dear friends,
The power to heal may be one of the most important skills a human living on Planet Earth can have right now. It’s a crowded place, and we’re all interconnected. One person’s unhealed wounds can impact the rest of us pretty quickly. For all of us to thrive, all of us have to heal. As the song by Little Big Town reminds us, happy people don’t cheat, lie, hate or steal. Unhappy people? Well . . . you get the point. We want more happy people.
But.
Life.
If you haven’t been banged up yet, I’m delighted for you. The rest of us have already dealt with messy divorces, professional disappointments, childhood trauma, life-altering violence and tragic death. And then there’s the lighter stuff like self-doubt, anxiety, loneliness and the everyday bumps and bruises that come from being human even during the best of times. The truth is, being human means being hurt. Some of the hurts are minor scratches; you weren’t invited to that party on Saturday night. Some are brutally life changing; your son died by suicide. The test of our character is how we deal with our wounds. The unskillful among us spread the harm and harshness they feel, but do not tend to their own healing. The skillful among us tend to the healing. The most skillful among us tend to their own healing and help others along the way, without harming others and without spreading harshness.
If you’re reading this, I’m guessing that, like me, you’d like to be part of the last group. I can’t pretend that this healing practice is easy for me. I also can’t say that I’m anywhere near “healed.” I can, however, honestly say that learning to embody gentleness has been transformative. The things that used to cause superficial scrapes — you know, the objectively unimportant things like your brother-in-law making a dig about your cooking — just roll off my back because I’ve learned how to hold myself with gentleness. The moderate things, like having a book proposal rejected, sting for far less time because I’ve learned to keep coming back to what is real in the moment. And for the truly big things? I’ve found that the more I practice with the little and moderate stuff, the better prepared I am for the really hard stuff.
Here’s the practice:
(1) Spend a day tending to the little things. By little, I mean tiny, minuscule, infinitesimally small. These are the most superficial of emotional scrapes: the slight sting when your inner mean girl points out that you’re not exactly rocking your look today; the mild letdown when your boss is unenthused by the idea you thought was fantastic; the unpleasant twinge when your partner isn’t paying attention to your latest tale. I’m talking about all those things that hurt a little, but, deep down, we know are not really big deals.
Now that you know what kind of hurt you’re tending to, this is how to tend: Each time you become aware of the hurt, offer it kindness. I actually say to myself, “May I hold this in gentleness.” If you can name the thing specifically, go ahead and say, “May I hold this disappointment/embarrassment/guilt in gentleness.” If you’re not exactly certain what is hurting, only that there is hurting, leave the statement unspecified. The practice works either way. The goal is to meet your own pain with gentle kindness. Don’t worry about the relative importance of your hurt. This is a practice. It’s really not that different from a basketball player practicing free throws in their back yard. You do the thing over and over when the stakes are low so that when the stakes are high, you have the skill.
(2) Notice how you feel. After you spend a day being gentle with your tender hurts, pay attention to how your body feels, and how clear (or not) your mind is. One of the most remarkable discoveries I’ve made is that when I offer the hurt part of me kindness, it relaxes. Sometimes, that’s it. The hurt just heals itself. It’s like that offer to hold the pain in gentleness is a teacher calling on a student frantically waiving their hand in the air. They just want to be acknowledged. The noticing itself is the curative balm.
In my experience, most little wounds are healed in the simple act of acknowledging and offering kindness. What has been an unexpected bonus is that in offering gentleness to my own hurts, I’m able respond to other people’s pain more gently, with more skill, and with more ease. When I’m irritated with myself, it’s very easy to be irritated with others. As I’ve learned to be gentler with myself, I’ve become less prickly overall. The little annoyances just don’t have the impact they once did. It’s a very nice side effect.
(3) If all else fails, set the bar lower. Sometimes the noticing soothes, but does not heal. Pay attention to that, too. Get curious. What stories are swirling in your brain? Do they stoke resentment, righteous indignation or angry self justification? Are you feeling a certain looping quality in your thinking? The same thoughts and emotions repeating over and over? When I find myself here, feeling hurt and stewing in stories, but with enough presence to notice that I’m caught in the pain and the narrative, I set the bar lower. Instead of putting more pressure on myself to heal, I’ll gently put my hand on my heart and say, “It is my intention to heal this. I’ll hold it in gentleness for as long as it needs.” The exact words don’t matter. What does matter is that you acknowledge that your first pass at healing was not 100% successful. Congratulations! You’re human. Most healing comes from repetition. None of us would learn to ride a bike if the first time we fell, we just shrugged and said, “Guess I wasn’t cut out for bike riding.” Don’t just shrug when you still feel the hurt. Gently hold the intention to heal. I promise, you are cut out for healing. It just takes practice.
(4) If you’re feeling it, try the practice with more challenging hurts. If you want a deep dive into mindful healing, you can’t do better than checking out Tara Brach’s work with RAIN: Recognize, Accept, Investigate and Nurture. Here’s the link https://www.tarabrach.com/rain/ The goal may be slightly different, but the more adept you are at practicing RAIN, the more adept you’ll be at this practice. It’s all part of the same larger mindful approach to living.
And that’s it for this week! Be well, be healed, and be powerful.
warmly,
alison
