August 28, 2026

Meet Your Own Darkness First

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals: only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.

Sharon Salzberg co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in 1976 after years studying vipassana and metta practice in India and Burma, helping bring these Buddhist lovingkindness teachings to Western audiences. In her book on lovingkindness, she describes compassion not as pity flowing from someone strong to someone weak, but as a meeting of equals who recognize the same vulnerability in each other. This passage insists that we can only truly sit with another person's pain once we have stopped running from our own. In the Buddhist metta tradition, practitioners deliberately begin lovingkindness meditation by directing warmth toward themselves first, because unexamined self-aversion quietly blocks genuine care for others. Only after that foundation is laid does the practice extend outward, to loved ones, to strangers, and finally to those hardest to love.

A principle of Eastern Wisdom: Compassion and Lovingkindness →