Episode 26: You Can Land At Compassion
It can be easy to criticize and judge ourselves or others. It requires a little more effort to cultivate compassion, but it's one of the most beautiful, expansive emotions you can feel. Listen in this week as I share practical ways to shift from judgment to compassion, even when it feels hard. Whether you’re struggling to show kindness to yourself, a loved one, or even a difficult person in your life, this episode will inspire you to aim for compassion—and give yourself grace when you miss.
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Full Transcript:
You're listening to the Think New Thoughts podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 26. You can land at compassion.
I'm Emily Ricks, and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships. In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way so you can love God, your neighbor, and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.
Hello, my friend, so glad to have you here today.
Let's talk about compassion. It's one of my favorite emotions, and I love aiming to feel it as I live my life. So what is it? I like to define compassion as a deep awareness of another person's suffering.
In some ways, it's synonymous with love, but I think compassion is a little richer and a little deeper, and has an element of really meeting someone with understanding when they're struggling. I think of judgment as the opposite of compassion. Like on a continuum, judgment's over here on one end, and compassion is way over on the other side.
And I think my default personality, I think maybe all humans are somewhat this way, I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I tend to default toward judgment and criticism of myself, and judgment and criticism of other people, which is in opposition to compassion. Like if I don't manage my brain, and if I don't make intentional decisions of how I want to think and feel, then a lot of times I'll end up feeling critical and judgmental. Judgment sounds like, she shouldn't be like that, he's lazy, I'm so bad at this, he's rude, she's so negative, like can you hear the judgment in it? But compassion sounds more like, hmm, she's going through something hard right now, that must be challenging to be in that situation.
I bet that's painful for them. That's what compassion sounds like, it's deep awareness of another person's suffering, and meeting it with understanding rather than judgment. Compassion is not the same as feeling sorry for someone.
Some people get this mixed up, compassion isn't pity for yourself or someone else. Pity is poor me, I'm the victim, something else ruined my life, or poor you, that's so unfair, they shouldn't have done that. And this is not compassion, because can you hear the judgment that's inside the pity? Judgment of what is fair, judgment of who is right or who is wrong.
So pity is small and weak, and it tends to stunt growth and keep people stuck. But compassion is expansive, it enlarges and strengthens and lifts. And again, it's on the other side of the continuum from judgment.
Compassion isn't judging whether a person caused their own suffering, or judging somebody else who we think caused it, it's recognizing and acknowledging that another person is hurting in some way. So I wanna share with you an experience I had where I was able to land at compassion. It's really simple, but I'm hoping it will give you a sense of what it looked like for me, so that you can aim for compassion in your life, however that might look for you.
So my son Tyler, who's in fifth grade, recently got the flu. And then once his chills and fever and all that went away, there was a really severe fatigue that lingered for weeks. He had kind of a lingering cold, and then was just uncharacteristically tired.
He would wake up day after day, get ready for school, and decide he just didn't have the energy to go. And the longer this went on, the more I started to get worn down by the unpredictability of it all, and the limbo of not really being able to plan my day and get my stuff done. One morning, he had gotten ready for the day, but was moving pretty slow, and was really hesitant again of whether he was gonna be able to go to school.
I was in the kitchen, helping Tyler get some breakfast and some medicine, and I started to feel frustration and irritation well up inside me. And I had a lot of judgmental thoughts, like, why is he walking around being a victim and being so indecisive? Like, just tell me what you need. Or maybe I was getting kind of suspicious of him.
Like, is he even actually that sick? Like, is he overplaying this just so that he can get away with laying around? So I'm feeling all that judgment, and it felt gross. So I took some deep breaths and kind of reminded myself, like, hey, I wanna land at compassion here. And I can tell, I can feel in my body right now, I'm not feeling compassion.
This feels like judgment. This isn't really how I wanna show up for my son. And then the most interesting thing happened.
It actually kind of surprised me, because I thought what I meant when I affirmed that intention that I want to land at compassion, I thought I meant I wanted to land at compassion for my son. But what happened next was actually about compassion for me. So I had been trying for weeks to just press down my frustration and be like, it's not that big of a deal.
Don't complain about this, Emily. It is what it is. Just make it work and don't be selfish about your time and your tasks.
And in that moment, as I was in the kitchen measuring out 15 milliliters of DayQuil for my son, I landed at compassion for myself. And I was able to just acknowledge for myself in my own mind how this has actually been really challenging for me. I had been rearranging my plans and it had actually required a lot of me to navigate work commitments and other responsibilities with sick kids and figure out what really matters, what to prioritize.
And I had been putting a lot of effort in to manage it all. And I had just been kind of dismissing all of that effort and being like, this shouldn't even be a big deal to you. Just get over it.
And in the kitchen that morning, the thought that came to my mind was, wow, Emily, you're really doing something challenging here. This is asking a lot of you. You're doing great.
Those were the thoughts going through my mind as I handed my son the DayQuil. And it was like this wave of relief, this wave of love, this wave of acknowledgement and validation and appreciation and the frustration and the judgment and the impatience that I had been feeling melted away and gave way to something so beautiful that felt amazing. It was compassion.
I landed at compassion for myself and it felt like a big warm hug. Because before that, I had been feeling judgment of my son, but also judgment of myself, which I didn't even really realize until later. I had been kind of thinking, this isn't even that hard, Emily.
Why are you so selfish? Why are you so negative about this? Why can't you just get over it and not complain? And so I was using willpower to try to consciously choose to show up in a way that was kind and supportive, even though I was feeling frustrated. And my willpower was running out and I was getting tired. When I landed at compassion for myself and felt that warm hug, that it's okay that this has been hard for me.
It's okay that I got worn down by it. Then all of a sudden, I didn't need to rely on willpower to be gentle and kind with my son. Those actions flowed freely downstream from a feeling of compassion.
So what came next without any effort at all was I went over and sat in the chair next to my son as he was eating his breakfast. And I said, would you like to pray together? And we did. And as I prayed, I felt compassion for him.
I tuned into a deeper awareness of his suffering. I realized I had been focused that morning on how this was hard for me, but this also has been really hard for him. He doesn't feel well.
He doesn't want to be so tired. He's doing something really challenging, navigating this day after day. So once I landed at compassion for myself and was able to feel that and just drink it in, then I had all this compassion to share with Tyler.
And it felt so good. It felt like the pure love of Christ flowing in me, flowing through me and being shared. I felt God say it to me first, you're doing a great job and this is hard and I love you and I'm here.
And so then it was easy for me to say that same thing to my son. I wanted to savor that moment and really remember it. So I took a little snapshot on my mind and said, ah, this is what I'm gonna hang on to where I landed at compassion.
So I use this phrase land at compassion because that's how it feels to me. It's sort of like I'm on a trampoline. And as I'm interacting with people and living my life, I'm doing tricks and flips.
And sometimes I don't land on my feet. Sometimes I fall on my face and I land at judgment and annoyance and resentment. But if I keep trying and if I keep working at it, my goal is to land at compassion.
Like I did a flip and I landed on my feet. Yay, compassion, that's what I was aiming for. Let's see if we can do that again.
Sometimes we land at compassion for another person first and then we're able to apply that boundless abundant compassion toward ourselves. And sometimes it goes the other way that we land at compassion for ourselves first and then we're able to offer it to other people. And either way, it's beautiful and wonderful.
And I think ultimately compassion is a gift that God gives us. It's partly an intention that we can set. We can use our agency to say, hey, I wanna feel compassion.
I'm looking for thoughts and ideas that are gonna create that feeling for me. And I think some of it is a gift from God that as we pray for it, we're blessed with it. And we can sense that it's bigger than us, that we're being embraced by a divine force and being given this powerful, expansive emotion that we can then share with others.
It really is so cool. So what could it look like for you to land at compassion today? What are the judgments that could melt away as you step into a deep awareness of the challenge you are really facing or what someone else is going through? I wanna encourage you to aim for this beautiful, abundant, useful feeling of compassion in your life. You can land at compassion.
This is what I want you to know. So I wanna encourage you to aim for it. And then be compassionate with yourself when you miss.
This is such a sneaky little trick. Like judgment and compassion are in a war and judgment is trying to win. And you notice that you didn't land at compassion.
And so then you wanna get mad at yourself and judge yourself for not being more loving. But instead you just go, oh, I guess I missed on that one. I landed at judgment that time.
That's okay. That's actually pretty understandable for an imperfect human being dealing with other imperfect human beings to do. It's challenging to land at compassion in this situation.
So I'll keep trying. And then do you see how it's like magic? Even when you don't initially land at compassion and maybe you're feeling irritated with someone and not really loving them, you can shift to compassion about the miss. And then that compassion can overpower the judgment and you land at compassion in the end.
That's such a fun little hack. I feel so tricky when I'm able to land at compassion for myself when I don't land at compassion for other people. Try it out and see what you think.
Compassion is one of the most beautiful, abundant, rich, deep, expansive emotions there is. I think it's the well of living water that we read about in the scriptures. It's beautiful, clear, life-giving.
It quenches our thirst and it can never run out. See what happens when you aim to feel it a little more often. Thanks for joining me today.
I'll talk to you next week. Hey, if these podcast episodes are enriching your life, could you take a minute and leave me a review? This will help other people find out about the podcast and start benefiting from it too. I would appreciate that so much.
Also, you get to hear from me on the podcast, but I'd love to hear from you. Send me a DM on Instagram @emilyrickscoaching and tell me your thoughts, your impressions, or questions about the podcast. Or drop a comment and share how you're aiming for compassion in your life this week.