your heartaches and will tell you the miraculous effect that settings like “Mute” and “Cancel subscription” can have.
At the end of the book, you'll be offered a challenge of tenderness to yourself. 31 days of tasks and practicals that will help you to get to know yourself better, dot the i's and cross the t's and find out what you will get out of it.
I am not one for conjuring up castles in the air. I am only going to talk about the things I have tried and lived through myself. For sure, my experiences are not universal and shouldn't be viewed as instructions to live by. Listen to yourself, note when words that you read awaken familiar thoughts (“Oh, it's the same with me!”), but search for your truth yourself. Believe me, you can't miss it, something like a car's parking sensors will start to beep inside you, louder when you get to the core truth.
Ideas are like seeds: if you will feel that what you've just read causes itching and tingling then it means that the seed has fallen on prepared soil and will soon start to sprout. If you like what grows, hug yourself and celebrate. If you don't, then don't take misfortune close to heart. Remember that even if an attempt falls through, it doesn't necessarily mean it was all in vain.
I wrote this book so that you would be able to open it on any page and feel your shoulders start to relax, your breathing become easier and your head gets lighter.
And tenderness towards yourself will fill your body up to the brim like a warm wave.
The second tenderness. Feelings
You bring him a little tenderness in the palm of your hands
Putting them together like a little boat;
He giggles and slaps your hands up from below;
No, it doesn't hurt, why would it, no,
Something like this will not impair;
And yet the tenderness is shattered beyond repair.
My needlecraft teacher at school was a big fan of Louise Hay[3] and instead of explaining to us how to make our rows of stitches straight, she would send us to the fitting-room one by one, to sit in front of the mirror and repeat one hundred times looking at yourself “I love myself”.
We were thirteen. We knew nothing of love and even less of ourselves. So, all the assurances that you just need to “love yourself” – and your belly fat along with pimples will magically disappear and boobs grow larger – seemed senseless and odd.
Many years would pass before I would start to understand at least a little about love. Before I would be able to rid this word of all the superficiality attached to it, of all literary clichés and other people's stories associated with it. Before I would discover what it is like to lose someone, stay all alone, or be the one to leave first. I would yet find out what it is like when your world begins to shrink and starts weighing you down and you begin to feel dead on the inside: how wonderful it is to have you all; what a pity that I don't need any of you.
Many more years would pass before I would begin to understand the concept of self-love, start accepting my own feelings and naming my fears; before I would start saying “I am afraid” when I was, instead of playing a tough-looking heroine with her knees trembling under the table.
Age really makes a lot of things easier
To be precise, it is experience that we accumulate as we age
We understand our parents better when we become parents ourselves and feel the burden of having to take care of our family, especially when the money runs short and a job is nowhere to be seen.
We understand that a child's worldview and the worldview of an adult are two completely different Universes. So, instead of getting stuck in the hurt caused by people from the past and viewing yourself as a victim, it would be more tender to yourself to just accept what never had a chance to happen, to shed tears over what you did not get, mourn what wasn't lived through, and finally close the door on trying to find all those why's. Memory can lie to us and skew the facts. You may keep a grudge against someone who had no intention of hurting you, because “they gave you everything they could, and what wasn't given – that was not available at all”.[4]
In my opinion, it is very important in every person's development, to cut the phrase “I feel so because…” to “I feel so. Period”, and to try to find as many ways as possible to support yourself in the here and now, in the conditions and with the person you live in right now.
Feelings are neither ugly nor wrong
Tenderness towards you begins by giving yourself permission to feel everything you feel, regardless of what other people think, and not breaking those feelings down into good and bad categories.
Elizabeth Gilbert once wrote on her Facebook page[5] that if we are feeling joy then it is truthful and real to us, same as our sadness, same as our love for somebody. No one will win if we try to convince ourselves that we're feeling something different. There is no better way to become whole than to live your own truth. By choosing less, we will be choosing something unfit for ourselves.
If you are feeling sadness then that's what it is for the moment, and there's no good in denying it.
You have a reason to feel the way you do: maybe something has upset you, maybe you have lost something (money, relationships, a possession, inspiration, your weekend plans, the love of your life), and you need to live through that loss, grieve and adapt to a change.
Grieving does not mean wearing black, inconsolably sobbing, and never leaving the room. To grieve means allowing yourself to acknowledge your loss. There's no way of knowing how long it will take you, but if you try to stop yourself from living through it, then it will definitely take longer than it otherwise would.
If this were the case, tenderness to yourself would mean reconciling yourself to walking around for some time with pockets full of sadness. It will pass when it can. It is okay, it won't kill you and for certain will not make you worse.
With that in mind, try not to lure yourself into “worrying for the sake of worrying” – in other words, panicking about whether we're all right just because we felt the “wrong reaction” to something: maybe we got jealous, glad of a friend's bad luck, upset or just sad and started whining – as is the current trend – rather than being proactive.
We are sad when we find ourselves unable to spread “positive vibes” the whole time. We are pained to admit that there are things that will always trigger us, which means that we will always react in the “wrong” way, not as we would wish to react, but rather coming from our personal well-being and whatever strength we have at that moment. Just so we're not reduced to tears on the spot.
This is a reality, so please breathe in and out and come back to yourself as soon as you sense you are starting to feel worried about the “appropriateness” of your feelings. You are all right, your worries are on a par with the moment. You do not have to be ashamed of them and try to feel different.
It's not scary to feel hate even once for your loved one – It's scary to not allow yourself to feel anything towards him except for love.
Feelings are always about “now”, and not about character. If you are feeling angry, it does not say anything about the kind of person you are but it might say a lot about what is going on. Perhaps, someone is breaking into your personal boundaries or denigrating something dear to your heart. Or maybe you feel overworked and your body has switched into red-alert mode, perceiving everything within your sight as a threat.
The same goes for fear. If you're afraid, it doesn't mean that you're a coward. Your feelings just overrule your thought process and you feel threatened before you can explain what is going on. There is a good saying for it: if something feels wrong, then it probably is.
If you're hungry, exhausted, or tired, don't expect Buddha-like calmness from yourself when you come across mess that your children have made. Your anger