Building Your Foundation of Self: Gentleness, the Healing Salve
The latest from the Self Talk podcast
Self Talk with Rachel Astarte, Episode 135
What you do for yourself, any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself, will…transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.
—Pema Chödrön
Transcript [Edited]
Let’s recap, shall we?
So far in this series on the Foundation of Self, we’ve defined what it means to do inner work and why it’s important to us and our extended communities.
We’ve covered nonjudgment, the lifeblood that runs through our inner work practice.
In the last installment, we talked about awareness—the first tool we use to become conscious of where we are on the journey of our awakened lives and what we might want to shift or change.
We apply nonjudgment to what we find, some of which may be distasteful.
The third and final core principle of the Foundation of Self is Gentleness.
We apply gentleness when these two primary elements of nonjudgment and awareness come together.
What is gentleness?
Gentleness is softness, receptivity, and allowing in action. Society celebrates action, but in the way of doing, not being. Gentleness is the great exhale—the putting down of heavy bags, the picking up of grace.
The origins of the word gentle are fascinating. Gentle has the Proto-Indo-European root gene, which means to give birth or beget. This is where we get the Medieval Latin gens, which refers to race or clan.
Later, in the early 13th century, the word gentile meant to be well-born or of noble rank and family. In modern French, gentile means someone whose general presentation is nice, kind, and friendly.
Here's where it gets interesting.
If you add the suffix -ness (connoting a state of being) to gentle, you get a slightly different meaning, which first arose around the year 1300. Gentle-ness means “inherited nature.”
In the 1610s, gentleness evolved to mean “freedom from harshness or violence.” That’s broadly how we understand the word today.
In the Bible (Galatians 5:22-23), gentleness is described as “the fruit of the Spirit.” This is a reference to the Holy Spirit, but since we hold the divine within us, we can apply it to our individual selves as well.
The fruit of our spirit is what we feast on as we do inner work,
free from harshness or violence.
What does it mean to be gentle with oneself?
Using these definitions, you could come to the answer yourself.
What would it be like to treat yourself without harshness?
What would it be like to feast on the fruit of your spirit?
Here’s a little gentleness exercise
Take a moment to think of one area of your life where you are particularly hard on yourself. Maybe you’re a chronic procrastinator. Or you’re down on yourself for not having the willpower to stop snacking at night.
Now, just for a moment, can you imagine softening your feelings about that aspect or situation?
What comes up as you do that? Do you feel relief? A little anxiety? A lot of anxiety? Maybe there’s a combination of both.
Write a few of those feelings down.
These feelings are the nuggets of gold you’ve been panning for.
What opens you to a clearer way of being with yourself is the gold because those resonant truths in you form your solid foundation of self.
Likewise, what keeps you stuck is the gold because now you know exactly what needs your loving and gentle attention.
How can we be gentle with ourselves?
Some people may bristle at the idea of being gentle with themselves. They may fear they’ll slip into complacency or become lazy.
If we procrastinate, wouldn’t being gentle with ourselves mean we would just keep procrastinating? Or would we give ourselves a pass to eat snacks at night?
Being gentle is not about the topic itself (i.e., procrastination, snacking), it’s about our reaction to it. This is the gold we were talking about.
Back to the exercise…
Return to your list of feelings when you think about being gentle with yourself rather than hard on yourself.
For the feelings of relief, really feel that in your body. Oh, how nice it is to put that weight down and be kinder to myself. Where is it in your body? Lock it in. Create a body memory so you can recognize when you are in alignment with your true self.
For the more anxious feelings, do the same thing. Where are they in your body? Don’t try to change them. Just notice them.
Now turn your attention to the thoughts that arise about being gentle with yourself.
They could look something like this:
Others deserve my gentleness more than I do.
It feels uncomfortable to accept this bad behavior.
I expect more from myself.
I have to be the best at whatever I do.
Here’s your gold: The parts of you that need loving attention. Take each one of those thoughts and hold them tenderly like birds with broken wings.
This is where nonjudgment comes in so powerfully in our inner work.
Take the statement, “Others deserve my gentleness more than I do.”
Man, that should break your heart. By “your heart,” I mean your highest self’s heart. The heart of your pure consciousness Self. The one that knows that, ultimately, there is no separation between others and you. Anything else is just a story. One that comes from childhood wounding.
The true self sees that your individual suffering—whatever happened to make you think you don’t deserve gentleness—needs love to heal.
It takes gentleness to call upon that love. We can’t shame or blame our way into correcting a misalignment.
This is how we become gentle with ourselves.
We see how our life experiences have caused us to create stories that protect us, like “I have to be the best at whatever I do,” because having high expectations means we’re good.
In reality, this harshness causes pain. When we are gentle, we can say, I see that you have been suffering from this story. Let’s change it.
Then “Others deserve my gentleness more than I do” becomes: “Gentleness belongs to all beings, myself included.”
“I have to be the best at whatever I do” becomes: “Whatever I do, I do it fully and consciously. That is my best in that moment.”
Do you hear the difference? Can you feel the difference in your body?
Why is being gentle important?
Let’s look again at the process of being on the awakened path, building our foundation of self. It’s very much the hero’s journey.
Nonjudgment is the magic elixir we carry with us at all times. We know we will encounter some pretty hairy stuff as we look deeply at our lives and see where we are misaligned.
Awareness is the tool we use to cut away the dense overgrowth of persona we’ve developed over the years to survive, and look objectively at our wounded thought patterns, behaviors, and actions.
Gentleness is the salve we apply to the wounds we uncover. We can become aware of an unhelpful thought or belief, and refrain from judging ourselves for that unhelpful thought or belief, but if we don’t apply the salve of gentleness, we don’t heal.
Being gentle with ourselves means wrapping ourselves in a state of grace.
It’s a reminder of our universal connection to Great Spirit, Great Mystery, God, Godhead—The Holy Spirit.
When we give ourselves grace, we heal. But we also strengthen the muscle of awareness of our interconnectedness with all beings.
Just as the opening quote from Pema Chödrön illustrates: “What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.”
Our fully human individual lives, rich with experience, become a vital contribution to collective consciousness.
Be the gentle warrior
Being gentle does not mean being weak. Some of you might remember “Dr. Love” from the 1980s. That was x2 motivational speaker Leo Buscaglia. He really got this idea of gentleness being the opposite of weakness.
Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.
—Leo Buscaglia
With this in mind, I invite you to consider yourself a gentle warrior.
As we know, a warrior fiercely defends the values and virtues by which they live. The sword the gentle warrior wields is tenderness, compassion, and connection.
A study was done in Topeka, Kansas, around 2008 as part of the Peaceful Schools Project. Over 200 children in grades 3-5 participated in a martial arts-based intervention called the Gentle Warrior Program, designed to reduce aggression and bullying.
The boys who participated displayed less aggression and more helpful behavior toward victims of bullying. (No significant results were found for girls, but there could be many reasons we won’t go into here.) Interestingly, the overriding cause for this shift was the practice of empathy. The boys learned self-control and peaceful strategies to resolve conflicts by empathizing with the other students.
Imagine what you could accomplish by showing empathy toward yourself—by being the gentle warrior when in internal conflict, not the shamer or blamer. Think of how far along your awakened path that could take you.
Speaking of the awakened path, what does that mean? When we talk about awakening, what does that have to do with our inner work?
That’s what we’ll cover next time.
Until then, be gentle with yourself.
xo RA
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