Becoming a Compassionate Mess

What a year 2021 was. If your experience was anything like mine, the year was a total mess – Covid, toxic politics, global warming, inflation. Maybe you’re feeling like a mess yourself – exhausted, hopeless, unproductive, confused, depressed.

As the year winds down and you set your resolutions for the new year, in addition to thinking about all the things you’d like to do better, you might consider making a resolution that you can actually keep: becoming a compassionate mess!

This means that instead of focusing on getting it right, we focus on opening our hearts. Even though it’s important to try to alleviate our suffering by making needed changes in our lives, the truth is we’ll surely fail over and over again. This is what it means to be human.

The most important thing is, can we be compassionate to ourselves in the midst of our failures and disappointments? Can we embrace the mess with warmth, understanding, support and kindness?  If so, we will have achieved our goal.

We will never find lasting happiness in the circumstances of our lives. Even when we do manage to get it right for a while, things inevitably change.

So instead of thinking of success in terms of what happens, we can start to think of success in terms of how we relate to what happens. Are we being compassionate or not?

Our happiness is most reliably rooted in the loving quality that we bring to each moment of awareness, rather than whether or not we like what is happening at that moment.

But how do we become a compassionate mess? How do we keep our hearts open when things are scary or painful? Luckily there are many tangible, concrete practices that have been developed to help us relate to any moment of difficulty with compassion. 

I wish you all a Happy New Year, and hope that we can collectively bring the gift of compassion to all beings in this crazy world, starting with ourselves.