Compassion

Photo via Lululemon.

Pigeon pose is a great posture for practicing active compassion. As sensation fills up the hip joint, turn your thoughts to those who suffer from chronic pain. Allow yourself to love others and yourself, despite any momentary discomfort.

Learn to apply this off the mat, and you begin to change the world around you.

A practice that can lay the groundwork for drawing wisdom from our own sufferings is to be present to other people’s suffering. To witness. To see how many are the ways people dealing with suffering. To learn how suffering can elicit creativity or deepen hope or resilience or understanding. 


Some people recoil from others’ suffering—don’t like to visit hospitals, don’t know what to say, wish they were somewhere else, or could just send flowers. 


But a willingness to show up, even in our uncertainty about how to behave, may not only be a gift, it may help us learn to enter the places of darkness with confidence and trust, not needing to know how, or to predict outcomes, but to be fully present to whatever the moment calls for.

-Marilyn Chandler McEnryre