Warmth Is For Sissies, and Other Unexamined Beliefs

Some of the things we believe most firmly, we have never once said out loud. They are not opinions. They are unexamined beliefs, and they sit so far down that they feel like facts about the world rather than ideas about it. I found one of mine on a spiritual course, in a session that had started somewhere else entirely.

I had gone into that week carrying an anger I had held for a very long time. Old and familiar. Part of the furniture. And that week I had finally put it down in one of my own coaching sessions (yes, I’m a coach who takes coaching. I walk the talk because I know these sessions work).

What surprised me was not the relief. It was the room.

While I was busy being the wronged one, there had been no space to look at myself. I was too occupied.

Once the anger went quiet, there was space and I walked into my next coaching session with nothing in particular to defend. So we went looking for who I am when the anger is not running and what surfaced was warmth.

I rejected it on the spot. The words were out of me before I could catch them.

Unexamined beliefs only survive in the dark

I sat there stunned by my own sentence. Warmth is for sissies? Where on earth had I picked that up?

I had been carrying it like a law of nature. Said out loud in a quiet room it could not stand up for a second. It was preposterous. And it had been running my life for decades, rationing my own warmth, letting it out on special occasions only, as though it was a weakness I had to keep under control.

This is the part I want to pass on because I do not think I am unusual in this. These sentences sit at our core. We don’t know we’re holding them, and that is exactly why they last.

They cannot survive daylight, though. Say one out loud and really hear it, and it starts to come apart on its own.

It is too absurd to keep believing once you have looked straight at it.

Warmth is not soft

So I owned it instead. I am a warm person, and there is real strength in that.

Then I imagined carrying it. Into rooms, into conversations, meeting people from it rather than guarding it.

And I could see how much people love being met that way. I saw myself greeting someone genuinely glad to see them, and I watched something in them unclench. Met with real kindness instead of judgement, people stop bracing. They do not have to perform or prove anything, so they soften.

That is where the connection happens. Heart to heart, rather than mask to mask.

Because underneath the mask, there is almost always someone longing to be met.

So my warmth felt almost like a superpower. And absurdly, I had been guarding it as though it made me weak.

So I would ask you what the session asked me. What are the sayings you live by that you have never actually examined? The ones so old and so deep you take them for facts.

“Warmth is for sissies.” “Rest is lazy.” “Wanting things is selfish.” Yours will be worded in your own way, and you will probably know it by the small flinch when you finally say it out loud.