The Quiet Power of Gentleness
Lately, I’ve been finding deep solace in making time and space to articulate what feels most needed (at least in my heart) right now. Not because I necessarily know, or even understand, but because writing is both catharsis and a small act of agency. It asks for a kind of mindfulness that stretches my impatience and, in the process, softens me. It’s one of the few places where I have to sit in silence in order to create, and therefore becomes an unexpectedly intimate experiment with the self.
And still, there is almost always resistance. Fear tells me I won’t be able to say what I want in a meaningful and coherent way. But if I can stay with that fear long enough, it begins to loosen its grip, and the words do arrive. More than anything, though, it’s the silence that feels most essential because, as the beautiful Ram Dass reminds us, “the quieter you become, the more you can hear.”
And isn’t that one of silence’s quiet gifts? It creates a pause that offers so much. We hear more and remember deeper. Time dissolves into Presence, and life begins to feel a little more spacious. Mother Teresa wrote that “we need silence in order to touch souls.” There is something elemental about it, like water. Gentle, shaping, smoothing the edges, bringing clarity, and sometimes even resolution. Silence is, in its own way, a form of gentleness and thus the perfect container for our topic today — the quiet power of gentleness.
The great journalist and writer Krista Tippett, in a recent piece written in response to what has unfolded in her hometown of Minneapolis, offered this: “My heart is sore. Your heart is sore. Can this be the common ground between us?” And yet, how do we begin to build that common ground? How do we, as I proposed in last month’s essay, begin to form an antidote to what feels so brutal and often so unnecessary?
We start by returning to gentleness.
Why? Because beneath our defences and beneath our opinions, there is something we all share: tenderness, vulnerability, and the longing to belong. This is our common ground. And to restore it, we must remember love and unlearn fear. We also have to name harshness for what it is. Harsh.
The renowned family therapist and relationship expert Terry Real recently observed that “there is nothing redeeming about harshness. It has no value of any kind… There is nothing you can say with harshness that isn’t better said with soft power.” There is nothing redeeming about harshness. It’s so true, and yet how careless we have become in wielding it.
Even the word harsh is harsh. Say it out loud. It feels dense, vigilant, and contracted, almost like a sneeze. Now say gentle. The word itself asks for a longer breath. It’s slower, more spacious, and reciprocal. It’s coherent and, in many ways, more suited to our bio-spiritual physiology. Gentleness signals safety, while harshness provokes defence. And as A Course in Miracles reminds us, “we create what we defend against.” Violence begets violence, and harshness rarely ends with itself.
I was recently at a talk, and the speaker offered a striking reminder: the universe does not give us what we want, or even what we think we need. The universe gives us what we are. Sit with that for a moment, because it’s a substantial truth. The universe gives us what we are. This is why the Course teaches us that we must learn “to become generous out of self-interest.” And I’ll take it one step further. Learn to become gentle out of self-interest. Not only does it feel so much better, but it’s how we co-regulate our shared nervous system. It’s how we begin to unearth the common ground beneath us.
A dear, wise friend shared a definition with me that I keep coming back to: responsibility is the ability to respond. Not the ability to react, which we are all pretty good at, but the ability to pause and choose. To respond well is to practice the fine art of restraint. It is to think before we speak, to slow down, to choose gentleness over harshness, love over fear, humility over pride. And because the ego speaks first and the ego speaks loudest, we have to cultivate this capacity on purpose. It requires a disciplined mind and is, in my opinion, essential learning — lest we forget that all of life breathes together.
In closing, I’d like to share a teaching often attributed to Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who endured several Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz:
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
In our response lies our growth and our freedom — not only as individuals, but as a collective. A harsh word can contract that space in an instant. It can light a fire instantaneously, which, once ignited, becomes so much harder to contain.
Remember Dr. Real: there is nothing redeeming about harshness. It has no value of any kind. And yet, just because it is valueless does not mean it is harmless. Harshness can humiliate and demean. It can damage and destroy. It can turn tenderness into armour and distance into habit. Left unchecked, it can end marriages, fracture communities, and in its most extreme forms, feed the very conflicts we long to avoid.
So please, dear friends, let us soften our vigilance. Let us return to the pause. Let us remember our common ground. Let us choose the quiet strength of gentleness, again and again. And let us not forget the words of Pema Chödrön: “There is nothing more important on the spiritual path than developing gentleness towards oneself.” And so begin there, gently.