Robyn’s poems-with-drawings and recent short essays in Choosing Gentleness: Opening Our Hearts to All the Ways We Feel and Are in Every Moment 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.