Are you familiar with the feeling that arises when you comfort someone? Can you remember the last time your child, partner, or friend was feeling anxious, hurt, stressed, embarrassed, or any other host of uncomfortable emotion? Can you remember wanting to hold them, hug them, make things better? Can you remember wanting to take the pain away from them, if only for a moment? I invite you to fully feel into that and what it was like? Where in your body was that coming from? What sensations arise around those feelings? Where is that desire to hug sourcing from? Your heart? Your spine? Your head?
Do you feel vibrations in your body? A fullness? A warmth? Do you feel love and the support it provides arising from the depths of your being in order to provide solace for this loved one? Can you sit in the presence of this feeling and allow it to penetrate your entire body and all the spaces within and outside of you? How does this essence move between you and your loved one? Does it leave you to go to them, or position itself inside of you and radiate outward to them? Nothing you feel is wrong or incorrect, it is just how it shows up in you.
How does it feel to have this sense of love and caring arise in you? What is the experience you are having just noticing the emotions and remembering the intense want to make things better?
Now, as you are sitting in this sense of love and acceptance for this other person can you call to mind a moment for yourself where you were less than accepting of your own behavior, or your own experience or actions. Something that occurred where you were maybe harsh on yourself, didn’t meet your own expectations, or someone else’s and felt the hurt and disappointment from that?
Here’s the most important part, can you take the feelings you have generated and radiated toward this other person and their situation and allow them to radiate into your own experience, your own sense of self, your own harshness?
You may know this as self-compassion; it is the space that allows us to grow and change. To show up for ourselves, hold ourselves, and provide a love for ourselves even when we may not be getting it from others. It allows us to accept that we are human, that we are doing our best, that we are allowed to be messy and still KNOW that we are enough, we valuable, we are whole.
May you be able to practice this every day and know that you are loved no matter what.
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