Dear Friends,
After several days exploring the water element, we turn today to cultivate compassion.
Water responds. It moves toward what is dry. It flows around obstacles. It adjusts to conditions without argument. In this way, the water element offers a natural bridge into compassion – not as something we manufacture, but as a response that arises when we are willing to stay present with what is happening.
Compassion begins with contact. With noticing. With allowing ourselves to be touched by experience without turning away. Just as water meets what it encounters, compassion meets difficulty with care rather than avoidance.
In times like this, when there are distressing events unfolding in the world, compassion can feel both necessary and challenging. We may notice waves of sorrow, anger, helplessness, or numbness arising as we take in what is happening. The water element offers a helpful image here: we can allow ourselves to be touched by what we are seeing, without needing to hold it all or turn away. Compassion doesn’t require us to absorb the world’s suffering – it asks us to respond with care, in ways that are honest and sustainable.
When we explored the water element in practice, we noticed how sensations, emotions, and thoughts move and change. Compassion invites us to relate to that movement with tenderness – especially when experience feels uncomfortable, vulnerable, or strained.
This doesn’t require fixing or solving anything. Compassion is not about making pain go away. It’s about staying connected when things are not as we wish they were. Like water, it adapts. It responds. It doesn’t harden.
Today’s invitation is to practice compassion in a simple, embodied way. You might begin by noticing something that feels mildly difficult or tender in the body or heart. Nothing overwhelming. Just something honest.
Then, gently acknowledge it:
This is here.
This is being felt.
You might offer a few simple phrases, if that feels supportive:
May this be met with care.
May I respond with kindness.
May I allow this to be as it is.
If phrases don’t resonate, you might simply stay in gentle contact with what is here – or shift attention to something supportive. Touching in as much as feels manageable is itself an expression of compassion.
You can also notice compassion showing up naturally in daily life: pausing before reacting, softening when someone else is struggling, or allowing yourself a bit more room when things don’t go smoothly.
Compassion, like water, doesn’t need to be dramatic. Often it is quiet, responsive, and steady – meeting what flows with care.
You are welcome to reply to the email or add a comment to share how compassion showed up today. Your reflections may help others recognize their own capacity to respond with care as we continue together.
With good wishes,
Andrea
As compassion helps tie disparate emotions, thoughts, people, it’s as you’ve described water seeking and flowing and binding different and maybe unseen things together.
In earth sciences, waters ability to seep and flow is a function of the porosity and permeability of the materials and their chemistries and the ambient as well as changing temperatures and pressures — much like people when compassion and actions are put into action — whether knowingly or not.
Thank you Andrea for these evolving ways of glimpsing, and increasingly seeing and feeling.
Hi Rod, Thank you for this beautiful reflection. I love how you connect the flow of water with the subtle dynamics of compassion and human connection – the way it weaves through and binds so many unseen layers, much like the porosity and permeability you describe. This is powerful reminder of how our inner and outer environments shape how compassion moves through us and between us. I am grateful for your thoughtful engagement and for deepening this exploration with your perspective.
Porosity and permeability, that’s what I missed in my water tour.
Water and compassion. Thich Nhat Hanh often talks about the clouds in the flowers and in us; inter-being. Similarly compassion and lovingkindness permeate so much of our being: without them, there is no us. Inter-are.