It’s like the scent of rain
after a month of drought,
the way it rises up and fills the lungs,
quiets the body
and gentles the mind –
that’s what it’s like
when, after grasping
and spinning and reaching
and clenching at last,
exhausted with my own fear,
I lay my hand on my own heart.
and see through my thoughts,
and practice loving
what is beneath my palm:
This frightened woman
and the life that lives through her.
Not a single promise I will be safe,
but, when I press my open hand
into the beat of my anxious heart
what was dry becomes loamy,
what was cracked becomes rich,
and a faint sweetness
tendrils through me, like incense.
soothing as a lullaby
that opens in the dark.
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Have you ever experienced ‘a faint sweetness that tendrils through you, like incense’? Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer has given us beautiful and, for me anyway, accurate words and images to describe the experience of self-compassion in this poem. Reading it I feel wonder and gratitude for the transformer of the heart. If we learn how, we can give ourselves the soothing of a lullaby in the dark, feel our nervous system shift with the touch of our hand and watch our inner experience metamorphose from ‘cracked’ to ‘loamy’ in real time.
Does this sound a little miraculous? I would say it could perhaps be described as a very humble miracle. I like how Rosemerry uses the word faint. This leads me to consider how a moment of self-compassion will not fix everything, it won’t change a grey, fractious day into a sunny joyful one, but it will sometimes give me an almost intangible sense of easing from the inside out, of receiving ‘the scent of rain after a month of drought’, so that my breath is a touch more free, my eyes a tiny bit more clear and my heart a little more steady and soft.
As I wrote the above I realised that today is close to a grey and fractious day for me. I just stopped and took two minutes to tend to my clenched heart and tense shoulders. As often happens, as I let go of the fight with reality, a sweet sigh spontaneously arrives washing through it all. Maybe it’s all ok. Maybe this will pass. Maybe there is still love, even here. Even if faint.
PS If you’d like to practice self-compassion together with others, consider our Mindfulness Level 2 – Responding with Compassion which has a strong focus on self-compassion in the first and second module before widening out into compassion for others…
Photo by petr sidorov on Unsplash