Why Compassion? A personal journey of self-healing
Dear reader, I’m glad your curiosity has led you here. It is my hope to share a bit of how I came to embrace compassion. This being a simplified story of how I learnt to re-purpose every knowledge at my disposal to heal myself (in conjunction with professional help, and it is important to stress that seeking professional help is critical) from a mental breakdown:
- Neuroscience gave me a solid foundation in understanding memory, habits, cognition, and emotions (at one stage, I was a board director at the Greenstein Institute of Applied Neuroscience); and
- The Virtues Project’s faiths (plural) based communication framework gave me a healthy way to talk myself into a calmer state (I am a certified facilitator); and
- Wim Hof and pranayama gave me tools to master my breath as a way to calm myself down (a daily discipline of breathing exercises I’ve maintained to this day); and
- TCM (traditional chinese medicine) and ayuverda gave me knowledge for sustained physical self-care (primarily ways to maintain a strong immune system, and facilitating my own body’s inner wisdom); and
- My legal and coaching training in the art and science of questions helped me ask myself powerful questions that act as clues (for a question not asked is a door not opened), which when combined led to me to becoming a certified conflict mediator.
Let’s begin at the beginning.
Once upon a time, I was a little girl who didn’t know there was a name for the life I led. I came to learn much later in my 30’s that the term was domestic violence. Physical beatings, the sort that makes people at school ask the next day “what’s that?”, was frequent. But no one thought twice, because back in the 70’s and 80’s, corporal punishment was an acceptable form of disciplining children, and family matters should remain just that, private family matters.
Various instruments were used - canes of all different sorts, belts, hands, sticks. Doors were locked so there was no way to run. Public humiliation (physical and verbal) too was part of the deal. I thought we screamed our lungs out. But maybe not, because no one came. I don’t really recall how we kids were able to fall asleep every night. Sometimes, it feels like a…
