“If you are open to fine distinctions, you can observe that something in you knows the way home, slow as it may be, it returns you to the center of itself.”

An audio version of this blog post can be found here.

This quote above from Ruthy Alon, a late and great Feldenkrais somatic movement teacher, is a favorite of mine.

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.”

Rumi’s quote offers a beautiful insight about the dynamic nature of balance. Balance includes both opening and closing, exertion and rest.

As we move through each of the days that make up our lives, it’s essential to make time to pause. It’s good to check in with yourself and see how you are faring. Is it easy for you to relocate your center…has empathic distress gotten the better of you?

There’s plenty to be concerned about in our world and it’s essential that we pull back, take a breath.

“Self help books (or videos) are like car repair manuals: you can read them all day but doing so doesn’t repair anything. Working on a car means rolling up your sleeves and getting under the hood, and you have to be willing to get dirt on your hands and grease beneath your fingernails. Overhauling emotional knowledge is no spectator sport; it demands a messy experience of yanking and tinkering that comes from a limbic bond. If someone’s relationships today bear a troubled imprint, they do so because an influential relationship left its mark on a child’s mind. When a limbic connection has established a neural pattern, it takes a limbic connection to revise it.” “A General Theory Of Love” Lewis, Amini & Lannon, MDs

What is self compassion and what gets in our way of accessing it? It seems like an elusive concept. Most of us have not been raised or educated to appreciate self compassion yet, I’ve found it to be a potent medicine.

In conversations with those whom I work and from my own experience, self compassion gets confused with self pity or self indulgence.