Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash
“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”
— Joseph Campbell
Greetings to all my precious people!!
There’s a quality of softness I keep trying to carry home with me — the kind I always find in slower places, where time is measured in togetherness and not in hours. You can feel it when people gather just to sit and talk, when mornings are unhurried and the birdsong gets a chance to be heard. That softness is available to us anywhere, but most of us have to consciously choose it, because the pace of modern life conspires against it.
And here’s the harder truth: it’s not easy to be present in the soft, magical moments when we lack the internal connection to our own Self. There’s interference in the communication pathways — blockages and disconnections, many of them of our own making. The good news is that we can not only find where those connections have gone missing, we can cultivate a space of softness within us. The name for that cultivated softness is self-compassion.
Self-compassion is simply the process of turning compassion inward — treating yourself with kindness, understanding, and support rather than harsh self-criticism when you fail, make a mistake, or feel inadequate. Research consistently shows it’s one of the most powerful sources of resilience we have. It lowers anxiety and depression, lowers stress markers like cortisol, and — contrary to the fear that being gentle with ourselves makes us lazy — it actually makes us more motivated and persistent, not less.
Dr. Kristin Neff, the pioneering researcher in this field, describes three core components: self-kindness instead of self-judgment; common humanity instead of isolation (remembering that suffering and imperfection are part of the shared human experience, not a personal failing); and mindfulness instead of over-identification (holding painful feelings in balanced awareness rather than drowning in them or suppressing them).
This is, quite simply, the practice of becoming your own Anam Cara — your own soul friend. The Irish phrase names the companion who walks beside you, listening and bearing witness, never above you and never ahead. We extend that grace so easily to the people we love. The work of a lifetime is learning to extend it to ourselves. And here’s what I’ve come to believe: most of us first need a soul friend outside us — a trusted companion, a guide, a circle of women — to show us it’s even possible, before that kind voice can become our own.
A practice to begin with this week: the daily letter to your Self. The writer Elizabeth Gilbert has done this for 25 years — she began during a season of deep anxiety, writing what she sometimes describes as dialogues between herself and Love. Take a blank page and this prompt:
Dear Love, what would you have me know today?
Then write whatever flows, without editing, without judging. You might be surprised who answers.
And when you need to move the softness through your body rather than your pen, take your Self on a mindful walk. Not for the steps or the exercise, but to bring your full attention to each footfall, each breath, the feel of the ground. Notice the trees, the light, the small living things. Mindful walking is a moving meditation — it quiets the mental chatter, and it slowly teaches the nervous system to respond to life rather than react to it.
The guiding force behind my practice is rooted in the concept of Anam Cara. It is my privilege to bear witness and hold space as you listen to your body’s wisdom and reconnect to it — to walk beside you, as a soul friend would, while you come home to yourself.
If you’d like that companionship — I work with women one-on-one, and I gather small circles where this gentleness gets practiced together. Reply here or book a discovery call and let’s talk about what fits for you.
“No one leaves here alive. So please stop treating yourself as an afterthought.
Eat delicious food. Walk in the sun. Jump into the sea.
Speak the truth that you carry in your heart like a hidden treasure.
Be silly. Be good. Be weird. There is no time for anything else.”
— Anthony Hopkins
