Hi,
It's Brooks.
It's good to be here with you.
Today we're talking about being tender.
Tender with ourselves.
There's something wonderful about that word.
Tender.
Tenderness.
Something very gentle about it.
When we're tender with ourselves,
We're treating ourselves with a soft kindness.
A soft gentleness.
When we're tender with ourselves,
We appreciate who we are.
We appreciate our existence.
Because when you're tender,
You're very loving.
And tenderness is love.
And when you're tender with yourself,
You love yourself.
It's evidence.
We can be tender with ourselves in a lot of different ways.
How we treat ourselves when we wake up in the morning.
Here I am.
Here's the day.
Here's this day for me.
I'm curious what I'm going to do with the day.
What I'm going to experience.
What I'm going to explore.
Maybe taking a few minutes of just feeling yourself breathe.
Looking around the room.
Noticing your body.
Noticing your thoughts.
There's something very tender in curiosity.
When we're curious,
We're very open.
And openness,
There's a certain lightness.
A gentleness.
Nothing's forced.
So we can be tender with ourselves when we wake up.
Maybe we stretch a bit.
And we get out of bed.
And we enter into our day.
And we can use that tenderness no matter what it is that we're doing during the day.
As we were saying a few days ago,
We were talking about considering ourselves.
Considering ourselves first.
And tenderness is a wonderful way to approach ourselves.
As opposed to pushing,
Forcing,
Making ourselves do something.
In a sense like the whipping to get ourselves to do things.
Any negative comments,
That harshness falls away when we're tender with ourselves.
So take a moment to imagine what it means for you to be tender with yourself.
What would that feel like?
What would that look like?
You can put your hand on your heart if you want while you're doing this.
It's a nice way to connect with the tender part of yourself.
Wouldn't it be nice to bring in some of this tenderness that you're thinking about?
That you're imagining?
When we treat ourselves with tenderness,
We relax.
There's an ease that comes over us.
And we're much more effective in life.
When we're relaxed,
When we're peaceful,
We think a lot more clearly.
We find ourselves less reactive.
And our needs for things,
For a lot of extraneous things goes down.
Because when we treat ourselves with tenderness,
We feel satisfied.
We feel fulfilled.
And we're taken care of.
That ticks us out of the loop.
What I call the desiring loop.
Advertising is constantly telling us that something's wrong with us.
That we're not enough.
And so we have to get this.
Or we have to do this.
Or we have to be this.
Which is the opposite of being tender.
When we're tender with ourselves,
We're saying that we're enough as we are.
And we deserve this soft kindness.
Everyone's going to have their own version of what's tender for them.
And that's why it's good for you to think about,
Well what does that mean for me?
What would tenderness mean for me?
And what ways could I be tender with myself?
And the nice thing about this suggestion is it's a very simple suggestion so it has a way of sinking in past your mind.
And it goes to your heart.
It's like seeds.
Seeds of tenderness planted within you.
And they grow.
And just like if you plant a seed in the ground,
You water it,
And the sun does its job,
And at some point that sprout comes out of the ground.
So we put in these seeds of tenderness within ourselves.
And then we're out and about during the day.
And we spontaneously find ourselves being tender.
Because we're openly considering tenderness.
And you deserve tenderness.
You deserve to be tender with you.
The great thing is you don't have to earn it.
It's not like,
Oh I've done these things and now I can be tender with myself.
It's inherent.
It's inherent in you.
You can use life as an example.
Life is very tender with you.
Life breathes you.
You don't have to think during the day,
Okay I've got to breathe myself.
I've got to take an oxygen and I've got to breathe out.
I've got to breathe in and I've got to breathe out.
Life tenderly breathes us.
And I say tenderly because we don't really notice it.
It happens.
Something very gentle about the breath.
In and out.
In and out.
You could say life is a role model for us to learn how to be tender.
Life tenderly beats our heart.
Tenderly circulates the blood in our body.
Tenderly blinks our eyes.
So we're going to end our talk now.
And I wish you the best with your tenderness.
Take care.
