Five Takeaways on Why Tenderness Matters Now

What happens when we slow down enough to feel the tenderness that connects us to one another?

At our February Community Meeting, speaker, author, and education leader Meena Srinivasan invited us to explore tenderness as an embodied emotional quality that can deepen presence, strengthen relationships, and transform the way we show up as leaders, caregivers, and community members.

Together we reflected on how tenderness lives in the body, how it differs from compassion, and how slowing down and softening can help us hold both the joys and sorrows of life with greater care and connection.

Here are five key takeaways.

Although tenderness and compassion are related, they are not the same thing. Compassion is typically activated by suffering, while tenderness can arise with or without suffering.

Compassion always has to do with some kind of suffering. Tenderness doesn’t, and that’s what makes it distinct and incredibly powerful. What a lot of people think, is that tenderness is just a facet of compassion. And what we’ve discovered is that it’s distinct. It’s its own unique quality, and it actually correlates more with loving-kindness and joy than compassion.

I think a lot of us experience tenderness, as a state, as in response to something. And even in some of the research, what we see is that tenderness shows up a lot in life’s edges. So birth, death, anticipatory loss. And I am really coming to see how powerful tenderness is when we can cultivate it as a trait, as something practicable, something disciplined.

Unlike more cognitive concepts like empathy, tenderness is something we feel physically in the body.

Many of us care deeply about empathy, compassion, vulnerability, especially in education and in caregiving. We really try to embody that. And what I’ve been noticing in my own life and leadership, my marriage and parenting, and what’s really guiding this exploration and the research, tenderness feels a little different.

One of the reasons for that is because it is distinctly somatic. The sense of tenderness is something we feel in the body, and because it’s often experienced as something somatic, I feel it serves as an activator. An activator is something that brings to life these other prosocial constructs [like kindness or other helping behaviors].

Warmth, gentleness, genuineness, and interconnectedness all must be present for true tenderness.

What we’ve identified through the [preliminary] research are what we call the “core four,” so dimensions of tenderness. So when we experience tenderness, we are experiencing warmth, gentleness, genuineness, and interconnectedness.

When we think about the core four, without one, it’s not tenderness. So similarly, if some of you are familiar with Kristin Neff’s self-compassion model of mindfulness, common humanity, and self-kindness? Without one [of those components], it’s not self compassion. So similarly here, without interconnectedness, it’s not tenderness. Without warmth, it’s not tenderness. Without gentleness, it’s not tenderness. Without genuineness, it’s not tenderness.

Being tender isn’t about fixing problems or eliminating suffering, but rather bearing witness and allowing your heart to open. It’s a refusal to become numb.

What I’m trying to communicate here is an invitation to go on your own tenderness journey. When you notice that softness, to stay with it, to be with it, to inquire. This is not something prescriptive. I’m not going to give you the three ways to be tender, right? Maybe in 10 years, we’ll have that. Right now, it’s an invitation to just notice, what is this? What is this phenomenon? What is it doing for me? How is it shifting my relationship?

Another big area of my life where I’ve seen a lot of transformation with tenderness is with my parents. So I care for aging parents. They live near me now. That for me is like the true test if you’ve really transformed or embodied something is when your partner, your spouse, can say you are different. My husband will tell you I’ve really transformed my relationship with my parents. And it is all because of tenderness.

Tenderness isn’t about fixing or advising or even alleviating some suffering. You might, through the act of tenderness, alleviate someone’s suffering, but that’s not the intention. The intention is to bear witness, to fully be there. And when I’m with my parents now, I stroke my mom’s hair. I can get my dad a glass of water. I can be with them, just be soft and be in the moment and honor and recognize their humanity.

Tenderness allows people to stay present with difficult emotions and remain connected to beauty and joy at the same time.

One of the things that I’ve been exploring a lot is tenderness as a portal to holding paradox. There’s a saying that I turn to all the time. I believe it’s Taoist. “Of the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows, that life is not meant to be one or the other, but both.” And for me, tenderness is becoming intimate with that truth, with that truth of the joy and the sorrow.

Where do we start? I think the state [of tenderness] can be a doorway for cultivating it as a trait. So, we notice these experiences where we’re softer and we have that little bit of tenderness, or we’re listening to music and we feel a little more open. I think we need to first get intimate with what tenderness feels like in our body in our own unique way, and then when we have intentionality, we can start bringing it into our lives in the ways that make sense.