gentle power

a name change to meet the times

hi friends,

It’s been five years since my first 30-day experiment with living gently. And while life on Earth is a little different than it was in the early days of the pandemic, most of our day-to-day challenges are the same. Here we all are – sharing this crowded planet – and trying to live our best lives during a time of social, economic, political and technological upheaval. And even though we’re living in a time when there is more information available to more people in more ways than ever before in human history, all that content doesn’t seem to helping much. Most of us don’t feel like we’re living the meaningful, connected and joyful lives we want.

Why?

Because most of us grew up in a world where we were taught to cultivate only one type of power: Forceful effort without regard to context or the consequences to others. And while we can use force to make things different, we’ve all experienced that kind of strong-armed change. It’s rarely lasting or stable. And that’s because when we harm parts of ourselves – or we harm other beings – in order to get what we want, we also create the causes and conditions for resistance and reactance to that very change. The power to force may work in the short-term, but it is fragile and not sustainable in the long run.

What we need to do is cultivate real power to create the lives, and the world, that we want. And real power is gentle. It never seeks to harm and is never harsh. Gentle power coexists with wisdom, honesty, peace, equanimity and kindness. Gentle power is grounded in integrity and clear seeing. It does not seek to win or punish or profit, but rather is animated by a desire to be skillful.

Cultivating gentleness fills a gap in our “how to live” tool kits, along with resilience, grit, and consistency. When you start exploring gentle power, the entire world opens up: You find solutions to problems in ways you never expected; you connect to others with more ease; you find that your efforts are met with less reactance because you’re naturally less harsh and doing less harm; and, most importantly, you radically transform your relationship with yourself and how you engage with your own life.

Because you’re reading this, I suspect you already knew all that: you know that there is a better way to live, as Mary Oliver puts it, your one wild and precious life. And you know that the way is grounded in compassion, integrity and kindness — a life based in gentle power. And so that’s going to be the new name for this newsletter.

Over the next few weeks and months, I’ll be tweaking things here and there, but the founding intention of this project remains the same. I hope you’ll stay and continue to explore how gentleness can help us to meet the challenges of today’s world.

with love, as always,

alison