What are the conditions needed to feel? Maybe a sense of trust. Maybe a sense of giving oneself permission to set aside the tight-wound structure of "holding it together". Maybe the basic sense of feeling worthy enough to stop and take care of oneself. Maybe talking with someone who can feel how painful your difficulty is, and meet you as a person feeling...not skipping past feeling to try to fix the problem.

One thing that seems to truly matter: taking time to set aside striving...laying down for a time the aggressive sense of "should". Just giving the heart an open opportunity to be - releasing it for a while from from the commmand to stay muffled so as not to disrupt productivity and composure. Where our human world so much encourages striving, nature invites its complimentary opposite: a rich fullness from which to deeply feel. So an opportunity lies in discovering that rich fullness within...as if laying relaxed in a meadow of wildflowers...your heart on the ground brushed by soft petals..so that every grief and heartbreak could release into the earth. Or as if floating in a lake high up in the mountains...where all the tightly held emotions of your heart unclench and lift like songbirds into the open sky.

But then deeper still: the opportunity may come to notice self-judging beliefs you're barely aware of...and the difficult emotions that come with them. Noticing and giving space for the Divine to gently reveal them as false. Honouring and gently unravelling - for example - the despondency that comes with feeling unworthy of love. Or the shame and self-judgement we might feel when some part of mind is fixated on memories of rejection, abandonment, or betrayal. Letting go the sense of being ugly or weak or broken. And then too...finding the parts of oneself that have tapped out: the parts that find the world too painful to bear. And finding ways to welcome them home. So much happening that could almost be missed, except that the intensity happening down in your depths may show up uncomfortably reflected in the intensity of your outer life.

Whatever knot you might be unravelling, the broader invition involves maturing your relationship with time. So we may take the opportunity to set down coping mechanisms we use to manage uncomfortable echos of the past. Stepping instead into the raw immediacy of Now - to meet life directly with clear-eyed, innocent vitality. So the space of meeting becomes an exploration of what lets that happen. Finding out what holds and supports the heart so it can open. And finding out - in experience, moment to moment - why it matters.

So we find a way to set aside strategizing and striving and knowing. We fall back into a space in the Heart that naturally awaits us. We discover the Ground of Being like an ancient Earth Goddess who patiently waits for us to crawl into her lap, look into her compassionate eyes, and let go the burdens we so tightly hold. In the story of the Buddha's enlightenment, he touches the ground and asks the Earth to witness his awakening. It seems we can also follow this way and find Divine Character Witness: something beyond our stuck self-judgement that can look in our eyes and say "you're ok" with a compassionate certainty we can actually believe. Such meetings offer redemptive love in a way we can't easily find with our fellow human beings.

And yet! Gentleness opens doorways. When we can let go of how things "should" be, we may open a portal into new territory within ourselves: into the ancient nature of what we actually are. Freed from the pressure of an inner prison guard dictating how things should be, dormant parts of ourselves can wake up and stretch and start expressing themselves. And this can change your world.

When we use the word "gentleness" here, we really mean taking a step back from a habitual stance of aggression - taking a break from trying to make things align to how they "should" be. In effect, taking a break from "should" altogether, to give space for something much more wise and beautiful within ourselves to step forward. Many approaches to spirituality describe this as opening to the Divine. The particular details of what that Divine might look and feel like don't so much matter. "The Divine" can mean Christ or one's own Buddha Nature, or a Plant you met in a dream. The point is opening up past knee-jerk, known ways of meeting the world: to make an open space in which a wiser, more elegant way of meeting a moment might become clear.

The greatest driver of change here is what part of ourselves is in charge of envisioning how things should be. If it's some old conditioned part of ourselves that's marinated for decades in comparison and ambition, the sense of "how things should be" may be a great recipe for unhappiness. When we feel aligned to a sense of spiritual reality, our sense of "how things should be" can be rooted in something much deeper than our social conditioning.

A gentle lean into the inner world opens up new possibilities for how we meet reality - and our preferences for what reality should be. We may, for example, find within ourselves a flowering sense of creativity, agency and self-possession. So that all the things we imagine ourselves to be victimized by are revealed as details - not nearly as significant as they at first seem. When we feel a victim of our circumstances, it generates plenty of negative emotion. But more to the point here, the sense of victimhood blinds us to the possibilities for freedom that lie before us. We lose a sense of creative agency. When that sense of agency re-awakens, it changes the sense of "how things should be". We're no longer in reaction - or driven by some subterrean sense of hopelessness and defeat. We realize we can make choices from a place of quiet clarity: so that the deeper dimensions of who we are guide the choices we make - and thereby craft our lives. In this sense, the sense of "how things should be" is something sensed from that quiet clarity. The choices we make feel either aligned to what we deeply know is true...or not. While gentleness can be a doorway through to this way of being, the way we express from it may be scalpel-precise and efficient. Choices are made and actions taken with less clutter, tension and inner division.

"How things should be" might also expand out to a sense of one's own will and Divine will being the same thing. When we contact the sense of self-determination, it's a small step from there to realize we're part of a larger world that is determining and shaping itself through us. The pulse of Nature may be asking that something fade or die away. That same pulse might likewise be offering the energy for something new to flower. Our sense of "how things should be" may involve listening to sense how the world wants to flow - the world that we are not seperate from. A certain kind of gentlenes or non-aggression is prerequisite to this as well. Without it, we tend to stake our individual will in a fight against reality. A different life awaits when we give up the fight.