Relentless Gentleness

It may seem funny to pair the word "relentless" with the word "gentleness", but this is what I am working with more and more. I can be a somewhat relentless person - relentless in business (note I did not say ruthless), in personal relationships, in working on/with myself. However, that relentlessness can be quite tiring, has been exhausting, in fact. And so I am learning that my gentleness needs to be as relentless as the more common things associated with relentlessness:
ambition
appetite
striving.

What does relentless gentleness look like?
For me it looks like

1. Holding space in my schedule for resting, protecting time with cats, meditation, exercise.
2. Standing my ground against my own self-hating tendencies, the ones that push me too hard to work.
3. Leveraging the same pushy bits of myself that force me to work, to criticize and instead use those forces to force myself to rest, relax, just hang out.

It's a ground teaching in Vajrayana Buddhism that the place from where our confusion arises is also from where our wisdom is born. This relentlessness in myself is not inherently bad - it's strength, resilience and dedication. How I apply it, on the other hand, changes everything. Learning to direct the need to be committed and clear towards kindness is key; changing the tack of the sail of "get it done" to "make sure I sleep a full nine hours" is tricky but rewarding. And slowly but surely, the strengthened gentleness takes over more easily when the seemingly more powerful self-critic tries to take the reins.

What I Really Really Want

"Hurt Pharmacy Open" Mar Vista, LA January 2013

Around Christmas, I had a series of wonderful conversations with my best friend about what we miss. We both find Christmas - the holidays in general - a lonely time. It's midwinter, dark, and people we love/chosen family, leave town to be with their families of origin. We'd say we miss our families of origin, but spending time with them is never what we hope? expect? it to be. We still feel lonely afterwards, no matter how wonderfully it goes, which sometimes, it actually does.

New Year's Intention

A few years ago, friends of ours introduced us to, or co-invented with us (none of us can seem to recall which happened) a practice of coming up with a single word for the upcoming year, on New Year's Eve. The word, we decided, should have many possible meanings, and not be stated as any kind of affirmation (I will play more in the coming year/I am playing more in the coming year) or resolution (I need to play more in the upcoming year). Instead, it would allow for word play - for exploration, for change in meaning, throughout the year.

The first one Dylan and I chose, and we chose the same, was "consume." We tried to gently explore our food consumption (going on a diet, eventually, but really focusing more on watching/noticing consumption than losing weight, which was a helpful change in perspective), and also financial consumption, consumption of goods, of energy, of social interactions.

Luckily, neither of us developed consumption.

Hidden

At the end, or sometimes in the middle, of each class of writing I teach, I ask the students to consider what in each others' writing they'd like to hear more about. Sometimes they are silly or sweet parts, but often they are "hotspots" - places where the writer touched on something very hot, very potent, and backed off. A place where a writer, where a human, is hiding something.