Where Tenderness Lives
A journey of self-exploration,
forgiveness, and individual and
collective healing.
BY HEATHER PLETT
Where Tenderness Lives
A journey of self-exploration, forgiveness, and individual and collective healing.
BY HEATHER PLETT
“Refreshing like a glass of water in the desert, Heather Plett’s book is an engrossing page-turner for those of us on an accelerated path of healing and transformation.” – Bethany Webster, author of Discovering the Inner Mother
In this illuminating book,
acclaimed author
Heather Plett reveals:
How trauma―from the earliest patterns of our upbringing to devastating events―can shape our lives and our personalities
How treating ourselves with radical tenderness can be the balm of healing for our wounded selves, and how this healing can invite others into their own healing
How learning to hold space for ourselves―our hopes, our aspirations, and our desires―is one of the most worthwhile pursuits of a life well-lived
“Bravely, beautifully, Heather Plett takes us on a journey into her life. We go along gladly, for every bit of her hard-won growth and wisdom feels absolutely genuine, and generous too.” – Dora Dueck, author of Return Strokes
In this illuminating book,
acclaimed author
Heather Plett reveals:
How trauma―from the earliest patterns of our upbringing to devastating events―can shape our lives and our personalities
How treating ourselves with radical tenderness can be the balm of healing for our wounded selves, and how this healing can invite others into their own healing
How learning to hold space for ourselves―our hopes, our aspirations, and our desires―is one of the most worthwhile pursuits of a life well-lived
How trauma―from the earliest patterns of our upbringing to devastating events―can shape our lives and our personalities
How treating ourselves with radical tenderness can be the balm of healing for our wounded selves, and how this healing can invite others into their own healing
How learning to hold space for ourselves―our hopes, our aspirations, and our desires―is one of the most worthwhile pursuits of a life well-lived
Each chapter in this heartfelt and honest book contains a revelation about how to move from shades of fear and doubt to freedom and joy.
Through stories that range from what it meant to grow up Mennonite to surviving a horrific assault; from leaving a marriage that no longer worked to the poignant moment her grown daughters leave home, Plett provides a vocabulary of understanding how we grew into the people we are and how to move on from what no longer serves us.
From Forbes Magazine:
“Where Tenderness Lives is remarkably intimate, even raw. Author Heather Plett explores challenging themes, like the impacts of childhood and early-adulthood trauma on “adult” personalities and coping mechanisms, how “holding space for ourselves” despite competing personal and professional demands can improve our productivity and potential, and how “radical tenderness”—which is still frowned upon in hard-charging business culture—could be the secret to a fully actualized life and career.”
Through stories that range from what it meant to grow up Mennonite to surviving a horrific assault; from leaving a marriage that no longer worked to the poignant moment her grown daughters leave home, Plett provides a vocabulary of understanding how we grew into the people we are and how to move on from what no longer serves us.
“Though her experiences are distinctly hers, Heather tenderly and brilliantly invites us into our own, offering profound healing and hope along the way.”
– Ronna Detrick, author of Rewriting Eve
From Publishers Weekly:
“Canadian author, speaker, and teacher Plett’s second addition to the self-help/memoir genre, following The Art of Holding Space, is a fiercely vulnerable yet instructive set of stories that explore Plett’s relationship with trauma and healing. Plett holds tenderness and storytelling itself as the keys rather than a fantasy, offered in many self-help books, of some “triumphant, permanent fix.” No stone is left unturned in the landscape of life Plett draws, as she explores, with candor, her Mennonite upbringing (“To live a Mennonite childhood is to learn to live at the edges, in the space in between”), sexual assault (“I am still living with my rapist’s hands at my throat”), tumultuous marriage (“I was that woman behind the door when my former husband attempted suicide”) and more.’
By reflecting on her own life with vulnerability and self-compassion, Plett provides a springboard for
your own self-exploration, as well as a path to
individual and collective healing.
In her first book, The Art of Holding Space: A Practice of Love, Liberation, and Leadership, Heather started with a more broad view of what it means to hold space, and in this book, she narrows the focus and talks about how her life has been enriched by the deep and healing practice of holding space for herself.
Heather is an embodied, intuitive, much sought-after author, speaker, facilitator, and teacher on the continually evolving concept of Holding Space. Her first book, The Art of Holding Space: A Practice of Love, Liberation and Leadership has sold over 10,000 copies and has been translated into Dutch, with a Vietnamese edition in the works. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Harvard Business Review and Grist magazine and has been quoted in multiple books as well as curriculum for nurses, hospice care workers, yoga teachers, facilitators, and military chaplains. Heather is co-founder of the Centre for Holding Space and has created on-line workshops, self-study programs, in-person retreats, and curriculum for several businesses and hundreds of individuals worldwide. Heather is currently a citizen of the world with no fixed address, though she will always call Canada home as it is still the country where her three adult daughters live and where her business partner, Krista, holds down the fort.