Dear friends,
Thank you for opening another Within letter. A click of the ♡ button makes a difference. So does sharing these pieces.
In her book “The Listening Path” author Julia Cameron wrote the beautiful note:
“As we practice listening, we come to sense a benevolent something that touches our consciousness with a feeling of belonging.”
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It is something I have come closer and closer to the more I soften into being.
Being exactly who I am.
Being here.
Being peaceful.
Being true.
Being tender.
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When I immerse myself into the lake and notice the light shifting and glistening, I feel it.
When I practice deep listening to a friend without searching for the next question, or contracting in the space between her tears, I feel it.
When I invite my body to rest in openness and wait for life to arise as it is happening, (rather than reaching for something to make life happen), I feel it.
And in this place, I am reminded: “Oh yes, this is how I want to be—tender.”
It’s an innate feeling, like a remembering: a softness beneath the protective armour.
It’s where the true and beautiful connection with yourself, others and the whole of your life flows out from.
You can teach yourself how to soften, how to listen to silence.
Listen to how the emotions feel inside your body—what the tightness in your jaw, shoulders, and chest is trying to tell you.
Everything about you is tenderness waiting for you to remember.
It is not lost.
But it is, perhaps, buried beneath fragments of life you may not have fully digested.
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“I am made and re-made continually”
—Virginia Woolf
Nearly all of our wounding was created because life happened too fast, too soon and in ways that were too overwhelming for us to process.
We didn’t receive the safe, attuned connection we needed.
We weren’t able to digest everything that happened to us: the emotions, the feelings, the beliefs about ourselves and life.
We didn’t feel accepted for who we were in our entirety.
Being ourselves: soft, delicate, alive, felt unsafe.
So we adapted.
But this left us with undigested life in our bodies: contracted, unprocessed energy—an internal charge called resistance—that blocks our innate sense of presence and triggers a mechanism of trying to reach a destination that feels like home. A charge that causes us to believe we must leave ourselves to reach home.
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It took me many years—many painful journeys travelling the same spiral path— before I realised that it was the feeling of the intense, internal charge that I was attempting to escape from.
When I lost the charge, processed everything I needed to and learned the art of softening back into myself, softening the resistance, I saw that life is not in the distance.
It is rising to meet you in every single moment, every breath, every blink of an eye.
Returning to tenderness
Allow a richer life to touch you in the interval, in the space of softness—no longer waiting, no longer reaching.
Just being.
In this space—between the speed of life, social media, comparison, and fear—you will find out what matters the most to you.
In this space, there is always an invitation to rest in presence:
What would happen if I closed my eyes and placed my hand on my heart for a moment?
What will something in the distance give me on the inside that I don’t already have?
What does joy look like for me in this moment?
The answers lie in the small, embodied actions that will increase your capacity to love yourself and your life more meaningfully, deeply, fully.
What you are looking for is the stillness within yourself. What you are looking for is the discovery that nothing out there can complete you because you are already whole.
Tender Reminder
Allowing yourself to feel all of your feelings without judgement, (without labeling them ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and without the story behind them, in front of them, and around them) is an act of self-love and acceptance.
You are held. The sensations, feelings, inner parts of you are being held.
Give yourself permission to rest in a space where you can begin to notice this.
“Learn silence. And at least with your friends, with your lovers, with your family, with your fellow travelers here, sit in silence sometimes. Don’t go on gossiping, don’t go on talking. Stop talking, and not only on the outside - stop the inner talk. Be in an interval. Just sit, doing nothing, just being presences to each other. And soon you will start finding a new way to communicate. And that is the right way.”
—Osho
May we all come to know this stillness, this right way.
Softly, April x
Going Within
My self-study course Going Within shares all the tools, techniques and creative rituals I undertake on a daily basis to stay aligned with my authentic self, and live a life of clarity, peace and joy.
This is a self-study course with lifetime access to paid subscribers.
"Oh yes, this is how I want to be—tender.” yes!
I can't tell you how much I needed these words this morning, beautiful friend. Thank you xo