Attend to the CircleOn learning to be gentle with yourself

So many of my clients tell me the same thing: I don’t know how to be gentle with myself. We of course laugh about that. How a certain degree of ‘harsh’ hangs like a badge of honour. We have been driven. And the drive has often been worth it. We have pushed through hard times, hard things, with intensity, and gotten the outcome we want. But then, as we spend more time on the idea of gentleness, we begin to peel back the layers of what harshness costs us: a deeper sense of wellbeing and connectedness.

I know this intimately. Growing up I was a perfectionist. I was the first to critique my schoolwork and my sports. I remember people telling me as a youngster, ‘You need to be more gentle with yourself.’ And I’d stand there thinking ‘I don’t know how’ with the nagging feeling that I needed to improve, do better, and even fix the feelings of dissatisfaction that emerged when hints of failure surfaced. The thing is, when growing up, I didn’t have or know of any way to train gentleness. And I suspect it is true for most of us: it is not that we refuse to be gentle with ourselves – it is that we have no place, and no practice, where gentleness is cultivated.

And that is the key. Gentleness is a felt practice more than a mental intention. You cannot simply will yourself into gentleness, as if being-gentle is an outcome. Though having an intention toward gentleness is a starting point, the act of being-gentle requires letting go of that very same wilful intention. And if that intention is cast in the same mould as self-evaluations, gentleness will evade the practice. A felt problem needs a felt practice. For me, that is where Tai Chi Chuan came in.

Attend to the circle, all else empty

When I was twenty, Tai Chi’s paradox of simplicity combined with complexity drew my attention. Coordinating the body in a wavelike flow looked magical to me. I could glimpse the peace and the presence – the healing space – that Tai Chi could offer those who stuck with it. And I wanted to be able to feel that. Seeing someone perform an act with masterful flow brings about a sort of awe – a deep respect for their studious attention and care to hone a craft.

What has proven to be the most useful way to practice over the years is to choose one focus at a time while letting go of others. I’m sure it is the same with other types of art or sport: practice one thing at a time, and eventually, it all comes together. My most recent focus in Tai Chi has been to attend to the circle, all else empty. The instruction is nothing more than that – stay connected with the continuous and slow circular movement while letting everything else go as if it were completely empty.

Something happens when you stay with this. The movement eventually takes precedence over wilful striving. Rather than directing the circular flow, the body begins to follow it – feel it – without willpower, without anything to achieve. Just turning. And in that following, the ego and the striving let go. The state that opens is something close to play: just being present with the constant and steady cadence, along the arc of the circle, without self-critique or any outcome to strive toward.

I will be honest: the felt sense of this is not easily conveyed in writing. It is as if a circle flows beyond the self while also catching the self in its wave; the self and not-self moving together at once. Just being in a state of flow. And at the conclusion of the set a sense of gentleness pervades the body – trained in the circle – where there is no longer any room for harshness, criticism, and striving. Only the circle. All else empty.

Other circles

Tai Chi is one way of cultivating gentleness with oneself. There are others that also encourage an embodied sense of slowing down.

Walking, at a genuinely gentle pace, where the steps turn like a circle. Diaphragmatic breathing where the movement of breath in and out provides a soothing flow that eventually cycles without forceful effort. And meditation, where the breath flows together with a sense of grounded stillness – and the mind lets go in the flow of moment-to-moment awareness.

None of these require athleticism or forty minutes on a mat. They require only the willingness to spend time attending to something gentle, constant, and unforced – and to let that, rather than the day’s striving, set the tone of the nervous system.

What we attend to

Neuroplastic conditions, in part, persist when attention amplifies the perception of danger. The nervous system is always attending to some circle; the practice is choosing which. And, at least initially, attending to gentleness can feel strange. Change happens over time. And it happens because of repeated practice. In thirty years of Tai Chi training and teaching, the instruction to attend to one thing, all else empty is by far the most useful. When practicing gentleness, all we need to do is follow that direction. Attend to the gentle breathing, and let everything else empty out. Attend to the steady cadence of your footsteps, and all else is empty.

And when the mind drifts back to the pain – as it will – nothing has gone wrong. Noticing the drift is the practice. For those living with pain, though, this is the hardest moment. Because the usual pattern is to work on the pain: to focus, to solve, to fix, with an outcome in mind. And solving moves in the currency of criticism – monitoring, measuring, grading the body against how it ought to be. That currency sensitizes the threat detection rather than soothing it. The harder we work on the pain, the more danger the system perceives. So the instruction stays the same: return to the circle. Return without criticism. Every return is a repetition. And repetitions are how the nervous system learns. A mind that spends even half an hour attending to a slow, constant, gentle movement begins to embody the knowledge that things can be and are okay.

Criticism directed at yourself is still interpreted by the brain as a threat; it becomes a danger signal, delivered continuously, from a source that never leaves the room. Which makes gentleness something more than a nicety. It is recalibration. Time spent attending to the circle – gentle, constant, unforced – is time the nervous system spends outside the environment of outcome and correction. Nothing to measure, nothing to fix, no verdict pending. In that environment, felt and repeated, the brain learns what it cannot be argued into: that it is safe.