Posted by Kimberly Rex
A Wish for Tenderness, Courage, and Hope
I found this quote that I saved for the holidays long ago. It feels like a good time to speak again about a wish for tenderness, courage, and hope.
“What is Christmas? It is tenderness for the past, courage for the present, and hope for the future. It is a fervent wish that every cup may overflow with blessings rich and eternal and that every path may lead to peace.”~Agnes M. Pharo
Tenderness for the Past
As the holidays arrive, it is a reminder to look at life through the lens of compassion and tenderness. Even when issues and situations with family members or others feel uneasy, it is through tenderness that we create compassion. It is through compassion that courage arrives. And, from courage from the heart, hope is possible.
Tenderness for the past can serve as a powerful tool to feed your need for support and nurture you in times of challenge and stress. Creating an anchor image of an experience you had that brought you a sense of joy, love, and gratitude is actually a powerful way to feed your need for comfort and joy in the present. Sharing a story of childhood, first date, or memory that connected you to beauty and awe can also feed the needs of others to share in the experience. Listening to others’ stories that contain this same kind of wonder and love feeds you as well.
The innocence of seeing the first snowfall or holiday ornament, the remembrance of playing games with friends, or the wonder of having a first pet can all remind you of the tenderness of feeling brand-new to experiences. The feeling of appreciation for the parts of yourself that were able to take in a new world despite what was happening that felt challenging can build your capacity to give yourself permission to look at the world today in a new way.
Courage for the Present
In the same way, that tenderness feeds you with the memory of kindness and understanding, giving yourself the gift of tenderness and appreciation feeds your entire body-mind-spirit system now. By having compassion for yourself and your experiences, you can move beyond fear to gain the courage to create positive change.
This means, that today, while these parts of you from early life that allowed you to survive and attach to others continue to attempt to serve you, some of that material might not apply or even be appropriate for what is happening in your life today. So, courage is required to work with these earlier parts of your life to motivate your entire being to update your needs in the place you are today.
To be innocent is to be here as if for the first time, with no attachment to the past. Each moment is actually ever new.”~Adyashanti
With the development of your thinking, reasoning, decision-making, and action-taking brain centers on board as an adult, you now have the ability to consider positive change with your global brain. Your early emotional and survival brains that had unresolved trauma do not know the past or future. While you are still hooked to the past well-established limiting patterns, the trauma body lives in trauma time. That is, until you release, heal and create new neural pathways by mobilizing the energy for good. When you unhook that tether to the past by working with what would have made a coherent difference in the past now, you are better able to take care of unmet needs to create positive changes within yourself in the present.
Hope for the Future
Hope shows up through your ability to rely on the healing cycles of nature and nurture. It shows up with the healing of parts within yourself still connected to your earlier experiences. Traumatic experiences are stored in parts of your body-mind-spirit system and can be accessed for the information and energy stores they hold through the Resonance muscle-checking system in Resonance Repatterning.
The right brain also, often holds the key to unlocking the information within through creativity, Seeing the big picture that developed over time even as a little one can benefit your ability to heal. It is through movement, drawing, and singing. writing, visualizing, or any positive and life-enhancing creative act that allows the parts of yourself to connect to the action and decision-making parts of the executive function in your thinking brain to apply the wisdom within toward hope today.
By casting light within, you are better able to see more fully what light is available around you, to see the broad view, and to also rest in the growth and grace of what is happening to you at any moment. It is in this light that you are better able to know that time and space are flexible while shifting and transforming your experiences today from your past life experiences in the process.
With intention, you, nature, others, and the world at large are shifting and changing in ways that might only be able to be seen with the beginner’s mind. Yet it takes courage and hope from the integral parts of ourselves that reason and has empathy for life rejuvenating itself through cycles of dark and light in which we all take part. In this way, the new pathways lead us to greater internal peace that ripples into the world around us.
Self-Care: Holiday Tips for Finding Tenderness, Courage, and Hope Again
Kimberly Rex, MS is an Advanced Resonance Repatterning® practitioner, Person-Centered Expressive Therapist, and Wellness and Well-being Life Coach. She works with people all over the world via Skype, phone, and proxy.
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