Finding our way home to our Tender Truth.

Reclaiming our sensitivity, vulnerability and emotional honesty. Quality #2 of The True Self Series.

In todays newsletter we are exploring the quality of Tender Truth. The part of you that is delicate, sensitive, tender and vulnerable.

It is that beautiful place within us that knows how to meet life and ourselves with sensitivity. It has the quality of a flower petal, a lightness, delicate softness and fragrance that softens the heart.

It is the part that says

• “I feel this.”

• “I’m allowed to feel this.”

• “This matters.”

• “This hurts.”

• “This is true for me.”

• “This is what’s real.”

• “I care.”

It is the voice of emotional honesty.

How we feel towards our own suffering, how we tend to our hurt and that of others. Compassion, kindness and care.

The courage to be with what’s real, even when it’s vulnerable. It’s the moment we stop performing or protecting, and let ourselves be touched by life.

Where Sacred Strength defends the boundary, Tender Truth reveals the heart behind it.

It is the part of you that feels everything. Openly. Honestly. It lives in close contact with your truth of your experience.

Often we relate this quality with weakness, and for many of us we learned very early on that to feel this quality is not safe.

We were told:

• You’re too sensitive

• Don’t be so emotional

• Pull yourself together

• Be strong

Or maybe our tenderness was ignored altogether. No one mirrored our emotions, no one sat with us in our truth. No one taught us that feelings were safe, sacred and worthy of attention.

So we learned to swallow our tears, dull our vibrancy, perform strength and distrust our emotions.

We were met with harshness and insensitivity so we hardened. We built armour. We put on masks to hide the tender self, we adapted. We became watchful, instead of attuning to our inner self and our tender needs, we learned to read the room instead.

• How do I need to be to keep myself safe?

• Who do I need to be in order to be loved?

And in so doing, we lost access to one of our most beautiful gifts.

Our capacity to feel and be real .

But this part of us that longs to be seen, known and loved, just as it is, never left. It has been residing quietly in the inner folds of the heart, whispering to you to come closer.

It is the part of you that when touched with kindness, opens to sadness, pain and grief. It is the truth of what we are holding, beneath the veneer. Beneath the masks.

We do so much to avoid our own pain and suffering. And of course we do, pain without support or holding is overwhelming. So we learn to deny, to avoid and distract.

• We shut down our sensitivity

• We minimize or dismiss our pain

• We blame and project on others rather than feel the hurt underneath

• We harden and toughen up to survive

• We invest in the story instead of feeling the feeling

• We over-function, fawn, make others more important

• We act as if we don’t care, when we deeply do

• We deny our needs and override our body’s wisdom

• We turn to anger and hostility to create distance and power

• We rationalise and spiritualise

This is what happens when we’re taught, implicitly or explicitly, that being sensitive is too much, or that our sensitivity is not safe with others.

And if we managed to get out of childhood unscathed, the world around will see to our closing. A world that is largely desensitised from this tenderness.

Collectively we have inherited generations of unprocessed pain. Our modern culture rewards speed over slowness, productivity over presence, performance over truth. Many men are shamed into burying their emotional lives. We are bombarded in our daily lives with stimulation, information, and expectation.

We numb. We have to keep going. Keep moving. Keep producing. We disconnect to survive.

Tenderness, truth, sensitivity and the openness of the True Self doesn’t thrive in that environment. It gets buried, shamed and silenced.

And yet, our sensitivity is the very place through which our truth speaks. Through which the heart speaks.

To reclaim this quality is to soften.

To recognise that this tenderness that we avoid is actually what connects us to our humanity, depth and heart-led truth.

The healing we are seeking begins when we stop abandoning ourselves in the places we were abandoned.

In our ability to meet our true and direct experience, what we feel in the moment. Our longing, our hurt and pain, our grief and sorrow, and stay, without turning away.

This is how we no longer abandon ourselves. This is how we heal the childhood abandonment wounds.

When we stay close to this, we become attuned to the subtle opening and closing of the heart in response to how our sensitivity is received. And the pain we feel when it closes. How we respond to our own needs for this tenderness - from ourselves and others.

We grow to value keeping the heart open.

We are very tender beings, and the heart responds to the most subtle external and internal cues.

This is the act of turning our kindness towards our own suffering, and meeting ourselves. The way we have likely, long done for others. When we stop numbing, denying or distracting, and start listening to what our inner world has to say.

When we turn towards our own heart and say ‘I care’, ‘I’m listening’ and ‘I’m here’.

It requires compassionate attention, honesty about what hurts, a willingness to ‘be with’ ourselves versus turn away, courage to feel the depth of our feelings and emotions, courage and capacity to stay with sensations held in the body, and a gentle attunement to what is real for us.

We orient towards what is true.

Our true self is tender, and it wants to be met and held with presence and that same tenderness.

Reclaiming our tenderness is a radical act.

It is a firm ‘no’ to the ways the world around us wants to deaden our sensitivity, and a ‘yes’ to the call for softness from within. Saying yes to this and no to the other, requires the quality of ‘Sacred Strength’. It is the choice to soften in a world that pushes you to be hard. A choice of courage and commitment to oneself.

Our sensitivity, tenderness and truth are our compass.

It is what brings us close to ourselves, to feel ourselves and others. It is what allows for empathy, care and connection.

When we lose contact with our tenderness, we lose contact with ourselves.
Hardening, shutting down and disconnecting, because caring hurts.

But when we do this, we ultimately hurt ourselves.

The pathway back is to allow the hurt, and the truth that we care.

Allowing ourselves to tremble, cry, sing, write and speak our truth knowing that it deserves to be spoken and that we are listening.

Questions for reflection;

• What happens in your body when you allow yourself to feel something deeply?

• In what ways have you learned to hide, mask, or dismiss your emotional truth?

• How do you respond to your own pain; with judgment, dismissal, or compassion?

• Where do you still perform strength, when what you most need is gentleness?

• Where in your life are you longing to be more honest with yourself or others?

• What would it look like to stop abandoning yourself in your hardest moments?

Please tell me, how did this newsletter move, touch or inspire you? How is your relationship with your Tender Truth?

With love and tenderness,

Maraya Rae Rodostianos

Want to know more about working with me? Book a complimentary 30 minute connection call with me here. It’s super casual and you can ask any questions.

PS. Next in this series is the quality of Inherent Worth; unhooking from performance and perfection, and remembering that your value is not up for debate.