Tender & Fierce

This morning I read an article by Dr. Kristin Neff, pioneer in the study of self compassion, in which she writes about two different kinds of self compassion that are essential, especially for women: Yin self compassion is tender, it is loving kindness toward oneself, where Yang self compassion is fierce, it is the empowered, protective, truth-speaking form of self compassion. I love those two words so much, both individually and also how they fit together so gracefully to make a whole.

Earlier, I could feel the raw edges of rage the minute I got out of bed and my feet hit the cool floor. It's a quickening; a sudden red hot feeling of pressure and chaos, a wild animal clawing at my skin from the inside.

I seem able to find compassion for myself in many of the feelings I experience these days, though not rage, which has lately been exploding out of me without so much as the early warning I experienced this morning. It is a horrible thing, and afterwards, leaves me feeling buried in deep layers of intolerable shame and despair. Nora, my trauma-specialist psychologist tells me that not only is the rage appropriate and completely understandable given my traumas, but that it is a positive movement, a sign that the freeze that I have lived most of my life in is thawing, that the fight (of the fight/flight/freeze trauma response) instinct is coming alive. It is a relief to hear that, but there is a humongous gulf between that information and being able to stop feeling like the worst kind of human being possible, and it is in her office that the notion of self compassion keeps coming up, and I do see it there, I see it in her soft brown eyes when she looks at me in her tender way; I do see it, but it is not yet able to enter my being.

Here's the thing: as with so many other things in its vicious cycle, trauma itself affects a person's ability to practice self compassion. Ironic that it is compassion itself that carries within it the capacity to heal the very same trauma.

This morning, somehow, miraculously, I am able to skip the explosion and go straight to what always comes after, waves and waves of incredible grief and sorrow. Usually it's only through the raging that I am finally able to collapse into all that rests below it. But at least this morning, there is that.

And if not compassion itself, I have now these two words, which I will hold tenderly and fiercely to me, carry with me, write about, mull over, and try on for size when I am able.


With Love 🧡


Click here for the Kristen Neff article.

Dreaming

This morning I pick up Mark Nepo’s The Endless Practice and I read this:

Wakefulness is not a destination

but a song the human heart keeps singing

Thank god. There it is, a tiny shaft, the crack as Leonard Cohen wrote, that lets the light in. A reminder who I am. Who we are. There’s no end game here, just a human heart that keeps on trying.

I’m both relieved for the reminder, right there in print, and grief stricken that it is so easily forgotten; and in the oblivion so much lost.

The other day I came upon a blog by a woman older than me who quite unexpectedly became an entrepreneur later in life. She writes that each morning she jumps out of bed excited what each new day will bring, what might be created that day.

My envy was palpable. It’s been years since I’ve known that feeling. Definitely not since my marriage ended ten years ago and I was plunged into acute depression and a true dark night of the soul that went on for years. The worst has passed, but most of the time I’m like a cloudy day. I know the sun is there somewhere, I just can’t find it. Or worse, when days string into weeks and weeks into months, forget that it exists altogether.

Then along comes Nepo, who has pulled me out of the dark and cold time and time again, writing in his simple staggering way about the heart, about our precious human journeys. And a silly little five-day online thingy about writing your dreams into being. Spiritually schooled for years in Advaita, where the ever present now is the only place to be, it seems like heresy. This dreaming is bullshit, I mutter to myself and at the same moment I pull out my colorful markers and giant pad of paper and begin to fantasize about what I would like my life to look like in two or three years. 

But it’s no mystery. I can tell you right now, I want it to look like that woman’s: Creative and exciting. Filled with passions and beauty. But also, I want an open heart; I want more sunny days than cloudy. And while we’re at it, let’s heal that trauma and the shame and exhaustion that pour from its center. How about an entire revisioning about the whole ageing thing? Oh god, and learn how to finally make those gorgeous, dreamy photos that I swoon over; write enough essays to fill a book; learn how to use Tumblr; be in nature everyday; have a relationship again.

And for a moment the clouds are parted and there it is: a tender human heart singing its wild dreams.