Lifeletter 95: The Power of Gentleness

As soon as we start to force and push, our human nature closes down. When we practice with precision and gentleness, our mind, heart and body remain open. In this openness there is clarity and tenderness. In this openness our deep inner wisdom can reveal itself.

Many people I know, including myself, took up a practice, or some kind of therapy many years ago. We didn’t know it at the time, but what most of us really wanted was escape. We wanted to get away from life—to transcend it, fix it, improve it, make it conform to what we wanted. The last thing we imagined was this way of radical presence: transforming our whole relationship with life.

Now, I hear almost every day, about the despair and hopelessness people struggle with, after so much practice, after working on themselves for so long. As one friend of mine said recently, “Here I am, still crazy, after all these years.”

This doesn’t mean that we are tragically flawed, lacking willpower, or some essential capacity. This is what the mind tells us, but it’s not true. We’ve simply been trying something that doesn’t really work. And when it doesn’t work, we think we need to try harder, instead of considering another way.

There is a turning, a fundamental shift, that only happens when we really get clear. When we realize, deep in our bones, that the old way has not worked. We have to reach this clarity for ourselves, not just in our mind, but deep in the body. No one else can tell me this, I have to reach the end of struggle in my own way, and in my own time.

There is no way of knowing when this shift will happen. Or how. When we finally realize that all of this struggle is not working. Sometimes it comes suddenly, sometimes it’s like a tiny droplet of clarity and ease. Then we begin to live with a growing sense of this other way, this new way, which allows us to be incredibly persistent, but with gentleness. The gentleness that tames the ego, that dissolves the mind.

Gentleness is what happens when I am truly willing to work with myself, just as I am, right in the middle of the messy, untameable reality of my life. Without this gentleness, I will keep struggling, striving, forcing, and pushing. Trying to change myself, trying to fix others.

In the work of real transformation, we start from a different place. From the very beginning, we are tapping into the healing and awakening that happens when we allow everything to be as it is.

By everything, I mean every thought, every feeling, every moment, every person, every situation. If you relax and rest, just for a moment, and let yourself be just as you are—you’ll encounter this gentleness. It’s not the way we usually operate. It’s not how we’ve been trained. It’s not even something we normally consider or value.

This gentleness, this wide-openness, is not the familiar territory of our separate self. If we really embrace this way of being, we start to slip outside the whole egoic framework or agenda. This can feel disconcerting, unfamiliar. And sometimes it is experienced as a profound release.

What happens to me, to my life, when I give up the core of my habitual struggle? When I allow myself to be just as I am? Not passively, not with resignation, but with radical presence?

Why would I take up a practice like this? Why would I leave behind all of the strategies and techniques that I have learned? What the mind doesn’t know, doesn’t even suspect, is that in this space of gentIeness, I start to see everything very clearly. Without any judgement, without the movement to avoid or to change, the precise nature of my conditioning becomes more and more obvious. And that’s when everything starts to change.

So when we rest in presence, and when we inquire, we are engaging in a very different approach to transformation, to evolution, to waking up. Things do change, we change, our life changes, but not in the way we thought it would happen. Real transformation is quite rare. Have you noticed this?

We can accumulate a lot of knowledge, but it’s the precision and clarity of this gentleness that allows that knowledge to transform itself into wisdom, into something we can live, every day of our lives.

This wisdom is like a deer in the forest, quietly waiting, until it’s safe to come out. In this open space we can receive life’s feedback, life’s natural intelligence, without needing to protect and defend ourselves.

In this openness I can begin to hear what is really calling me, what it is that matters to me, more than anything.

What is there beyond knowing that keeps
calling to me?
I can’t turn in any direction
but it’s there. (Mary Oliver)

Just beginning to be like this: gentle, open, vulnerable, present, we are calling into existence a whole new world. A world that unfolds naturally, and unexpectedly, the way a river flows, the way a tree blossoms.

with love