The Immense Power Of Gentleness

In this teaching, Geoff Bell-Devaney explains how being gentle with ourselves can help us find greater acceptance and inner peace. He shares how, by being gentle with ourselves, we can also discover self love.

Transcript

There's much power in gentleness,

For when we're gentle and accepting this full spectrum of our emotions,

We're much more effective,

We're fluid,

We're creatively alive,

We're empowered,

We're not lost in resisting,

We're not lost in thinking,

We're not lost in wanting things to be different than they are.

We're gently and compassionately meeting reality and becoming familiar with it and letting it be okay and the more that we do that,

The more we start to settle into this moment and we realize that it's all of these inherently natural experiences like thought and emotion that are not who we are but that because they're so close to us in a very felt-sense way,

We can easily get bossed around by them,

We can get lost in them and it's this practice of meeting these thoughts and emotions with gentleness and compassion that we can find a tremendous strength and we can separate ourselves from these old unconscious ways of feeding the mind,

Of playing these games of thinking and stirring up emotions and we can let go of that whole way of being and we can allow life to arise,

We can meet it and we can stay deeply grounded in this depth of peace that can only be found in the present moment,

A depth of peace that we can only experience by meeting these emotions with gentleness and compassion for when again we're running from these emotions and our thoughts,

We're resisting reality and it's in meeting these emotions and thoughts with compassion and gentleness and courage and an open heart that we can start to accept reality and we can start to accept life,

We can start to walk down this path towards peace instead of this old path of resistance and thinking and living in the past and the future and then this whole depth of peace that can only be found in the present moment starts to unveil itself to us.