There is a punishing harshness I want to unpack in the health and wellness world.
I see so many female influencers in this space peddling punishment as virtue and unnecessary harshness as ‘facts.’ I see ‘get-your-shit-together-you-lazy-fuck’ energy being sold as radical responsibility.
Just to be abundantly clear: This is not what we need to heal.
We do not need more punishment, more harshness, more authoritative, hierarchal, disciplinary energy to make ourselves healthy.
If you are overweight, ill, unmotivated, exhausted, acting in ways you are not proud of; more punishment of yourself will never equal real transformation.
It may create a lot of change. You may lose weight through punishment of your body. You may run a marathon by telling yourself harsh words to push through the pain. You may make millions or billions of dollars through a deep hatred of yourself and a desire to make yourself feel worthy.
Punishment can be an entirely effective mechanism for certain action; until it’s not.
Or until it’s just you and your mind on your deathbed and you hate yourself.
Radical responsibility is not dominating your tender, wild, broken, hurting, tired parts into submission. Radical responsibility is being willing to look at those parts. It’s being willing to see them and take stock of where you truly are with neutrality and sobriety.
In my personal life and in my work, I live by the statement: “You cannot transcend what you do not first accept.”
Acceptance is massively misunderstood. For some reason people think acceptance equals saying the thing in question is good and right. That’s not it.
Acceptance is saying what is, IS. That’s it. It’s not a value judgment. It’s neutral.
We are terrible at this as a collective. Before we can make any attempt to truly “solve” a problem, we have to first look at the problem soberly.
We have to see where we actually are and accept it. Only then, can we really move forward in a way that takes the reality into account. This is a big reason why we haven’t actually made any big changes in regards to climate disaster. We can’t actually get in alignment (another way of saying “accept”) with where we are and feel it.
When we get in alignment with where we are and accept what is true about ourselves and our patterns, we can access the despair, the grief, the loss that comes with it.
This is why everyone wants to avoid this step because if we opened and softened to what is truly here, we might actually have to feel pain.
Even the people pedaling punishment, harshness, and judgment of self are using those tactics to avoid the grief and the despair that comes with actually acknowledging where we are. It’s like they believe if they force the pain; then they won’t have to actually feel the pain and fall apart. If they force the pain; they can get ahead of it and still be in control.
We are all avoiding the coming undone; which is inherently feminine. All of this harshness and punishment is rooted in hatred of the feminine; eg misogyny. It’s rooted in not understanding the death and life cycles and how to ride them while staying awake and aware. It’s all rooted in actually wanting to avoid transformation and becoming.
We all say we want transformation, but most people aren’t actually willing to die well.
You may read all this and think I must be for coddling people. For allowing them all their emotional turmoil and victimization. That I somehow think we all just need to fall apart and lay on the ground and give up. That if I’m not for harshness and punishment; then I must be for permissiveness.
This is where the nuance that doesn’t get translated enough comes in. This is where we get lost if we don’t have the maturity and flexibility in our systems to hold paradox.
Radical responsibility is not harshness and it’s not punishment. It is a noticing. It is a being with facts and realities that may be hard to sit with. We are so quick to jump into punishment once we see these facts, and that is the place where we need to cultivate softness if we want to experience true transformation.
Let’s say you decide you want to work out three times a week. And for a few weeks you do. Then one week gets busy and you miss your workouts and before you know it a month has passed and you haven’t worked out once.
What do you do when you notice this? Do you berate yourself? Do you feel ashamed? Do you tell yourself how bad and broken you are? Do you try to avoid thinking about it? Do you kind of go blank? Do you tell yourself you’re a piece of shit and go to the gym and work out harder than you really had the energy for?
No matter the outcome of any of these options they are all based in harshness and punishment.
What I’ve found is most people don’t know how to go about change without punishment.
Isn’t this the way we were raised? We colored on the walls and then we got punished by having to be in time out so that we didn’t do it again, right?
We screamed too loud and then our mothers turned away and ignored us (withdrawing love is most certainly punishment for a child) hoping it would make us be quiet.
We parent ourselves the same way we were parented. Our parents’ voices becoming our internal dialogue.
How is this working for us?
There are wildly alarming, unprecedented negative statistics pertaining to the average person’s physical, mental and emotional well-being.
As a collective, we are not ok. This is a fact we all need to look at, soberly.
We can look at this and say most people are fat, stupid, ignorant, and lazy, and we all just need to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and get it together.
We could disguise this attitude by saying people don’t “respect” or “love” themselves enough to make good choices, but that’s still using shame and self flagellation (I’m such a loser! Why can’t I just love myself more!) to get to our goal.
You can’t hate yourself into loving yourself and if you don’t love yourself now, as you are; you’re not going to love yourself as a rich woman or a skinny woman. That’s not how self love works.
What we are seeing in the collective today is actually a result of punishing culture, generations deep and well worn.
Eventually, punishing wears us down and ultimately disconnects us from Life.
You can see it in the way we believe how separate we all are. “I’m not one of those stupid people because I wear linen clothing and eat organic food and workout!”
Life, creator, God, Truth, whatever you want to call it, connects us. It reminds us that we are all part of something much bigger. It tells us: “you are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a single drop.”
However, we don’t get to collapse in that either. We don’t get to just lay down and do nothing.
Life will humble you. Life will show you where you think you are in control and blast it apart. Life will continually with a whisper at first, a brick next, and a Mack truck last, guide you, lead you, and point you in the direction you’re meant to move.
So instead of operating as if everyone is an idiot that just needs to get their shit together; you could decide to actually be with what is true here.
The truth is; humans are good. They are flawed. They are hurting. They are traumatized. They are being poisoned by processed food and chemicals. And we are always more alike than we are different. Underneath all the noise; we want the same things: health and happiness for ourselves and our loved ones.
This is where the massive power of softness comes in.
When we treat ourselves with softness; we don’t give up responsibility. We simply choose to no longer punish ourselves or others.
When we treat ourselves with softness; we will treat others with softness and the world becomes a softer place. A place where people can stop being so deeply afraid of their feelings. A place where people aren’t afraid to look at the facts; because they know; no matter what they will not turn on themselves.
You don’t know your power until you know what it’s like to be a woman who refuses to turn on herself.
This is the kind of power that creates worlds. This is the power of God’s Love.
When we no longer turn on ourselves; we are not afraid to speak out. We are not afraid to stand firmly in the world we would like our children to grow up in and wave people toward us.
When we no longer turn on ourselves; we can lead from a fully integrated place.
Softness is not weakness.
Softness is power.
When you embody and hold this kind of softness, you aren’t afraid of the facts or the reality because you can accept anything because you aren’t going dread living in your own mind if you fuck up.
When you embody and hold this kind of softness, you can let Life lead you because you trust yourself to not beat yourself up no matter what happens.
When you embody and hold this kind of softness; paradoxically, you are precise in a way overarching harshness could never be; because you can feel all the little caveats and deep pockets.
When you embody and hold this kind of softness; you can take full and total responsibility because there is no punishment on the other side of it.
This is radical. This is not the paradigm any of us were raised in; but it is the paradigm we are shifting in to.
Some people (my past self included) think of softness as disgusting. They find it repulsive. They find themselves avoiding it at all costs.
Disgust is not neutral. It’s a very charged feeling. It’s visceral. When we have a deep, real need for something and we are again and again denied that need, one way we make the pain of that missing need feel a little less brutal is to be disgusted by the need itself.
This has been shown again and again in attachment research. Babies and children require this kind of softness I am talking about; this unconditional love.
If you were not given this softness enough as a baby and child; you may feel disgusted by it because disgust is a more powerful position than need.
We reject what we need most to make that need less painful.
I find the harshest people are most disgusted by softness, and this points to their deep and primal need for it.
We don’t need another kick in the ass. We don’t need another reason to punish ourselves. We don’t need to avoid the truth because of the fear of what acknowledging the truth might mean for our internal dialogue.
We need acceptance. We need precision. We need to bring the light of unconditional love down into our bodies.
We need to own the power of our softness.
“Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth,
"You owe me."
Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.”
- Hafiz
Come see my interview with Siri Birk during the Soft Revolution free summit next Friday October 11th at 10am PST where we’ll be discussing this new paradigm of softness.
Harshness, Radical Responsibility, and The Power of Softness