Choosing Gentleness
Opening our Hearts to All the Ways We Feel and Are in Every Moment
Robyn’s poems-with-drawings and recent short essays encourage us to embrace wherever we are in our process, without criticism. They inspire us to risk treating all of our feelings with tenderness and compassion rather than the judgment/ suppression our emotion-phobic culture prescribes. They remind us of the culturally suppressed truths about the importance of (and the how of) taking exquisite care of our tender, vulnerable essential selves.
The collection invites us to reframe our ideas about how growth actually unfolds; to consider how the pressures around forgiveness and gratitude often serve to cut us off from the painful emotions we can only metabolize by actually feeling them. It presents alternative, more meaningful ways for us to think about anger, about what gets called procrastination and about what gets called selfish.
The poems and essays offer us tender permission to slow down, to value rest and fallow time as well as time with just ourselves. They explore the legacy of, and the process of healing from, early mothering wounds.
Throughout the collection, there’s repeated support for us to listen in to what our deeps want and need from us, to caringly tend to those needs and to open our eyes to the tiny moments of magic in everyday life. We are urged to allow our selves to grieve and rage about the losses we face even as we move toward accepting each successive new normal. And, we are encouraged to practice always looking inward instead of outward for direction and for acceptance of all of whom we may be.
This tender little book might well caringly mentor and support you as you travel the road to the self-compassion, self-acceptance, self-love and inner peace for which you’ve always yearned.
Go Only as Fast as Your Slowest Part Feels Safe to Go
Tales to Kindle Gentleness and Compassion for Our Exhausted Selves
This collection of emotionally uncensored autobiographical tales spirals back and forth through time describing the author’s struggles and emerging awareness. They reveal how she grew an unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner caregiver who helped her to finally end the battering of her virulent inner critic (the Hatchet Lady).
This fierce and tender inner caregiver brought simple lessons in radical self-care, self-compassion and self-love that have transformed Robyn's ways of being with her self and with life. These lessons – affirmations and reminders of long forgotten or culturally suppressed truths about the importance of taking the very best care of our own vulnerable selves – are at the center of the tales in Go Only as Fast as Your Slowest Part Feels Safe to Go. They offer practical steps and encouragement for learning to be more gentle and compassionate with our over-stressed selves.
Robyn, a psychologist in private practice in Ojai, California, has dedicated her life, work, art and writing to healing and helping others heal from the harshness that our crazy-making world visits upon all of us, particularly upon women. A former hyper-self-critical super-achiever, Robyn has gradually learned how to slow down, listen in and tenderly embrace all the ways she is and is not.
Tenderly Embracing All the Ways That I Feel and Am
Journaling to Kindle Gentleness and Compassion for Our Precious Selves
A companion to Robyn’s first book, Go Only as Fast as Your Slowest Part Feels Safe to Go: Tales to Kindle Gentleness and Compassion for Our Exhausted Selves, within this bound 8 1/2 by 11 journal, you’ll find blank pages edged with words and images that invite you to dive deeply into your self as you write or draw.
The seed thoughts in these pages provide doorways for exposing, questioning and separating your self from the internalized “shoulds” and cultural rules that have molded our beliefs about what is acceptable behavior, what makes us worthy. They encourage claiming your own authentic voice, delving into new ways of being with the various parts of your self/your inner family and building loving, gentle support for the truths of your own inner knowing.
They provide inspiration for you to explore the many different and, perhaps, cut off or suppressed aspects of your self that constitute what might be called your inner family. They encourage you to explore the various voices that either keep a running background commentary going in your head or else languish unattended by you. As you engage in journal dialog with (perhaps even name) these parts of your self, you can begin to bring to consciousness the processes that usually direct (without your awareness) the quality of your self-talk, the ways you treat your self.
Remembering and Celebration Deck
Support for Going Only as Fast as Your Slowest Part Feels Safe to Go
The cards in this deck served as the seeds for the stories contained in Going Only As Fast as Your Slowest Part Feels Safe to Go: Tales to Kindle Gentleness and Compassion for Our Exhausted Selves.
An oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.