Compassion
Happy Valentine’s Day! Love is alive! Love is all around! Love is not a limited resource! You are loved! You are LOVE!
For this week’s wall hanging for the Oracle Deck project, I chose the word “compassion”. This felt fitting with it being the week of Valentine’s Day when there is so much talk about love. I love love. I love platonic love, I love romantic love and I’m learning to love self-love. And I don’t feel like it’s truly possible to love - either ourselves or others - without compassion.
So, here is my piece representing compassion and a few of my thoughts on this very deep, essential, life changing practice/thing/action/lens to view the world through.
Compassion
To practice compassion is to learn to dance with both the light and the dark. It is stepping into the shadow and holding hands with the monsters. It is feeling your heart break and choosing to let the cracks widen and expand rather than sealing them shut. It is allowing your grief to be a portal, an opening rather than an ending. It is looking at all parts of yourself and others and gently asking, Where does it hurt?
Compassion is not passive. It is an act of courage, of tenderness. It asks us to witness pain without turning away, to sit in discomfort without rushing to fix or silence it. It is the willingness to see clearly and love anyway. To recognize that wounds ignored do not disappear—they fester, they harden. But wounds acknowledged, tended to, and held with care? They soften. They breathe. They heal.
When we cultivate compassion, we open ourselves to the fullness of life—its beauty, its sorrow, its messiness, its miracles. We welcome every part of ourselves and others, knowing that nothing is unworthy of love.
Where can you show yourself compassion?
What wounds do you wish to heal?
What does it feel like to widen those cracks in your heart and see what flows out of them?
Creative Prompts:
Write yourself a love note as if you were a dear friend who truly sees and understands you.
Imagine compassion as an entity. What does it look like? How does it move? Draw or embody it in some way.
In case it is of interest to you, here are a few books I’ve read this year that have really helped me to understand and cultivate my own compassion.
Welcoming the Unwelcome by Pema Chödrön
Radical Compassion by Tara Brach