Feminine Tenderness and Why You’ve Been Taught to Diminish Your Sensitivities

One of the deepest gifts of the feminine nature is Tenderness.

Tenderness is a softening into life, a grounded devotion to staying gentle and open in heart, even when it feels easier to harden.

I've found that for the women I've worked with, this feeling of tenderness is central to their deeper fulfilment.

As naturally relational beings, tenderness enlivens and connects a woman back to her deeper essence. Tenderness is what inspires a woman to nurture and care for herself and others. Tenderness shifts what is stuck and allows what needs to flow. Tenderness activates an unspoken energetic that naturally invites in support, love and resourcing.

Another definition of tenderness though, is ‘a sensitivity to pain.’

Which is why much of the feminine path is also about learning to embody and embrace our natural sensitivities, without being overwhelmed or discouraged by pain.

When I first started my business, I focused a lot on supporting women to work with their sensitivities.

And I still feel a strong pull towards supporting those (especially in business) who are highly sensitive.

Yet I believe that as women, we all hold a natural gift of sensitivity. We all hold the feminine gift of tenderness.

And while it may express differently for all of us externally, a big part of unravelling our masculine shields and softening into our feminine essence, is about restoring our innate sensitivities.

For women, this means understanding that sensitivity isn’t something to be “fixed.” That pain and deep emotion can exist, without it overwhelming us into fight, flight or freeze mode, or forcing us to close down our hearts.

In our world, women are usually taught that our sensitivities are a bad thing. We’re taught to toughen up, to get a thicker skin, to stop feeling so much.

Yet with tenderness, there is no thick skin. There is no tough exterior. There is no trying to push down feelings.

And when we try to override our innate tenderness with “toughness,” we diminish our natural femininity. We inadvertently block ourselves off from recognising and living from the beauty and value of our natural selves.

One of the keys to softening into a deeper sense of our organic feminine being (as opposed to the rejected or wounded feminine- more on this here), is in cultivating a sense of safety around feeling.

If we don’t feel safe to feel, we tend to close up, or, alternatively, we try to deflect our feelings onto others or express them in wounded ways. This is what so many women have been taught to do, through family and societal conditioning that hasn’t understood or nurtured the inherent nature of the feminine.

Being with our feelings, acknowledging our own tenderness, and understanding that we don’t need to fix what we’re feeling, or, act on our feelings in disempowering or wounded ways, is such an important part of our true feminine nature.

There is strength in staying soft, in a world that convinces us that it’s safer to have a hardened heart.

When a woman unravels the false shields that keep her heart (seemingly) protected- shields like perfectionism, control, striving, people pleasing, micromanaging, performing, pushing and forcing- she strengthens, not weakens, who she is.

And in turn, she shares her feminine tenderness with the world, simply through Being who she naturally is.

Belinda x

---

first time here?

Learn more about feminine healing here.