“When you have a lifetime of emotions that you have been running from,” writes Helen Knott, “it seems like once they catch up they will gang-beat you and leave you crippled in an alleyway.”4 That need not happen. The compassion of truth recognizes that pain is not the enemy. In fact, pain is inherently compassionate, as it tries to alert us to what is amiss. Healing, in a sense, is about unlearning the notion that we need to protect ourselves from our own pain. In this way, compassion is a gateway to another essential quality: courage.
