Notes From Mindful Self-Compassion: The Relative & The Absolute

It’s 3 in the morning, and with another bout of insomnia, I’m looking out at the night sky.

Not a terrible way to spend my time, but to be clear, I’d rather be sound asleep right now.

(Especially when I’m due at work in 5 1/2 hours!)

But given the sleepless circumstances, it is a more accepting way to peacefully co-exist with my periodic insomnia (bothersome though it may be) as opposed to the futile act of resisting the inevitable tossing and turning in bed next to my fitfully sleeping family.

Some might call this effort of mine: "Self Compassion in Everyday Life," 'which is actually something my Mindful Self-Compassion teacher, Christine, has been trying to instill in me and the other 26 students in our 10-Week Online MSC course.

And just to make a little bit of lemon aid out of lemons, it also offers a way for me to balance and tolerate the ebb and flow of the relative and the absolute of this small human life in the context of an inconceivably vast cosmos, when on this night, it is the relative that keeps me awake:

• me or my family getting COVID-19,
• the school shutting down due to COVID-19,
• the Supreme Court vacancy,
• my daughter’s difficulty reading,
• the estrangement from my family of origin,
• the lumps in my husbands abdomen,
• the uncomfortable email exchange with a colleague yesterday,
• etc., etc.

Because you see, it under the Universe of stars, that the absolute is my balm.

So I gather a soft blanket around my shoulders, quietly tip toe through the house to avoid waking my family on the creaky wood floorboards, open the slider to the back deck, step out, and look up and out upon the infinite.

Then, as my mind wanders back to its list of worries—as it does within seconds even under that magnificent wonder of galactic size and beauty—I repeat the words attributed to the 14th century Christian mystic and first known female writer in the English language, Julian of Norwich, who wrote:

All shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of thing shall be well.

Or, in the words of a more modern spiritual mystic, American author Annie Dillard in her 1999 book For the Time Being:

There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death...There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.

May I take these words into my heart so that I may bear the relative in the midst of the ever present absolute.

May you as well.