Softening into life (unravelling the hardness we are taught to carry)

I love a softened life.

I love flowers and animals, oceans and parks. I love bare feet on grass, watercolour paints and candlelit tables. I love floaty, flowy, unrushed and earthy. I love the Italian Passegiata, slow mornings with no alarm and pottering in vintage shops.

Yet I also know that no matter what a soft life looks like on the outside, it is the internal essence of being that is at the heart of soft living.

I see living a softened life as less about what it looks like, and more about what it feels like. It is about resting in the naturalness of Life. It’s unravelling the hardened edges and self-protection we’ve been taught are the only ways to cope with life. It’s restoring a pace that is natural to us, instead of frantically trying to keep up with artificial expectations.

And yes, this can look like slow days and nature and barefoot walks, but it can also look like a deeper spiritual dignity that is carried within the external rush that can arise in daily life. A dignity that rests beneath whatever it is you are doing, and softly infuses your soul with a gentle sense of ‘I am where I am meant to be. There is no rush. It is safe to be me.’

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Something that I remember doing when I was a teacher, was waking up a bit earlier, and instead of going straight to work, stopping off at the cafe by work and getting my coffee to sit in. There, I would read, write and sip my coffee.

As I sat there, lots of people from work would come in and order their take-away coffees, as they rushed to get to school. And if you’ve been a teacher, you know that there is always something that you could be rushing to do. I definitely could have ordered my take-away drink and headed to work to get through more before the students arrived. And I did definitely get pangs of ‘do people think I’m really lazy because I’m just sitting here and not rushing off to work?’ when I would see other teachers from school come in.

Yet actively taking this time, prioritising this unhurried morning ritual amongst the busy hum of the cafe, felt very important.

Because the thing is, we could always be doing more. And our collective systems are designed to reward those who play into this idea of being busy and rushed as a badge of honour.

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A big part of a softened life, is becoming open to being okay with people judging you. To being okay with people thinking that you are not doing enough. To being okay with other people thinking ‘How dare you not work as hard as me. How dare you not strive and push and perform.’

What I have found, is that the hardness we are taught to carry, is very often formed via the ways we are taught to perform for love, approval and acceptance. We create ways of being that are designed to protect us from judgement. From rejection. From the feelings that come with feeling not approved of. From the feeling of not being viewed as enough.

If we just do more, produce more, present ourselves in a certain way, we can avoid these feelings. Yet this very often comes at the expense of being our natural selves. And with this, comes a feeling of abandonment. Of artificiality. Of a vital texture of life being lost in the rush to prove, strive and become…

read on

This full piece of writing now lives in the ‘Soften & Bloom ebook’ if you would like to read more.

Belinda x