September 7
I can meet others with compassion while remaining rooted in myself.
The way I care for myself affects the way I am able to care for others.
There was a time when loving someone could easily become taking on what belonged to them. Their feelings became mine to manage. Their struggles became mine to fix. Their choices became mine to worry about. Their discomfort could become more important than my own needs.
I understand love differently now.
There is a difference between holding space for someone and taking on their stuff.
Holding space allows me to be present with another person without requiring them to be different. I can listen. I can care. I can offer support when it is mine to offer. I can have compassion for the wounds, beliefs, fears, and experiences that may influence how someone moves through the world.
And I can let what belongs to them remain theirs.
Their choices are theirs.
Their beliefs are theirs.
Their emotions are theirs.
Their healing is theirs.
Their relationship with life is theirs.
And mine is mine.
This is not indifference. It is not turning away from someone I love or deciding that their struggles don’t matter to me.
It is learning where I end and another person begins.
I can love someone deeply and wish something different for them without making it my responsibility to create that difference.
I can meet people where they are, love them, tell the truth, and live mine.
Sometimes compassion itself can become tangled with an old belief that being loving means tolerating everything, remaining endlessly available, or setting aside my own experience because someone else is struggling.
But compassion includes me too.
I can have compassion for another person’s experience and compassion for the part of me that needs quiet.
I can understand another person’s fear without making that fear my own.
I can honor another person’s choices while making different choices for myself.
I can love without absorbing.
Compassion does not require me to abandon myself in order to make room for someone else.
I used to think protecting myself meant becoming stronger than whatever was around me. I imagined needing to withstand difficult energy, push against it, rise above it, or somehow prove that it could not affect me.
I don’t need to prove that anymore.
If something affects me, I can acknowledge that it affects me.
And then I can ask:
What is mine to do?
Protection doesn’t always look like armor.
Sometimes it looks like choice.
I can choose what I participate in. I can step away when I am able. I can speak clearly. I can ask for what I need. I can go outside. I can pray. I can breathe. I can seek quiet where I can find it. I can spend time with people who nourish me. I can place my attention on what reminds me of beauty, possibility, and Love.
I can become intentional about what I allow into my inner world and what I create around me.
He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.
—Psalm 23
I am learning to recognize my own still waters.
They are the places, practices, people, and choices that return me to myself.
Sometimes they are found in actual water, trees, mountains, mist, or the quiet presence of another living being.
Sometimes still waters are prayer.
A walk.
A closed door.
Music.
Silence.
A conversation in which I feel deeply seen.
Meaningful work.
Rest.
Creating something that did not exist before.
I don’t need the entire world around me to become peaceful before I begin creating peace within and around me.
And I don’t have to wait for every circumstance to align before I create.
Creativity is not limited to art. I create through the words I speak, the work I offer, the spaces I tend, the boundaries I establish, the relationships I nurture, the beauty I notice, the choices I make, and the energy I bring to what is mine.
I can create with what I have now while still dreaming of something more.
That doesn’t mean pretending my current circumstances meet every need. It doesn’t mean giving up my desire for change.
It means I don’t have to postpone living until everything around me looks the way I wish it did.
I can tend to what is mine.
I can create pockets of peace.
I can seek my still waters.
I can continue imagining what I want to create next.
And I can trust that caring for myself does not diminish the love I have for anyone else.
Perhaps it allows that love to become freer.
Less entangled with fixing.
Less burdened by responsibility that was never mine.
Less dependent upon another person changing.
I can love someone as they are and remain devoted to what brings me peace, safety, and personal sovereignty.
I can let what belongs to another remain theirs.
I can take responsibility for what belongs to me.
I can create with what I have now.
And through all of it, I can keep returning to compassion, for others and for myself.
Grounding Questions
Where might compassion for someone else need to include compassion for myself too?
Is there something I am carrying today that actually belongs to someone else?
What are my still waters: the places, people, practices, or choices that restore me?
What can I create with what I have now?
