LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Kiese Laymon!

Exquisite tenderness

​​Dear Lovelets,

I just spent the entire week at my friend Barb Morrison’s music studio, recording the audiobook for my new memoir, ALL THE WAY TO THE RIVER. I had asked my publisher if I could read the book at Barb’s home studio rather than at a recording booth somewhere in New York City with a bunch of strangers, because I knew how emotionally challenging it was going to be to read this book from the first page to the last, and I wanted to be in a familiar place, with a friend — and with someone who had known and loved Rayya. (Barb and Rayya were best friends for many, many years.)

Much of this book is not a pretty story, and I knew it was going to be hard to face it all over again, as well as reliving the experience of deep grief and loss. There were tears — oh my heavens, were there tears. And sadness, recalling the hard and even ridiculous times Rayya and I went through. And laughter. At one point Barb made me laugh by relaying this line to me, which they’d heard in Al-Anon: “Your life was collapsing faster than you could lower your standards.” (Yup. Been there. That’s all in Chapter Fourteen.)

I was so grateful to be able to do the audio book recording in Barb’s studio. It was just as comforting as I knew it would be. I got lots of hugs — plus lunch breaks on the porch, snuggle time with our dog and cats, encouragement, and support. We even got to make our own coffee concoctions. (Coffee + Fresca over ice is the drink of summer, by the way! I invented it! We named it The Frescessco, and it’s amazing. Don’t laugh till you’ve tried it!)

But the thing about Barb’s music studio is that it’s in the middle of a stretch of busy rural farmland, which means that I didn’t only get tenderness during the recording process, I also got a ton of interruptions due to a combination of tractors, lawn mowers, low-flying airplanes, passing trucks, overzealous motorcycles, crickets, frogs, and some really, really, really loud birds.

It became clear to all of us early in the process that we were just going to have to accept the fact that we couldn’t control when the outside noises were going to interrupt us, or for how long. Sometimes I had to stop reading an emotional scene right in the middle of a sentence and pause for two minutes. Sometimes I had to pause for two hours. It was stop/start like this for almost five days. We were absolutely powerless over it.

Eventually, this became cosmically funny, because ALL THE WAY TO THE RIVER is ultimately a book about surrender. And that’s what we were all being asked to do, in order to create this audiobook. We had to surrender. We had to soften. And I had to accept once more that I am not the only person on the planet, and that I can’t have things my way. I had to accept that I have to share this planet with billions of other entities. Eventually, when there came a new noise interruption, I would just close my eyes and say to myself, “That person has a right to drive a tractor . . . That person has a right to drive a motorcycle . . . Those people have a right to fly in a plane . . . That person has a right to mow their lawn . . . That cat has a right to meow . . . That frog has a right to call out . . . My dog has a right to scratch herself really loudly . . . Those crows have the right to scream.”

And then, once I’d accepted that they all have the right to exist, the next step was to love them. The next step was to say to myself, about the interrupter: “May you be blessed. May you be happy. May you be free from suffering. May you know peace.”

And with that, frustration turned to tenderness. In full surrender, I would wait for silence to return, for a minute or ten. And that’s how we got through it: tenderly.

And that’s what our subject is this week, as brought to us by the incomparable Kiese Laymon, author and speaker and human extraordinaire.

The subject is tenderness.

How can it be found? What does it mean? Why do we need it?

Let’s keep going, beauties. It’s so good.

Love,
Your Lizzy

Dear Love, what would you have me know about tenderness?

Sweet thing, gentle thing, come closer and listen.

I want to go right to the center of something with you. Come with me. I’ve got you, I’m holding your hand, I’m safe, you’re safe.

A person who is terrified cannot feel or express tenderness to themselves or others. A person who is terrified can only ever face the world from the position of a defensive crouch, perhaps with a weapon in her hand. A weapon of words, or an actual weapon, that could easily cause her to move from the position of self-defense to the position of assault. If frightened enough, yes, absolutely everyone is capable of assault. Even you — as you well know and have directly experienced.

I will also tell you this. You cannot make the world a safe place, meaning you cannot wrangle a feeling of safety FROM the world. If ever you do feel safe from external sources (and you have) history has shown that the feeling of safety is fleeting. You have many times felt safe in someone’s arms. Where are they now, all those people, who once held you? Some dead, some gone, some turned against you, some harmed you, some you harmed. A home can feel safe until it isn’t. A body can feel safe until it doesn’t. A country can feel safe till it turns upon itself and others.

You have a friend who was killed on a bright blue day by a strike of lightning that came out of the sky and struck her. You had a sponsor who used to tell you, “Baby girl, you could get hit by a car on the way to someone else’s funeral and die,” which is true.

All this information makes you want to brace. It makes everyone brace. Right now more than ever, the world is braced. Clenched. Hunched in a defensive position, or hiding, or weaponizing themselves, or building walls.

Where, in all this, can tenderness be found?

My answer is simple: Everywhere.

Yes. Everywhere.

Where you are the most clenched and the most afraid is exactly where I ask you to soften. Against whom you are the most braced and the most defensive, I ask you to soften. (Which doesn’t mean you have to hang out with them. It just means soften your heart ABOUT them.)

Remember the story of your teacher Byron Katie — that time when the man put a gun to her stomach and told her he was going to kill her and burn down her house. And she said to him, “I understand, dear. If I were thinking and believing what you are thinking and believing, I would have no choice but to kill people and burn down their houses. But I really hope, my dear, that you don’t do that to yourself.”

Tenderness. Softness. Understanding.

That’s what she showed him.

And he dropped the gun and fell apart, crying in her arms.

Here is where it gets a bit hard, but lean in closer, and let me tell you the truth. You can’t do this kind of thing as a MOVE. It might have looked to an outsider like Byron Katie disarmed him with a kind of jujitsu emotional intelligence, but it wasn’t a trick, honey. It wasn’t a tactic. She wasn’t trying to manipulate him to drop the gun, by loving him into submission. She genuinely did not care if she lived or died. She was simply standing in a moment of tenderness with someone whose actions she did actually completely understand, because she, too, had felt so angry, so lost, so violent in her life. And to be in that deep a state of tenderness, she had to genuinely not care about protecting her life as much as she cared about connecting through love with the person who was standing in front of her.

Okay, listen. Listen. We don’t demand this level of perfect love of you! I know your spiritual perfectionism and I know how the bully who lives in your head likes to compare yourself to people who the bully in your head thinks are better than you, and so automatically your ego comes up with a list of 20 reasons why you could never be as tender as Byron Katie (and even 20 people you could never be this tender toward) — please, honey, we’re not asking you to be Byron Katie. We already have a Byron Katie, we don’t need two of them. We need a Liz Gilbert.

But we need a Liz Gilbert who is willing to be courageous enough at times to come up out of a defensive crouch, drop all her weapons, and recognize at a heart level that the only thing anyone out there is ever doing is the best idea they had that day for how to survive. We need a Liz Gilbert who remembers what Ram Dass said (and yes, once more, we don’t need you to BE Ram Dass, we already had a Ram Dass, we don’t need two of them, but it’s useful to remember such things). He said: “On the spiritual journey, at some point you have to find something you care about more than security.”

Find it in your heart, child, to care about something more than you care about security. That’s the only way you will ever be able to be unafraid enough to access your tenderness.

We know it isn’t easy.

But we sent you a clue the other night when you had a nightmare about being led into a meadow by some soldiers at gunpoint. You were about to wake up in terror until, in the dream, you heard my voice. You heard the voice of Unconditional Love say to you, “Relax completely.” And you felt a gun at the back of your head. And you relaxed completely. Instantly, in the dream you relaxed with the thought “If this is the last moment of my life, I don’t want to miss the beauty of this meadow.”

You can remember in every part of your being, even right now, what the somatic sensation was of that complete surrender. You can remember it right now. You can go tender. You can go soft. You can access that anywhere. You can have it right now. You can have it always.

Relax completely into love.

This is what we want you to know about tenderness.

We love you.

Prompt

Our theme this week is tenderness — not the “easy” kind that we can access readily when things are going great, but the kind that Kiese Laymon urges us to find “when we fail . . . when we do harm.” What if, before we leap to anger or regret or shame, we stop and access tenderness toward ourselves and others?

This week, if you like, join me in posing this question: Dear Love, what would you have me know about tenderness?