“Gentleness may have been the first thing I noticed about Joe…I may have noticed his size at about the same time: though he is by no means an enormous man, he was the tallest person in our training, and one of the few men. Though I believe that he is gentle by nature, I get the sense that he also carefully cultivates gentleness, probably in part to compensate for a tendency to seem imposing. The intensity of his focus, his fierce intelligence, and his penetrating insight may have contributed to an all-around sense of intimidation, were it not for his warm heart and gentle approach…Joe’s equanimity and gentleness were part of what made me so suspicious. I felt I was being lulled into something, perhaps made to accept some kind of touchy-feely, New Age pabulum. (Only much later would it occur to me, with a painful shock: somehow I had been taught to fear genuine kindness, to be suspicious of sentiment, to believe that if it wasn’t genuine poetry, it wasn’t genuine feeling. When, I wondered, did I become so infected with irony that I couldn’t receive uncomplicated love?) With time, though, I recognized that Joe epitomized the first rule of Rubenfeld Synergy Method: gentleness. Approaching our clients this way also communicates a deep kind of attention: when we are being gentle, we are listening, and leaving space for the client’s truth to emerge.”
~ Kamela Dolinova, Gentleness: the first word in our work
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