Our Beloved Inner Community

“The clarity we need to meet the world as it is, arises out of self compassion: here is the intersection of inner and outer work.”

From the point of view of depth psychology and the wisdom traditions, we each have a center point, the ground of being that is untouched, unfazed, unharmed by anything. Different traditions call it different things: the Self with a capital “S”, Awakened Heart, Atman. I refer to it sometimes as our “bright and shiny being”. It has no one name but it belongs to all of us and is not corruptible. We can become quite confused and lose track of it but it doesn’t mean it has ever lost track of us.

From the point of view of our incorruptible-ness, we are offered a different relationship to ourselves and the option to move from an inner world that includes all of who we are.

To embrace all parts of ourselves is key to our inner work; it is the work of cultivating self compassion. Self compassion is essential in order to offer compassion to those who’ve been marginalized in our outer world.

By “compassion” I don’t mean the watered down version of what that word has come to mean. By compassion, I mean we recognize the suffering of ourselves and other beings and we are not complicit in perpetuating harm to ourselves or others.

The impact of our service to the world is equal to the compassion for ourselves.

In this time of deep social, economic, and political change, to engage from a place of self compassion prevents burn out.

The clarity we need to meet the world as it is, arises out of self compassion: here is the intersection of inner and outer work.

To embrace our humanity is to embrace all beings. To live and move from the place of deep interconnectedness acknowledges that what each of us does, matters. Each time one of us awakens, heals, and embraces our marginalized parts, the world is healed.

Offering healing to the world is not often the initial reason most of us seek support during hard passages in our lives but we may have the insight that embracing our beloved inner community uplifts all beings.

This is the reason I get out of bed in the morning.