Rebuilding Up Tender Emotional Foundations

Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures.
~ John F. Kennedy

Tenderness is a type of peace; an agape (selfless love of one person for another that is spiritual in nature) love and being charitable and is, as well, a sacrificial love.  In today's world, we find so much of global destruction of peace and agape love.  We have gone from Mememememememe to factions of Usususususus against Themthemthemthem.  How do we rebuild the kind of love the world is lacking now?  How did we get this far into separations of every kind?

Those of us who are mothers, have known, or not known, that most tender of moments of glimpsing our newly birthed child with the deepest kind of tender love ever found on earth.  Those of us, who have found our twin star/soulmate, know tenderness that comes that is beyond earthly affections.  I found how wide and deep is that kind of love when I was first found by my maternal family and now my paternal family.  I know that blood runs strong and DNA has a draw we cannot fathom unless it happens to us.  A sick child can have our heart and soul rush to it in tender nurturing hopes and dreams and wishes.  There are so many reasons for agape, for the tenderness that softens our minds and hearts and spirit.

When we are out of balance, and Ego steps in, we can be moved away from compassion, from tenderness, and we feel that immediately.   There are feelings of shame, of guilt, of unworthiness that we then have to contend with.  It is ugliness and it weighs heavy on us.  It is so easy to turn off tender agape and become hard and unfeeling and our soul longs for return to that tender peace of the feelings that filled you with hope and trust and joy and deep love.  It is much harder to climb out and Ego will tell you not to bother, it is not worth the work, it is easier to shut off, and it would just be easier to walk away from it and let it go.  Ego does not reside where agape resides.  

Tender Agape can be retrieved when we stop reruns of a hurtful incident, in which Ego resides.  It returns when we accept that we can be the/a better person.  Forgiving Self for a human flaw that caused the Ego-centered feelings and realize that everyone is vulnerable to such.  What is most important is that we come to honest search for ways to be the/a better person.  Realize who you really meant to be and how you derailed that in yourself.  It is not going to happen overnight.  It is going to take some deep soul-searching.  The harder you work to be the/a better person, the more Ego is going to try to step in.  Recognize Ego and then get busy and fix yourself.  No one else can do enough forgiving of you for you to feel it to your very marrow.  You have to forgive yourself.  

The second step is to forgive other(s).  Sometimes you have to overlook your trust-wall in order to let go of strong negative feelings towards someone.  And, oh it galls one to do so, sometimes.  But, there is no going forward from an incident without forgiving the other(s), not for them, but for yourself.  Ego will truly shout at you as you find your courage and strength that it takes to forgive some...and not to their face, just simply, from deep inside your sacred space, forgive them and then let it go.  

Somehow, we need to know how to free up emotional space because the world keeps it filled up as it is. As we re-run the incident, we lose authenticity of the event, the specialists say.  Each time it goes through our head and we think of it, our memory changes the event.  I do think this is true.  Spending some time trying to figure out the other person's perspective helps, whether you decide (and, here, you are apt to be either judgmental or tender in the knowing,).  And it is a humbling experience to do this as well and our Ego will fight tooth and nail for us to be right and someone else to be wrong...a personal sense of justice can interfere at this.   In the end, we all have flaws and frailties and we all do things we wish we had not.

Fight the Ego and learn to be tender with self in these ways and this helps to extinguish the effects it has on us.  Building a healthy foundation while life batters at you, is creating a port to hold you during other storms.

©Carol Desjarlais 11.16.19