Tenderness is a great teacher -- coming to it in our culture is grace and wisdom. The tenderness of allowance and the allowance of tenderness starts with the way one is with oneself.
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The tenderness of heart which meets life as it is, melts separation, and illuminates the tyranny behind that which would have things other than the way that they are. Tenderness is a pole to acceptance and relaxing into what is here -- including our humanness. Empowerment is often a result of that. The push to "be" is a different experience from the tenderness to allow what is, to allow (even) the "nothingness" from which "pure light" springs, to allow with great tenderness, and in that softness, the embrace that sees ever-more clearly, what is.

Tenderness is a great teacher -- coming to it in our culture is grace and wisdom. The tenderness of allowance and the allowance of tenderness starts with the way one is with oneself. Forgetting the strength at the core of our tenderness is what can cause us to contract to protect ourselves. Tenderness is a reflection of our deepest heart. It both comes from and is a bridge to compassion. It is the breath of no reason behind creativity. It the breath of light behind play. It is the breath of love behind communion.

Tenderness is a grace that allows frailty -- and in acceptance of frailty, there is a strength of what does not need to hold to itself (unless frailty is taken on as an identity and held to). It is the grace of allowance and in allowance, there is the strength of what is beyond believing the story, beyond the duality that would divide against our humanness that would make something wrong of it, try to change it, or deny it. Frailty, met with the gentle strength of tenderness, can be what melts the armor around a heart, the armor that holds illusions of separation in place. It can be a pole to the unknown -- the strength of presence that rests as emptiness, the oneness that can sing "yes now" to exhale, to death, to releasing, for it has nothing "other" to fear. It can be the seeds and springboards of pure potential and the creative will.

Awareness without division is empowerment. A sense of connection gives a sense of empowerment, or the natural and divinely intelligent breath of being that is absent of the sense of disempowerment. Perhaps more than any idea or attributes of self that might be recognized, there is within the arms of acceptance a sense of peace that does not impede the dance of fluidity, that does not fight life as it is while holding onto life as we think it should be. It does not fight what is with ideas that it holds onto of who we are, or who we think we should be. There is nothing to obscure divine creative intelligence flowing as it does when all relaxes that habitually divides against that and contracts against the sweetness of our true nature.

Awareness without division redefines power and will, and realizes through natural beingness and oneness with all. The grace of tenderness allows the heart of awareness that knows oneness of all. In its oneness, it is innately empowered, or absent from the sense of disempowerment -- or even beyond ideas of empowered or disempowered. The tenderness of allowance of things to be as they are, to not divide against them, is the heart of that, and the dance of our divinely intelligent true nature.

For more by Ellen Davis, click here.

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