Feeling Our Way: Embracing The Tender Heart

Our world is struggling—economically, environmentally, politically—and many of us ache and yearn for healing. Not only personally, but globally, the needs of others claim our attention, especially when we tune into our empathic sensitivities. Our feelings offer us important information, but culturally we have learned to devalue or ignore them. Paradoxically, this is the very reason why we’re struggling on the small and larger scale. Tenderness, a gentle, loving quality of the heart, ideally greets us at the moment of birth and guides our walk through life. Unfortunately, many of us learn to give up any hope for tenderness as we grow, except perhaps in our most intimate moments. Worse, we cast aside all thought of extending this gift to ourselves. Yet our feelings, physical and emotional, need the care of a tender heart if we are to thrive in our challenging, insensitive world. We know that our beautiful, tender heart can be hurt, but it can also heal us. Sadly, when we avoid our painful feelings and separate the hurting from the healing, we feel our heart broken in two. Often we interpret our feelings through the judgments of an inner critic who berates not only our feeling and behavioral responses to life and relationships, but also those feelings derived from empathy—the ability to sense the inner, unspoken, physical and emotional states of others. Most of us do not consciously recognize the effects of empathy upon our own inner state. Yet, if fury or grief lies hidden beneath the smile plastered on someone’s face, we feel it, some of us more so than others. When we cannot identify the source of our inner distress, considerable confusion, self-criticism, anxiety, and depression may follow, sometimes leading to mental health diagnoses and treatments. Feeling Our Way: Embracing the Tender Heart offers a multidimensional approach to better appreciate how our feelings serve as messengers of important information and that the heart is their best interpreter. When we learn to embrace our tender heart, and reconnect the healing with the hurting, a new conscious alignment with our soulful essence becomes possible and the inner critic comes to peace. We also reap the added benefit of positively impacting child development, our personal and professional relationships, and the world. Feeling Our Way: Embracing the Tender Heart uniquely integrates reader-friendly information from neurological, psychological, energy medicine, and spiritual perspectives. It also provides effective energy medicine tools, myths, and real-life stories in a comprehensive guidebook for those wanting to understand the roots of their sensitivity, heal the resulting wounds, and empower their tender heart with love and resilience, thereby contributing to the healing of our planet. Drawing upon the author’s personal and professional experience, this work invites the reader to honor our inner world of feeling as a pathway to the sacred and as an essential aspect of our evolving human potential.