Our conversation spanned the mundane, “how are you today,” to the existential, “how are you right now”. Somewhere in the exchange my companion paused with a wondering at how I had juxtaposed tender and tension so closely in my description.
Not a pair of words I had ever pondered the etymology of either, I wrote it down; something to look up in a future down-time space. Such a sweet flowering of history, language and understanding awaited me.
The root of both tender and tension is tend; Latin: tendere – to stretch.
Tend: Origin
To tend, to care for a garden, a space, or a relationship is to be stretched. In our caring and commitment to care for its wellbeing and growth, we are grown and moved. So much so that we can bend. We begin to ‘tend in that direction,’ of what it is we tend, inclined towards our intention.
Intend, to stretch our awareness or desired action towards something. As in, to move with intention, or treat with intention. In Craniosacral therapy, we are stretching our awareness towards tension or health, support and care for what is tender.
Tender, young, fresh, weak: to be stretched thin to the point of weakness that becomes related to the young, new or healing. If one is tender, we treat them gently. We are tenders, stretching our intention towards the vulnerable and tender pieces of ourselves and our community.
We are tenders of the tender with our intentions.
Tend is also the root of tendon and tension.
Tendon: flexible, strong, collagen tissue anchoring muscle to bone. The thing that is stretched! The anatomy that moves and holds, is expressed through, allow for, and strengthened by, the quality of stretch.
Tension, this often used and maybe misunderstood word also arises from a place of stretch. Tension, so often the thing we tend, or stretch, away from, transformed for me in this exploration from a place of over holding, or holding in a way that is challenging, to a place where stretch may be expressed. The tension in a relationship refers to our place of challenge, asking us to be more supple, to stretch towards each other in understanding or away from each other to create more space. Tension can stretch us toward new skills, new revelations and ways of being. When we find ourselves (and our bodies) under tension without support, fluidity, or the ability to bend, tension can stretch us to breaking points.
Explaining Craniosacral work to my clients, I often offer a description of how our bodies are tensegrity structures.
Every part is connected in a dynamic dance to every other part. Our anatomy is responsive to shifts in how we carry and balance our weight, rotate and extend with every step and motion. Deepening my understanding beyond anatomy in this way brought forward appreciation for stretch and tension as not only dynamic, but the place of more aliveness in our learning, our experience of tenderness, and our need to be tended.
The distance between tender and tension as opposites, collapsed into a middle ground of what stretch, or mobility and the ability to stretch offers us in our human experience as physical beings as well as emotional and spiritual beings. Every movement and configuration in our bodies and relationships offers new opportunities to explore these shapes of ourselves in their tenderness, in their softness and capacity, and how we can tend to this process in ourselves and in each other.
Such unexpected revelation has left me heart tender, my heart is stretched, more open, more understanding as well as more deeply tended. An understanding has arisen in meeting myself and my clients in their tension and tenderness, a way of listening beneath what they are saying or identifying that brings us closer to the actual need, the most supportive way of tending.
So sincerely in awe of how this teaching came into the cranial field leaving me heartily, thoroughly, heart-tendered.
So thoughtfully and well expressed. The sooner we learn to tend to ourselves and the tensions we carry in all forms, the more we can appreciate the mental and physical gardens entrusted to us. Thx for sharing!