrong.” The more you practice, the more you will be able to greet everything – even in a hospital room – with gentleness. And with gentleness comes wisdom, ease, and peace.
That’s it for this week. I hope that whatever your weather is, you have your umbrella, sunglasses, or warm coat close at hand…and that you choose the one you need with gentleness.
warmly,
alison
