Sitting with compassion for others and myself led me to a beautiful meditation:
Fill yourself up with compassion with each breath.
What do you look like when you are living with compassion?
Show yourself some compassion right now.
Allow your hand to move and breathe compassion into your body.
Notice your body and breathe compassion.
Let compassion move your hand.
How are you transmitting compassion?
What is your message of compassion today?
Listen to compassion.
Take a deeper breath in and out.
Breathe compassion.
When you see the world with compassion, what’s possible?
And take a nice big breath.
Be compassionate to you, always.
Beam compassion with every interaction.
And so it is.
As Pema Chödrön writes, “Just as nurturing our ability to love is a way of awakening bodhichitta, so also is nurturing our ability to feel compassion. Compassion, however, is more emotionally challenging than loving-kindness because it involves the willingness to feel pain. It definitely requires the training of a warrior.
When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance.”
Stay with your breath. Stay with yourself. Stay with compassion.