I remember a student arriving to class straight from hospital, having just left her mother after a difficult appointment. She apologised for being late, apologised for being distracted, apologised, it seemed, for simply being where she was that day. I told her there was nothing to apologise for. She looked almost startled by that.
It’s a small moment, but it’s stayed with me, because it says something about how many of us move through the world – bracing for judgement that, more often than not, we’re the only ones handing out.
Compassion As Practice, Not Just Feeling
We tend to think of compassion as something that happens to us – a wave of feeling that arrives, or doesn’t, depending on the day. But in the yogic tradition, it’s treated more like a posture. Something you can train toward, deliberately, the same way you might train a hamstring to lengthen or a breath to settle.
Patanjali touches on this directly. Among the attitudes he recommends cultivating toward others – friendliness toward the happy, compassion toward the suffering – karuna, compassion, sits as a deliberate orientation rather than a fortunate accident of temperament. You’re not waiting to feel compassionate. You’re choosing, again and again, to turn toward suffering rather than away from it.
That includes your own.
Where This Gets Difficult
This is the part people often don’t expect. It’s frequently far easier to extend compassion outward than inward. I see this constantly in class – a student gentle and patient with a friend’s struggles, then quietly merciless about her own stiff hips, her own “bad” balance, her own body simply being the age it actually is.
Ahimsa, non-harming, is usually spoken about in terms of how we treat others. But it was never meant to stop there. The sharp internal voice – too slow, too stiff, too old for this – is its own small violence, repeated so often it starts to sound like truth rather than habit.
Compassion, in this sense, becomes less about being nice and more about being honest. Honest about what a body has carried, what a week has demanded, what’s reasonable to expect of yourself on a Tuesday when you slept badly and the world’s been a lot.
What It Looks Like on the Mat
I notice it most in the small adjustments. The student who comes to a pose and immediately reaches for the “advanced” version, regardless of how the body actually feels that day – and the quieter, often harder practice of choosing the gentler variation instead, without narrating it as giving up.
Compassion shows up as the block under the hand that doesn’t quite reach the floor. The knee that stays bent in a forward fold. The decision to rest in child’s pose for an extra breath, not because you can’t keep going, but because you’ve noticed you don’t need to prove that you can.
None of this is really about the pose. It’s about whether the voice running underneath the pose is kind.
What It Looks Like Off It
Once you start noticing this on the mat, it tends to follow you out the door. The colleague who’s short with you on a hard day – and the pause before assuming the worst about why. The friend who cancels plans again – met with curiosity about what she might be carrying, rather than quiet offence. Your own slower start to the morning, allowed to simply be slow.
Compassion, practised this way, isn’t really about becoming a more agreeable person. It’s about loosening the grip of judgement – toward others, and just as often, toward yourself – enough that there’s room left over for something gentler to take its place.
For the tradition and philosophy behind these ideas, the Philosophy section goes deeper.
If you’d like to explore these ideas further, Still & Steady provides an introduction to yoga philosophy for everyday life.