Gifts of Imperfection

Compassion
To prepare for writing my book on shame, I read everything I could find
on compassion. I ultimately found a powerful fit between the stories I
heard in the interviews and the work of American Buddhist nun Pema
Chödrön. In her book 
The Places That Scare You,
Chödrön writes,
“When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience
the fear of our pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning
to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us.”
2
What I love about Chödrön’s definition is her honesty about the 
vulnerability of practicing compassion. If we take a closer look at the
origin of the word 
compassion,
much like we did with 
courage,
we see
why compassion is not typically our first response to suffering. The word
compassion
is derived from the Latin words 
pati 
and 
cum,
meaning
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COURAGE, COMPASSION, AND CONNECTION: THE GIFTS OF IMPERFECTION

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“to suffer with.” I don’t believe that compassion is our default response.
I think our first response to pain—ours or someone else’s—is to self-
protect. We protect ourselves by looking for someone or something to
blame. Or sometimes we shield ourselves by turning to judgment or by
immediately going into fix-it mode. 
Chödrön addresses our tendency to self-protect by teaching that we
must be honest and forgiving about when and how we shut down: “In
cultivating compassion we draw from the wholeness of our experi-
ence—our suffering, our empathy, as well as our cruelty and terror. It
has to be this way. Compassion is not a relationship between the healer
and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know
our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.
Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”
3
In my story, Ashley was willing to be in my darkness with me. She
wasn’t there as my helper or to fix me; she was just with me—as an
equal—holding my hand as I waded through my feelings.