The Open Door A Reflection on Compassion

The first person who really taught me compassion never sat me down and explained it.

She fed me dinner.

Things at home were complicated when I was growing up.

Karen knew it.

We never really talked about it. She didn’t ask me to explain. She didn’t try to fix my life. She simply understood that there was a kid who needed somewhere else to land sometimes.

So she gave me an open door.

Not everyone.

Me.

I could walk into her house without feeling like I was imposing. If dinner was on the table, there was enough. If I needed somewhere to be, I already had somewhere to go.

At the time, I didn’t understand what a profound act of compassion that was.

Years later, as I came to understand complex trauma and the nervous system differently, I began to see what Karen had actually given me.

She wasn’t rescuing me.

She was giving my nervous system repeated experiences of safety.

Before Karen ever taught me about healing or the Human Energy Field, she taught my body what it felt like to exhale.

Healing came later.

Over time, Karen became one of my greatest teachers. She would eventually introduce me as her sixth child - her spiritual child. Her son and I were best friends, born on the same day. Family, friendship, healing, teaching - those lines became beautifully intertwined.

When Karen died, I wasn’t grieving a teacher.

I was grieving family.

I watched her husband lose his wife.

I watched her children lose their mother.

I watched people I loved try to find solid ground after losing someone who had been part of the foundation beneath their lives.

And I stayed close.

I don’t think I consciously learned compassion during those years.

I absorbed it.

Not as an idea.

As something lived.

See what is actually happening.

Recognize what someone needs.

Make room.

Years passed.

Karen had a long necklace made entirely of raw amethyst. After she died, it became part of my altar. I carried it with me for more than twenty years.

I never wore it.

Then, during the pandemic, the necklace became separated from me.

Through a series of circumstances I never could have predicted, it somehow ended up in the possession of Manel Casanova.

Karen and Manel never met.

And I barely knew Manel.

Yet somehow this necklace that had carried Karen’s presence in my life for decades passed through his hands.

Manel returned it to me.

And it went back to my altar.

At the time, I couldn’t possibly have known what that strange crossing of paths would eventually mean.

A couple years later, I joined Universal Healing.

Less than three months after I arrived, we lost Manel.

The moment I learned he was gone, everything inside me became still.

Then I heard three words.

Grab the necklace.

I walked to my altar and picked it up.

What happened next isn’t something I need to explain or prove.

It’s simply what I experienced.

As I held that long strand of raw amethyst, I felt aspects of Karen and Manel together within it.

Karen had been gone for more than twenty years.

Manel had just died.

They had never known each other.

Yet somehow, in that moment, they no longer felt separate within me.

And then Manel showed me how to wear the necklace.

For more than twenty years, I had carried it without ever putting it around my neck. Now, on the day Manel died, I understood how to tie the long strand so that I could finally wear it.

So I did.

For the first time in more than twenty years, I put Karen’s necklace around my neck.

I’ve worn it almost every day since.

And immediately, I found myself standing in a landscape I recognized.

A family was grieving.

A healing community had lost someone at its center.

There was shock. Devastation. Uncertainty about what came next.

I had seen this before.

And every part of me wanted to give it all my compassion.

So I moved closer.

I had been part of Universal Healing for less than three months, but that somehow didn’t matter.

I lead healings.

I began writing.

I helped build.

I stepped further into the work in Manel’s absence.

When something needed carrying, I reached for it.

When there was a gap, I stepped toward it.

When there was grief, uncertainty, or simply work that needed doing, my instinct was almost always the same.

Move closer.

It didn’t feel like sacrifice.

It felt like compassion.

And I don’t regret it.

But as we enter another week of our August journey through Reciprocity and Flow, I’m beginning to look at that instinct with different eyes.

This week, we’ll begin with the adrenals and the physiology of what happens when the body is repeatedly asked to respond, mobilize, endure, and keep going.

Then we’ll move into the Hara and Third Eye - into intention and perception, into the deeper questions of what is actually ours to do and whether we can see clearly enough to recognize the difference.

And finally, we’ll arrive at compassion.

Body.

Intention.

Perception.

Heart.

It’s an interesting progression for someone who learned compassion through an open door.

Because Karen didn’t open that door for everyone.

She saw me.

She recognized what I needed.

And she responded.

Maybe that’s the part of her lesson I’m only beginning to understand.

That distinction has been sitting with me.

Karen saw what I needed and responded.

She didn’t give everyone the same thing. She didn’t confuse compassion with unlimited access. She didn’t abandon herself in order to make room for me.

She discerned.

And somewhere along the way, I think I may have remembered the open door more clearly than I remembered the discernment behind it.

That is an uncomfortable thing to admit.

Because the compassion I brought to Universal Healing after Manel died was real.

The grief I witnessed was real.

So was my desire to help.

I don’t look back at that period and wish I had cared less. I don’t wish I had stepped away. I don’t want to rewrite genuine love and service as dysfunction simply because I can see the experience differently now.

But I am willing to ask whether compassion and self-abandonment can sometimes occupy the same space.

Whether something can begin in love and still ask too much of the body carrying it.

That is where compassion fatigue becomes interesting to me.

We sometimes talk about compassion fatigue as though the compassion itself has run out.

But that isn’t necessarily what happens.

We can still care deeply while becoming emotionally and physiologically exhausted by sustained exposure to other people’s suffering and need. The heart may remain willing long after the nervous system has begun signaling that the current way of caring isn’t sustainable.

I know something about that pattern.

Complex trauma can train a nervous system to pay extraordinary attention to other people. We learn to notice shifts in tone, emotion, energy, and environment. What begins as adaptation can become sensitivity. Sensitivity can become a gift. It can make us perceptive healers, caregivers, partners, friends, and leaders.

But a gift still needs discernment.

Because the same nervous system that can beautifully recognize what another person needs can become practiced at recognizing everyone else’s needs before its own.

This is part of why beginning this week with the adrenals feels important.

The adrenal glands participate in our stress response, releasing hormones that help us mobilize when something requires action. That capacity is essential. We are designed to respond.

We are not designed to remain endlessly mobilized.

There has to be a return.

A settling.

A restoration of resources.

Reciprocity isn’t only something that happens between people.

It happens inside the body.

Then, on Friday, we’ll move into the Hara and Third Eye.

In Brennan Healing Science, the Hara brings us beneath personality and reaction into the dimension of in

tention. It asks us to become aligned with the deeper movement of our lives rather than simply responding to every pull around us.

The Third Eye adds another piece.

Clear seeing.

Not only seeing another person’s suffering but seeing ourselves within the equation.

Seeing the difference between I can help and this is mine to carry.

Seeing when compassion is moving freely and when an old pattern has quietly taken the wheel.

That may be one of the harder forms of discernment for those of us who instinctively move toward suffering.

Because sometimes helping feels so natural that we never stop to ask what is moving us.

Love?

Purpose?

Fear?

Habit?

Responsibility?

An old nervous system that learned very early to pay attention?

Maybe several of them at once.

And then, on Sunday, we’ll arrive at Compassion.

Not as an instruction to care more.

Many of us don’t need that instruction.

We’ll explore compassion as something that can remain openhearted without becoming self-sacrificing. Something that can witness suffering without taking ownership of it. Something that can offer deeply while remaining connected to our body, our boundaries, and our own inner truth.

Traditional Chinese Medicine offers a beautiful lens for this.

The Heart houses the Shen - our spirit, consciousness, and capacity for meaningful connection. But the Heart exists within an interconnected system. Qi must move. Blood must circulate. Yin and Yang continually nourish and regulate one another.

Nothing healthy in the body gives endlessly without receiving.

Barbara Brennan’s work offers another language for something similar. Healing involves coherence across the dimensions of our being. The heart cannot be separated from the rest of the field. Our emotional openness, our energetic boundaries, our intention, our physical body, and the deeper truth of who we are all exist in relationship.

Maybe compassion asks for that same coherence.

A heart capable of opening.

A nervous system capable of settling.

A Third Eye capable of seeing clearly.

A Hara aligned deeply enough to know what is, ours to do.

And enough connection to ourselves to hear when one of those parts says, enough.

That brings me back to Karen.

She didn’t give me an open door because compassion required her to give everything to everyone.

She gave me an open door because she saw clearly.

There was a young person in front of her who needed somewhere safe to land.

She had the capacity to offer it.

So she did.

There was wisdom inside her compassion.

There was discernment inside her generosity.

There were boundaries inside the open door.

I think that may be the part I’ve needed to remember.

Because Reciprocity and Flow isn’t asking us to stop giving.

It isn’t asking us to measure every act of love against what we receive in return.

And it certainly isn’t asking us to become less compassionate.

Maybe it’s asking us to notice whether life is still moving.

Whether we’re giving from something alive and replenishing, or from a body that has been asking us to listen.

Whether our compassion can include discernment without becoming less tender.

Whether our purpose can include boundaries without becoming less devoted.

Whether we can remain present to another person’s suffering without leaving ourselves to do it.

I still wear Karen’s necklace almost every day.

It carries a story I don’t completely understand and don’t particularly need to.

Karen.

Manel.

An open door.

A grieving community.

A life shaped again and again by the instinct to move closer.

But perhaps the necklace isn’t reminding me to move closer anymore.

Perhaps, after all these years, it’s reminding me to look first.

To feel.

To listen.

To discern.

And then, when the door opens, to know why.