Becoming Tender: A conversation with Naomi Shimada

I spoke to the wise soul that is Naomi Shimada about books, love, grief, and tenderness in our changing world.

courtesy of Naomi Shimada

We are born tender, our bones must be soft for us to do the journey from our mother’s womb to the outside world- tenderness is therefore directly correlated with vitality, with life. 

When a child is born, some of its “bones” are made up of flexible cartilage, which is a firm tissue softer than a bone. As we grow, the cartilage hardens and turns into bone- therefore as we move toward death we inevitably harden. It is important to think that time, experience, and knowledge harden us, but it is even more important to remember our original state.

We live in a society that teaches us that to be tender is to be weak, that vulnerability leads to being taken advantage of, and that we must stay hard. Over the years, we ourselves fall trap to society’s tricks and become hard on ourselves. 

In a world that promotes competitiveness, it is our responsibility to find the tenderness we were born with. Naomi Shimada is on a journey to stay tender in a hard world and shares this in her newsletter Tender Contributions through beautiful personal accounts about life and tenderness. She tells me that she finds beauty in creating something amongst the ruins.

She is a beautiful and tenderly powerful human, and speaking with her is a pleasure; her mission is a poetic antidote, when we first met in front of various plates of tapas in Barcelona, we discovered that even if we didn’t know eachother, our paths had crossed on several occasions.

Tenderness is her mission, and it is somehow mine too, because this is what poetic antidotes are to me. Luminaries like Toni Morrison often spoke of softness and beauty as things that we needed to find, especially in a world that felt oppressive. So, why are we so hard?

“There's this awakening to the systemic perspective that for example to be in a relationship with each other is to exploit each other, to compete with each other. To live in a world but not the world itself” says Naomi, “Society that has created these conditions, invisible, that affects the psyche to make people actually evil! I am starting to think more and more about what are the things that make people act so terribly. My fascination with softness comes as a fascination with finding beauty, and making survival beautiful”.

We are sitting in front of eachother with some tea, and have just shared the vulnerability of a moment we are both trespassing, to speak about tenderness now feels like a blessing we needed. I tell her that for me, tenderness is a revolutionary practice, a poetic antidote as I call them, that being the opposite of hard is not necessarily to be weak. I wonder why we associate softness with weakness, I see it more as flexibility. “Yes, to be malleable but tenacious. Softness is a remembering that love exists in the world,” says Naomi. 

“I figured out in my life, actually quite a long time ago, and I owe my whole career and everything to understanding that vulnerability was my superpower,” she confesses. Naomi lost her father when she was young, and looking back at old journals, she recently found that even the little girl in her had understood that tenderness was her North Star.

The openness of how she has shared her processes throughout her career and writing is such an inspiration, and she tells me the main reason she did it was because she understood her purpose of transforming what is hard. 

baby owls, because yes.

The truth is that life is not a linear process, and we have no control over what can happen. Pain is a huge part of life, even though many of us spend a lifetime avoiding it. When there are difficult moments, connection to life’s beauty and tenderness becomes a beacon of light. When we are grieving, part of us feels more alive than we have ever felt, we are able to notice small things and understand their incredible vitality. As simple as a bird singing. “I’ve been fascinated lately with reading people’s deathbed confessions,” Naomi recounts “I think there is a lot to learn from the dying.”

“What I’ve noticed is people often wish they had had more time with their loved ones, that they wish they had worked less, that they had said sorry, that they had slowed down.” I listen attentively, “And now we’re living in the ruins of having gone too fast, worked everything too hard and just exploited people on the planet. And I’m interested in practising the art of softness now, not just at the end of my life”. I resonate deeply with Naomi’s thinking, this whole newsletter is about finding the softness and beauty and knowing that it is revolutionary not only at a personal level but at a collective one. What if everyone slowed down? What if everyone worked on tenderness? What would the world look like now?

“Tenderness to me feels like a verb. It's like an action-orientated, a flowing motion, a practice,” Naomi says. Tenderness is not static, and just by existing in movement, it is a practice of deconditioning from the systems we inhabit. Whenever I write about rewilding stories, or understanding that two or more things can be held at the same time, I am introducing softness into the discourse. “Yes, we are socialised to think that our worthiness is only valid through accumulation and accomplishment as if we weren’t born worthy already” There is a real crisis of worth, and with it, it is incredibly hard to be tender with oneself and the world.

Courtesy of Naomi Shimada

Slowing down, for example, is an act of tenderness, I say.  “Yes, to me tenderness feels like a deep form of spirituality, of acknowledging that we are energetic beings, that we are all connected and belonging in the system, it is what allows us to see our connectivity,” Naomi says as her eyes sparkle for a moment. I tell her that for me, tenderness is also an act of deconditioning,  a reset and a recentering. But it is a recentering that doesn't blame you for going off track. It observes you leaving, and then calls you back, really gently. As I say these words I am reminded of the practice of meditation and mindfulness, that call back to the breath is one of the most tender acts you can do for yourself. I ask Naomi what her practices of tenderness are. 

“I have many practices, some really small: like touching my body in certain ways or interacting with the sky and the ground. And then I have my daily Kundalini practice which allows me to be tender with myself and the world,” she tells me. I tell her that for me, the practice of ritual and connecting to the body is also a way in which I practice tenderness. To come back to the body in a world that relies on machines and algorithms is a poetic antidote. 

Allowing for tenderness is something we often avoid. I have recently come to terms with how certain ways in which I was brought up formed a response in me that I had taken as being part of my character. I am often trying to control the emotions in a room, and have an incredible capability to read people’s emotions, I thought it was a gift until my therapist told me that it might be a trauma response from growing up with adults who had rage fits quite regularly. When she told me, a weight lifted off of my shoulders and I felt for the first time that I had permission to be tender with that part of myself. It was incredibly healing.

A few months ago, I held the newborn of one of my best friends in my arms - he was 12 hours old- and his tiny little elbow was at a weird angle. In my mind, something so tiny could break if not held properly, but the nurse reassured me: “His bones are soft, you can’t break him,” she laughed. I sat there with this tiny malleable being in my arms and began to cry. Nothing tender can be broken.

Below, find a practice from me and Naomi, a meditation for sweetness with some sensorial elements. Join the tenderevolution!

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Ritual/Practice

Sensorial elements: Make a tea with Meadowsweet, add lemon and honey if it feels good for you. Then take some Jasmine oil and put a drop of it on your hands. Rub the hands well and then place them on your nose, breathing in, taking in the sweetness of this incredible herb.

Then sit or lay comfortably, and do this meditation that Naomi has gifted the readers of waves. There is an audio for those who prefer it.

“Sit in a comfortable position with your back straight, and start to just center yourself with some long deep breaths. Take your right hand and start to feel the pulse of your left wrist. Connect to your pulse. You are amazing because you are alive. As the pulse comes in repeat the mantra ‘Sat Nam’, meaning ‘truth is my name’ in the sacred Sikh language of Gurmukhi. Do this for 3 mins or longer up to 12 if you desire.”