Being Gentle With Oneself

When people argue with you and you feel defensive, you are implicitly accepting what they are saying to be truth. If you saw things differently and were able to stand strong in your own knowing, you would be interested in why they think or feel the way they do, instead of feeling defensive.

Being gentle with oneself is going through the stage Siddhartha went through when he was faced with armies and rage attacking him in his psyche while in meditation and he let all that be without defending himself, just accepting the onslaught, accepting the feelings, watching it all happen calmly until there was nothing left in him to fight. He had tried everything else and had nothing else to try except to try this revolutionary thing: surrendering. Not surrendering in defeat, surrendering because he knew the onslaught was his ego fighting for dear life; it was not real.

The defensive option or the fighting for one's worth or for respect, are violent because they don't come from knowing we're not guilty. They accept the accusation. It hurts.

In surrendering, Siddhartha took his own side, the side of his higher self, of his true self. That is what being gentle with oneself means.