The Strength of Softness

Learning to Stand Without the Applause

It’s tempting to measure our lives by the echoes around us.
Who approves? Who agrees? Who’s on our side?

In a world fuelled by likes and algorithms, it’s become natural—even expected—to shape our days around being seen, supported, or at the very least, understood. But the soul doesn’t thrive on applause. It thrives on something far quieter.

There’s a kind of strength that doesn’t come from being lifted up by others. It comes from learning to stand, with rooted feet and a quiet heart, even when no one claps.

It is the strength of softness.

When the Soul Withdraws From the Noise

Celtic spirituality speaks often of thresholds—those liminal, in-between spaces where God seems to draw especially close. But there’s a threshold that lives within us, too: the quiet space between needing to be right and simply choosing to be real.

When we no longer scramble to win arguments or seek revenge through righteousness, something sacred happens. The ego quiets. The heart opens. And we begin to hear God in the silence we once tried to fill.

Some situations don’t need our defence. They need our depth.
Some criticisms are invitations—to pause, to listen, to release what we thought we had to prove.

The ancient ones would retreat to the edge of the land to listen for God in the wind. Perhaps we too can retreat—just inwardly—for long enough to stop making everything about us, and start resting in the presence that has always held us.

Letting the Hurt Happen—and Transform

When people misunderstand you, judge you, or speak poorly of you, it hurts. Of course it does. To pretend it doesn’t would be to bypass your humanity.

But you don’t have to stay there.

In changework, we often speak of the difference between pain and identity. Pain says, “That stung.” Identity says, “I am not enough.” The first is real. The second is a trance.

When you hold your pain gently, without turning it into a story about your worth, something remarkable happens. You become available to grace.

The mystics knew this secret: the more you surrender your need to be admired, the freer your soul becomes. True humility isn’t about pretending to be small. It’s about no longer needing to be big.

It’s not self-rejection.
It’s self-forgetting—in the best way.
The way that lets you walk lightly, unburdened by constant self-concern.

The Fierce Grace of Humility

Humility, in our culture, has been misunderstood. It’s not grovelling. It’s not shrinking. It’s not allowing yourself to be walked over.

It’s presence.
Groundedness.
Being at peace with your place in the great dance of things.

To be humble is to stop performing, and start listening. It is to allow yourself to be seen—not just in your strengths, but in your limits—and to know that you are still loved.

God bends low to meet the humble, not because He prefers grovelling, but because the low place is where intimacy happens. It’s where pride no longer blocks the view.

The wild saints of the Celtic lands didn’t strive for greatness. They sought nearness—to the land, to each other, to God. And in their closeness to the earth, they became radiant.

Humility is not hiding. It’s becoming real.

You Don’t Have to Be Understood to Be Aligned

There will be times when people won’t get you. Times when your silence will be seen as weakness, your peace mistaken for passivity, your heart read all wrong.

But you are not here to be understood by everyone.
You are here to be true.

And truth, lived quietly, has a power that never needs to shout.

So stay close to your conscience. Let it guide your words, your choices, your presence. And when the voices of others grow loud, come back to the inner chapel. The one where God whispers your name without agenda.