Learning to be Gentle
From the beginning of this nomadic journey, from before the beginning, my guides, advisors, and coaches encouraged, “Be gentle with yourself.” Every friend watching me make demand after demand on myself admonished, “Be gentle with yourself.” Strangers new to meet me and observe the way I treat myself advised, “Be gentle with yourself.”
“Be gentle with yourself.” What does that even mean?
Kind of like breathing, I thought I was. I thought I was breathing. I thought I was being gentle. I thought I was taking time. I thought I was being kind and patient and granting myself grace and all the things I’ve been told to do as I heal and readjust and extricate toxicity from without and within. I am breathing, dammit!
This foray into nomad life came at a breaking point in my life. The stress of operating under extreme workaholism, exponentially multiplied over the years of COVID-imposed isolation, compounded by the anguish over losing my beloved dog, my loyal sidekick through thick and thin, this near-lethal brew shoved me out over a ledge. I never dealt with any of the underlying emotions, least of all the anxiety. I just leapt into the abyss, burning my life to ash behind me, virtually eliminating any ability to return. I mean, I certainly made sure not to burn any professional bridges, but I gave and threw away years of accumulated convenience to be able to fit my worldly possessions into two bags.
All I accomplished was to replace the extreme stress of my known reality with the extreme stress of the unknown, heavily seasoned with a hearty self-belittling every time I found myself missing a creature comfort I once had in my pleasant home. All without bothering to educate myself on how to best live this kind of life before launching into it. People watching from the outside called me brave. I wondered what they were seeing that I was not. This wasn’t brave. This was idiocy. Who trashes what was working, what was normal, what was putting money in the bank, in favor of this lunatic’s errand around the globe?
Gentle? Yeah, not so much.
I’d been approaching healing the same way I’d approached everything in my life for as long as I can remember. Set sights on a goal, beeline it, and let nothing deter or distract from the course. Kinda counterintuitive when talking about healing, huh? I’d compare it to racing around on broken legs instead of sitting still to allow them to mend, but, yeah, I’ve already done that too. So creating space for true healing to actually happen, I would not come out of my frenetic dead-heat sprint long enough to give that a go. And then I berated and belittled myself for making no progress.
When anxiety speaks? Drown it out. Ignore it. Like an abusive parent slapping a child for crying, I shoved my poor anxiety around, dragged it by the collar into everything I wanted to do. The louder it protested, the meaner I got. Months of this. Months of shouting at it to just shut up, sometimes out loud. Months of “just a nip” of alcohol will quiet it, like giving a child a sedative because you don’t want to deal with its needs. Months of battling myself out the door, like wrestling an unruly toddler into a car seat, without bothering to pause to question why it doesn’t want to go or what it might need to persuade it. Months of using brute force to still what can’t be stilled. Months of meanness only compounding the issue and further traumatizing myself.
And yet, even in the face of this self-directed abuse, I did move myself through the paces of my healthy habits. I reminded myself to be grateful. I meditated. I found ways to exercise everywhere I went. I journaled.
Staving off my ever-present companion anxiety at every turn, I’d find myself in a cyclonic whirlwind. Weeks of adhering to healthy habits, feeling grounded and centered. Then an inexplicable kind of panic, sometimes anxiety bobbing to the surface like a miserable cork popping up through my carefully cultivated Zen; more often what I’ve come to realize is a very specific trauma response, a kind of dread in the face of calm, an on-edge existence, holding my breath in anticipation of the impending shitstorm crouching in the background waiting for me to become complacent in the peace so that it can descend and wipe me out. A twisted kind of anticipatory defense mechanism would set off a few days of self-sabotage and self-destruction in increasing cataclysmic fashion. Followed by a few days of inevitable self-loathing for self-destructing. Then I’d pick myself back up, dust myself off, double-down on healthy habits and even initiate a few new habits. Rinse. Repeat. Cyclone.
For months I made light of it all. In public, I told self-deprecating jokes. On my blog, I told humorous anecdotes. In pictures, I grinned in front of backdrops of epic adventures in a new locale every week or so. Poker face. While in private, I shamed myself for every overwhelm-driven, ill-conceived, panicked move I’ve made, every act of self-destruction.
But as I mentioned, one key piece in my cyclone is adherence to healthy habits. And that’s no small feat while attempting to wrangle my anxiety into submission. Healthy habits do lead to healing, even when you trash them and restart and trash them and restart over and over. The thing about healthy habits is as long as you restart them within a reasonable amount of time, you won’t have lost much ground. I didn’t start from ground zero with a blank slate every time I stutter-stepped myself back into what was working. I didn’t lose the entirety of the physical strength I’d built over a year of working out just because I decided to quit my workout for a few days. When I decided to pick it back up, the strength came back in relative short order. Likewise, my meditation practice. I’d painstakingly built from an initial inability to meditate for more than five minutes at a time to actually looking forward to my half-hour or so practice. And after my cycle of self-destruction, I didn’t need to start back at five minutes. I was able to step right back into my half-hour and continue to build.
During those periods of adhering to my habits, I’d find that I’d discount my own efforts even as I was making them, and I’d demand more of myself even as I was practicing. Such as, oh, you worked out for 25 minutes today? You could have done 30. You should do 30, or more. Really should be shooting for an hour by now. Oh, you meditated for an hour today? Yeah, but you’re still using the crutch of guided exercises. You should be able to quiet the mind all on your own by now. Why is it that as fantastic as you feel during meditation, less than half an hour later you’re right back to spinning out?
And of course this self-flogging even while being healthy is exactly what drove me into my cycle of self-abuse, falling away from the healthy and into self-loathing over my myriad failures. Somewhere from the depths of this torturous cycle, I recognized a subtle truth, and finally a shift began.
That damn admonition to be gentle. It continued to be a central theme in all of my reading and research. You fell out of practice? Be gentle. Forgive yourself, grant yourself some grace. You are practicing? Great. Do it gently, don’t make demands on yourself, practice with patience and grace.
I can be pretty dense, but even a broken squirrel can be right once a day, or something like that. Repeat “be gentle” from enough different sources in enough different voices with enough different explanations and examples, and eventually I need to evaluate what “gentle” means, since obviously I am not getting it.
So I didn’t really change anything. I shifted slightly, gently. Instead of making increasing demands on myself, I practiced mindfulness. I made an effort to recognize when I was beginning to slip-slide into berating myself and flipped it. I patiently examined triggers to find their underlying causes and heard them out. I took an extra beat to acknowledge the good I was accomplishing instead of breezing past it. I worked out for 25 minutes today; I am doing good. I meditated for 20 minutes today; I am doing good. I ate a healthy lunch today; I am doing good.
And my old pal anxiety? I quit slapping it around and started listening. Why don’t you want to go out today? Instead of spinning out over what may or may not happen while walking around, let’s just sit here and breathe for a little while. Let’s analyze what triggered you off, and let’s unravel it until it’s not so big and scary.
Three days of being kind and gentle, three days of allowing myself time and space, three days of practicing powerful but simple, simple techniques to identify, allow, and release the cause of my angst. That’s all. Three days of patience, breathing exercises and simple releasing techniques, and now I am sitting calmly in a botanical garden with my laptop, watching turtles swim and iguanas meander and birds flit.
For one fleeting moment, while wandering along, I felt a twinge of the old task-driven me start to pull at me about needing to get moving, hurry, go… Go where? There is no task. There is no urgency. There is me, in nature, breathing slow. And I don’t need to skip it. I don’t need to rush through it and move to the next thing. There is no next thing until I’m ready for there to be a next thing.
Anxiety, soothed and attended to, gratefully laid down and took a much-needed, much-deserved nap.
When I am good and ready to move to the next thing, anxiety may very well rouse and begin to stir. And that will be okay. Because now, instead of slapping it back into a corner and dragging it along for the ride, this time I will patiently take a few slow, deep breaths, face it with the respect it has deserved this entire time, and ask it what it needs to feel better. This time I will listen. I am finally creating space to heal. I am finally learning what it truly means to be gentle.
