At this time of the year, we often feel tender: tender toward other people, tender toward the natural world and all its creatures, tender toward life itself, tender perhaps even toward ourselves. Images both sweet, like a dog and cat sleeping together, and horrifying, like the pain and suffering borne by innocent civilians on both sides of a war, elicit tender thoughts.

We all harbor and cherish personal images of tenderness, either those we experienced directly or those we observed. One that is particularly strong in my memory bank concerns popcorn and the making of popcorn balls during the holidays. My contribution to the recipe “book” we’re sharing this year describes my mother’s love of popcorn and my father’s more lukewarm response to it. Throughout my growing-up years, Mom and I would make popcorn balls by the dozens for family and friends, using her time-tested recipe. Dad would help, too, but on the periphery. Sometimes, I’d see him shaking his head wryly as we started a third batch and filled another turkey roasting pan with popped corn. I wondered if he felt like an outsider a bit then, and maybe he did.

When I left for college and a few years later established my own home, I speculated from time to time if the making of all those popcorn balls that still appeared at holidays fell primarily to Mom.

One holiday season in my early 30s, still living on my own and with a flexible employer who understood the need for an only child to visit home for longer periods, I surprised them by showing up for Christmas a few days early. I quietly opened the front door in the early wintry evening to a unexpected tableau. There they were – Mom and Dad (Retta and John) both in aprons – busy in the kitchen surrounded by tubs of popped corn, syrup bubbling on the stove, and stacks of wax paper squares waiting to make a home for a finished ball of chewy sweetness. Chatting away easily with their backs to the front door, I stood in the darkened entryway like a spy and simply watched. After a minute or two, Dad walked over to Mom, took something from her hands, and held her with such tenderness that I felt my knees buckle. I backed out the door, waiting a few minutes while wiping tears from my eyes, and then BURST back in so that they would hear me, keeping their private moment private.

This tender memory feels warm and healing, just as tenderness is. Tenderness can be fleeting, and it can be cultivated. Nurturing tenderness begins with opening the heart. While this sounds easy, it often becomes complicated because our preconceived, deeply held beliefs serve as roadblocks; when this happens, it helps to take a deep breath and whisper to yourself, “Let me just try. No harm will come.”

In my direct experience, three practices contribute mightily to tenderness: gratitude, empathy, and forgiveness.

Gratitude feeds tenderness. While sorting through my many yoga, philosophy, and psychology books at the Lakeville Center recently, I unearthed a journal my beloved cousin Becky – my sister in every way except for the adjective – bequeathed to me before she died of breast cancer fourteen years ago this December. Its title: “My Gratitude Journal”. How amazing, I thought, that this delicate tome with a cover showing shiny red apples (what else?) carried such a name because she began it with the full awareness that the cancer was back after nearly a decade.

Her first entry, dated April 23, 1997, reads in part: “Today I am grateful for: my darling daughter who I adore and who I feel truly understands me; the speech I heard on ‘Attitudes’ at the Women in the Workplace luncheon; the conversation I had with Auntie Retta [my popcorn-loving mother] tonight...I know I can talk to her anytime....” For pages and pages and for months and months, it goes on, gratitude holding her even as the cancer claimed her.

Know this: Gratitude feeds a tender heart as does empathy. Not sympathy, mind you, but empathy, the action we take to try to understand another person from where they stand in their shoes, with their experiences, and with their fears and biases. Sympathy almost always turns attention back to us while empathy keeps us focused on another with calm awareness so that they feel seen and heard. Feeling seen and heard helps to break down barriers even when no one changes their positions immediately. Over time, sometimes a long time that includes disagreement and even chaos, softening occurs.

Then, there is forgiveness - of others who have harmed you, of yourself for harming others and asking for their forgiveness, and of yourself for harming yourself. I recently led two lovingkindness meditations at Green Lotus and integrated the forgiveness meditation into them. Loving and forgiving go hand in hand and help to cultivate tenderness. In an upcoming Sunday in 2024, I am going to interweave both of them into a virtual Yoga Nidra class.

Tenderness – that is what I feel for all of you as I write the last “Marcia’s Musings” of 2023. Tenderness of heart, tenderness of mind, tenderness of touch (energetically speaking, I am hugging you all). Happy Holidays, and, in the New Year, try a little tenderness. It isn’t a season; it’s a practice.

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Marcia Appel

In 2006, Marcia, a former journalist and corporate executive, wrote the plan that launched Green Lotus. In 2007, Green Lotus opened, and Marcia and business partner Merry Beth Hovey, who joined in 2009, planted the seeds of service that are the foundation of the Green Lotus philosophy. "As teachers and healers," Marcia says, "we meet students and clients where they are. We learn and grow from each other -- and have fun doing it."

Marcia's Musings