Soft & squishy, or spiky AF?
Staying tender in a harsh, tumultuous world - without toxic bypassing
Political activists from the far right regularly condemn compassion.
Not because they disdain it, but because they fear it.
They know, deep down, that it is a raw, fierce power which can overthrow tyrants and ultimately lead to change.
This tumultuous world can feel WAY bigger than any one human should be expected to deal with.
Our naturally tender hearts are battered and bruised by the headlines of cruelty, chaos and collapse everywhere we turn.
Systems we thought could protect the vulnerable have been exposed as weak, or prone to corruption or - worst of all - designed to be harmful all along.
Many of us are feeling fried, and thinking we’re ‘too sensitive’ for this world.
That’s a lie. Compassion is our superpower.
But we have to practice it - in multiple dimensions.
Infinite compassion
Neil DeGrasse Tyson said ‘We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.’
For people of faith, your belief system at its very heart is likely to be based on principles of love, of connection to the Universal all-that-is we sometimes call Source, or the Divine.
And whether you have a spiritual belief system or not, you are still connected; there is a wild abundance of ALL things out there in the universe.
No human can possibly manufacture sufficient compassion to heal the world.
Trying to generate all the compassion for all the suffering will burn you out, fast.
But you don’t have to do it alone. You can make it a choice, to open your heart and invite infinite universal compassion to fill you up, any time you need it.
Self compassion
You’ll see every coachfluencer on IG banging on about self-love, often accompanied by pics of pedicures with champagne, or barefoot walking on a pristine beach.
That’s not what I mean here (which is a whole ‘nother conversation for another day…)
Self-compassion is the willingness to sit with yourself in the depths of despair, in the middle of burnout, in the agony of witnessing others’ suffering - and feel love and acceptance for your own frail, messy humanity.
To feel love and acceptance even though you couldn’t prevent a catastrophe; even though you can’t contribute to all the causes which move you; even when you feel like you ‘should have done more’ to keep MAGA out of the White House.
It’s radical kindness turned inwards, and it’s something we have to keep deliberately coming back to day by day by day, because our culture has programmed us to default to self-condemnation.
And it’s an act of superb defiance to flow self-compassion, when the systems around us would much prefer we didn’t.
Spacious compassion
Compassion for other people is perhaps the most familiar dimension; compassion for the vulnerable, the incarcerated, the refugee.
It becomes easier once we can access the infinite supply of compassion, and we get better at having compassion for our own imperfections.
And when it’s easier, we can be more spacious with it out in the world.
We can master the art of compassion for complete strangers, regardless of whether we know about their suffering or not.
We can find compassion for those who seem to be doing great, but whose stories we can never truly know.
We can even find compassion for people who made stupid mistakes, like the ones bitterly regretting their vote in the 2024 US election.
It is SO easy to be enraged by a regretful Trump voter: enraged by their bewilderment, by their naivety, by their unwillingness to believe everything we were screaming about Project 2025.
The harsh truth is that without sufficient numbers, power will not leave the hands of authoritarian systems.
So we’re going to need to bring them with us, those people with the leopard-eating scars on their faces.
Only our compassion can truly win their hearts and minds; not our scorn. And that is likely to be HARD.
(And to be clear, I’m not talking about the people who are now gleefully ‘owning the libs’. In theory, I would love to be able to feel compassion for ALL things, including them, but for this messy, imperfect human the best I can manage is neutrality and the block button)
Tactical compassion
Compassion is often seen as serene and a little fluffy, a soft, squishy doormat with no boundaries and little power.
But compassion is also be a ferocious defender of the vulnerable, wielding its strength with the sword of justice and the shield of truth.
And, like deliberate joy, it can be a strategic act of political resistance.
Whether the political solution to authoritarianism is moving the current systems back to the centre, switching to the Nordic style of social democracy, or ditching empires entirely in favour of old style ‘city states’, I have no idea.
Whatever comes next, it will only be sustainable if it has compassion at the centre.
No doubt rage is extremely useful to break us out of a stuck state, so it’s an initiator for change.
But it cannot be sustained in a pure state, and it cannot become the basis for a useful, functioning political system.
We need tactical compassion in action, to come together and figure out what’s next; AND to halt the descent into cruelty and despair.
Compassion in action is flexible, responsive, knowing when to be soft, and when to be spiky.
Compassion in action looks like protecting your coworkers and neighbours from ICE.
Compassion in action looks like Mexican volunteers helping out in the Texas floods.
Compassion in action looks like a teacher defying the rules by posting signs to say ‘all welcome here’.
The more tactical we make our compassion, the more effective it becomes.
The synergy
When we can activate all four dimensions of compassion, it thrives and grows, and so do we.
If there’s one piece missing, it all gets so much harder.
As you’re walking through the world, navigating the turmoil and witnessing the headlines, here’s what to ask yourself:
what dimension of compassion do I need more of?
what do I need, in order to help me get it?
Pour a little energy into those questions, and I bet good money that things start to change.