Gentleness

What would it be like for you to freak out with dignity? Inhabit wisdom alongside confusion? Be totally committed while welcoming spacious curiosity? In this brief embodied inquiry, we'll explore your relationship to dignity and related concepts. You'll have an opportunity to notice the unspoken rules shaping your inner lexicon, play with paradox, and explore ambiguity.  

What is your relationship with control? Do you tend to fight against unwanted parts of your experience? Does resistance move you forward or hold you back? Let this short self inquiry practice serve as a gentle invitation to get curious about your relationship with control and surrender. 

Getting or being 'centered', is not about inhabiting any particular form or state of mind. It is isn't a location or a destination. And at the same time, it includes all of these things. This short practice invites you to lightly investigate the boundaries of your center. 

Where does your mind go in the in-between spaces?

The second we decide that one way of being is good. Then we know that means that the other ways of being, or another way of being, is bad. There's this this whole drama that unfolds. It's dualistic thinking. It's a constant unfolding. 

How do you know what you're thinking? How do you clarify what you're looking at?How do you know what you see? What it means? What you want and what you fear?

I used to think of compassion, specifically self-compassion, as weakness.Gentleness seemed flaccid. 'Be gentle': It seemed like a consolation prize to offer to someone inept and fragile. I heard it as a veiled insult.Be gentle with yourself. (.....because you can't handle anything more than that, you poor, pitiful thing.)Now I know better.

As you hear, my voice isn't great. I'm coughing a lot, that is just going to be part of what this is. This work is not polished, I'm not polished. This is not edited. Much of it is offered without context or explanation. You might get clips and bits and pieces from before I got sick, and you might get some supporting dialogue around that, or it might just come in without explanation. The intention is to offer the doing of something - the doing of a thing (creating and sharing content) in a way that I believed I simply could not do six months ago. I couldn't do this because I would've refused to do this. Anything approaching this raw, unpolished, offering six months ago was not something I was willing to do.I didn't even know that I wasn't willing. I assumed that I shouldn't be willing. And I missed out on the magic that only happens amidst uncertainty and letting go. 

'Goodbye' expectations...like any fairytale, I'm loathe to let you go. 

This human thing doesn't have to be such a big deal. Especially when it feels like a really big deal.