A student gave me permission to share a recent experience she had with a new relationship. I will call her Laura. Laura has been using the heart centered focus for the last 6 months. She identified a fear she has of experiencing rejection from her father. This fear would take the form of avoiding displeasing her employers. Sometimes this fear even caused her to not act from a place of integrity, but she would compromise what she knew to be right, avoiding a possible confrontation with her employer and agreeing with whatever they wanted. Laura meditated with this fear, of allowing herself to be vulnerable from a heart-centered focus, her need to have her father’s approval or the approval of her employers. She understood that her fear of her father’s rejection also stemmed out of a deep feeling of unworthiness she had of herself.

Laura soon became involved in a new relationship with a man. The relationship started as friends. They would meet for coffee or take in a movie. As the relationship progressed in it’s friendship, she risked by telling this man that she was having more feelings for him then that of being friends. He also said he was feeling more than friendship for her. Then, he said that he did not want to engage a physical relationship with her at this time because he had some anxiety surrounding that level of intimacy. This information would have devastated her in the past, coming from the place of fearing the rejection of the father. But, in this instance she only saw his revelation as his own woundedness, and that it was not the result of her unworthiness or a rejection by the masculine. In that moment, she was able to hold the state of consciousness that did not have unworthiness as her truth. She was able to not take on his suffering and make it her own. This is the true gift of compassion.