When softness Begins
Softness is a practice, not a destination.
And when it begins, urgency often rises to meet it. This is about that moment—and what becomes possible when you don't run.
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I have a confession. When I started writing about softness, my nervous system panicked. Within a single week, everything shifted.
A wonderful work opportunity appeared, and immediately my mind asked: Will this be taken away? Is it too good to be true? Will they change their mind?
Conflict arose in my relationship. Fears about money and scarcity surfaced. A conversation with a friend left me feeling drained, tired and out of sorts.
“Every trigger point for safety-
activated all at once. ”
And just like that, I was back in an old familiar pattern. Fear, grasping, urgency. The need to fix, to control, to stay a step ahead. The very thing I was beginning to write about—softness as a way of being- had pulled me straight into everything that made softness feel impossible.
I know this pattern lived in my body because my body told me so. That week, my appetite decreased. I lost the motivation to move, to be in my body at all. My heart felt tight, like something was pressing on it from the inside. Sleep became fragmented. Some nights it did not come at all.
This is what urgency feels like when it returns:
not just as a thought, but as a physical reality. The body bracing again, the nervous system remembering what it learned long ago: Softness is not safe here.
The voices came quickly. I'm falling behind and being lazy. I'm losing control. I should be doing more. These are the universal whispers of urgency. You may know them, too.
But underneath those, my own questions surfaced. The ones that belong specifically to my life, my history: Is this even possible for a woman like me, a black woman? Will my life always be a struggle? Am I fooling myself, thinking I could rest here?
This is where my nervous system went. Because softness has never felt safe for me. Safety came from control, from having solutions, from taking action, from staying a step ahead, and always having a contingency plan. Softness was not about resting, noticing, [or] non-reactivity. I didn't know what that was. I didn't know how to be still without feeling like I was falling behind.
Urgency is a survival state, not your natural state. It kept you sharp. It kept you responsible. It kept you from falling apart. It kept you from being punished for stillness.
Urgency made sense:
When you were made responsible too early.
You became the mediator, the glue, the one who held it together.
You performed to earn safety.
You became hypervigilant to avoid danger.
You muted yourself to avoid punishment.
The nervous system learned. Stillness is dangerous. Rest is exposure. Softness will get you hurt.
So you kept moving. You kept fixing. You kept bracing for the next thing. And it worked until it didn't. Until the exhaustion became louder than the fear. Until the body started asking for something [that] urgency could never give.
After a few tears, I sat with it. The grief, the fear, the tightness in my chest. I did not rush to fix anything.
Because here's the truth: Urgency is exhausting. It demands decisive action without clarity. And I was tired. Tired of always trying to fix control, be a step ahead. Tired of worrying about what could go wrong. Tired of bracing for disasters.
So I stopped. Not because I had the answers, but because I didn't have the energy to keep running from the questions.
And something else happened. In that pause, I stopped internalising the triggers as proof of my unworthiness. I did not make the conflict mean I'm too much. I did not make the money fear mean I'll never have enough. I did not make the opportunity mean it will be taken away because good things don't happen to me. I saw the pattern, and for the first time, I did not collapse into it.
Honesty
I want to be honest with you. This was not a sudden breakthrough. This moment was built on years of work, years of asking the same questions. How do I live authentically? A life that feels like mine? What does that require?
Years of examining my beliefs- understanding them as conditioning, not truth. Learning to separate who I am from the patterns I inherited.
It was a thousand small moments coming together.
The books I read, the conversations I had, the times I failed and tried again, the glimmers of softness I touched and then lost and then touched again.
This time, I didn't fully go back to urgency. I noticed it happen in real time, not because everything in my life was stable, but because I was ready.
Readiness is not about perfect conditions. It's about capacity. And capacity is built slowly, invisibly, over time.
Here's what I began to understand. Just because you begin to experience softness doesn't mean your body forgets where it has been.
My nervous system knew urgency. It did not know, allowing, it did not know permission. So when softness began, my body did what it always did. It reached for what felt familiar. But this time I could see it, I could name it, and I could choose differently.
Softness didn't remove the old patterns. It revealed them. It pulled me into the very mechanisms that had ensured my survival, but kept my true self at a distance. Engaging with this work, thinking deeply about softness, writing about it, [and] trying to live it required me to see myself clearly: how I was showing up, where I was still bracing, what I was still afraid of. And it began to show me where I could make different choices.
“To the woman who’s reading this or listening to this. Your work has not been in vain. The therapy, the tears, the excavation, the searching for answers, the moments when you thought nothing was changing. It was all building something. A thousand small moments.”
Preparing you for the moment when urgency rises, and you finally have the capacity to see it for what it is. Not a sign that you're failing. Not proof that Softness isn't for you. But an old pattern, encountering something new. When urgency comes—and it will come—you can meet it differently.
You can notice the voices: I'm falling behind. I'm losing control. I should be doing more. You can feel the body: the tight chest, the lost appetite, the sleeplessness. And instead of acting from urgency, you can pause. You can ask: What would Softness do here?
Not fix. Not control. Not rush.
stay. Just notice. Just let the body learn that this time, it might be safe.
And if you haven't done that work yet—if you're just beginning—this is where you start. Not by having it all figured out. But by trusting that Softness is possible, even when your body doesn't believe it yet. You re-interpret urgency from Softness. You don't act from the panic. You stay with yourself until the panic passes.
That's the practice.
Softness is not a destination you arrive at and stay. It is a practice, a returning, a choosing, again and again and again. The body might resist. Old patterns will rise. Urgency will tell you that you're falling behind. That stillness is dangerous, and that you should be doing more.
And that resistance is not failure: It is the beginning of the real work.
Stay with yourself. Notice what rises. Let the body learn slowly that softness might be safe after all. And know this:
Sometimes what rises is not urgency. Sometimes it's fire.
* Images sourced via Pinterest. All rights belong to the original creators.*