Allowance
curiosity with compassion
As 2025 began to close, I decided that in 2026, I wanted to explore an emotion for a full month at a time. I did this in 2024 and it was so powerful and fun. It kept me grounded and in experimentation. It kept me focused and bound by a container. It created so many opportunities for exploration and growth. So I decided to do it again. I kicked off the year with a month of compassion.
Most of my life, I made the assumption that compassion meant offering kindness no matter what. Being someone who has offered kindness no matter what - even when it wasn’t given, reciprocated, or earned, even when it meant sacrificing my own integrity or boundaries - I had a safe skepticism about the way the month would go.
The anchor that grounded me was this paragraph by Pema Chodron from her book The Places That Scare You.
When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us….In cultivating compassion, we draw from the wholeness of our experience - 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.
As the month rolled along and my curiosity allowed the qualities of compassion to reveal themselves, I discovered that compassion is so much more than kindness. And, that it is the ultimate kindness. My experience was that compassion is living completely free of judgement. It is the ability to have an experience, any experience, without assigning it the value of right or wrong, good or bad. Compassion is the emotional maturity to allow something to happen.
As a culture, we are addicted to assigning qualities of good or bad to everything. Just pull up the comments of, well, anything to see how desperate our culture is to be right. Is that because being right feels good? Or is it because if we aren’t right, we can’t be good? Is it because if we aren’t right then that must mean we are wrong and wrong feels bad? Maybe it’s that if we feel bad, we must be bad.
Ding, ding, ding. Yes, to all of that.
A couple of years ago I started saying the phrase, “Just because it feels bad, doesn’t mean it is bad.” I said it first to myself. Then to my husband (bless him for his patience with me while I try out all my experiments on him first) and then with my friends and family. The more I played with this idea, the easier it was to move through.
You know the saying, “the only way out is through.” That became more and more real in my life each time I put the mantra, “just because it feels bad, doesn’t mean it is bad,” into practice.
The tail end of 2025 brought with it a lot of feeling bad. Everything was breaking at work, my husband was very ill and was in and out of the hospital, my son was constantly getting in trouble at school, and my extended family was avoiding feeling bad at any cost, even going as far as to say, “only come to dinner if you can talk about the good stuff.” My arms were breaking, my back was breaking, yet, I was the one who was tasked with managing the weight of it all.
Until I couldn’t.
I broke. I found a new rock bottom every day for about a week straight. I called only my most trusted friends, the ones who can hear me without needing to fix me (you know who you are), and I shared with them my darkest and most appalling secret, “I feel bad.” Even with all the practice I had letting bad be bad, I wanted it to stop. Innocently, I wanted to feel good again so I could be good again. Even inside of that experience, I knew a deeper truth - that there was nothing here to be fixed; that they only out was through.
One finger One knuckle at a time, I let go of trying to hold it all.
Then something beautiful happened. Perhaps for the first time ever, I noticed that the wave passed not because I managed everything, but because I gave up managing altogether.
Isn’t it beautiful then, that the totally misunderstood quality I picked to kick off 2026 was compassion? I certainly had the life experience to study the curriculum. As the month went on, the assignment became clear: release all judgement and meaning around experience and allow experience to be nothing but experience.
As the month went on I found myself in the midst of miracles. For the first time in my life, I recognized my own worth. I felt the essence of Self in a present, sustained way. I saw the innocence of my humanity. More than that, I could see it in everyone else, too.
“Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.”
Allowance, then, becomes a compassion enabler, or the action of compassion in practice.
Can you allow it, your own darkness to fill you up as your own humanity rather than something that is bad?
Can you allow it, someone else’s experience to take up space without assigning it the value of right or wrong?
Can you allow it, life to enter your experience with such mysterious force that you release your grip and go for the ride?
Can you allow it?
ALLOWANCE by Rhielle Widders there is a place to visit it is wide and expansive a vast plain of possibility a developer’s dream a place to put down a vision manifest destiny we all do it fill up the space until the only thing that remains is overwhelm congestion waiting waiting for someone to say it’s ok to move move out move up move over move around until you can feel your own body moving anyway, that’s how I see it the vast openness untapped genius a place to turn a dream into a reality anyway, the cycle goes on from stuck to steady to stuck again can you allow it? we all do it attempt to pick the right wave out of the vastness of the ocean we chase that feeling until all that remains is emptiness resentment complexity life isn't complex life is simple play in the wave that is offered if you can allow it
FOR YOU: What would you do differently if you brought compassion with you everywhere you went?