For most of my life I believed I needed to be tough. “Do the hard thing.” Face fear, beat back despair, fight for things. 

Yet, I now question the merit in all this energy towards armoring and going to battle. I’ve learned that not every battle is meant to be fought. Some are meant to be outgrown or simply ignored. Rarely it seems does aggression need to be met with more aggression. Knowing when to step back itself is power and a sign of wisdom.

And so I find myself asking: can gentleness itself heal? Or put another way, can we heal without it? 

Is this not the greatest purpose or meaning we can have in our lives: to help others heal, and live fully — in their light and divine nature? If we look at gentleness, we can see its core nature is attention, care, love. Gentleness allows us to know another, and understand how best to hold them. How to help them.

Gentleness itself has no force, no knowledge, no insistence. What gentleness does have is the time and patience to embrace vulnerability. When we are seen in our vulnerability, with gentleness, the truth of our own fragility can be known as well as our need for care, our need for another human. Yet in this — in being seen, in having our fragility and our need for others finally known — gentleness becomes its own kind of force, one that elevates care to a higher degree of compassion.

Lama Yeshe — “Be gentle first with yourself – if you wish to be gentle with others.”

Gentleness allows us to “suffer with.” To experience with another what he or she feels, without giving in to it. This compassion opens us up to others’ fear, their grief or suffering. Gentleness, at its best, allows us then to hold that pain, but not keep it. It allows space for us to breathe in what is oppressing others and breathe out love.

Being gentle means understanding others in their precariousness, their weaknesses. To appreciate what they have to give, when they have nothing, apparently, left to give. When we are infused with this tenderness, it means not wanting to add even a drop to suffering, to exclusion, to cruelty. 

Gentleness gives birth to space for a sensitive humanity, for a relation to the other that accepts weakness or even disappointment. Gentleness allows us to engage more deeply with truth. Gentleness invites us to pay attention, to care for the soul of another human. 

This compassion beckons to our responsibility as human beings toward the world around us, toward the beings making up this world and even toward the thoughts we may not ask for, but for which we are ultimately responsible. Gentleness is part of an intimate connection to all.

We are more and more trying to apply intelligence, artificial or otherwise, to “solve our problems.” But gentleness invites us to another order of being. It does not look at us as problems reason can or needs to solve. The consciousness of gentleness is a different order of knowing altogether.

We may be best served to ask: what alters us “for the better,” and what carries us to our hearts’ desire? How were we held at birth, and how do we hope to be held at death? 

With gentleness.

Keep the faith, 

Beth