The Listening Space: June Gathering
Compassion & Commitment
June 8, 2025 @ 12.30
🕊️ Free and open to all yoga students — within our community and beyond.
Last month, a theme emerged naturally from our circle: many of us are struggling with how to be more compassionate toward ourselves. How can we meet our own effort and discipline with softness? What does kindness really look like when we’re trying to stay committed to practice, especially when things feel hard?
This month in The Listening Space, we’ll take a closer look at compassion — not as a passive softness, but as a powerful and sometimes challenging form of self-inquiry. We’ll explore the difference between struggle and suffering, and reflect on how compassion might actually support rather than derail our growth.
Reflection questions:
Can we be both committed and kind — disciplined and compassionate?
Is compassion a tool for clarity, or a way we avoid challenge?
How do we tell the difference between self-care and self-sabotage?
Where is the line between working hard and pushing too hard?
Anchors for our conversation:
Yoga Sutra 1.12 reminds us that the mind is stilled through abhyāsa (dedicated practice) and vairāgya (non-attachment). Effort and ease go hand in hand.
How do we stay committed without becoming rigid or self-critical? How is compassion part of abhyāsa?
“Through cultivating friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the suffering, joy for the virtuous, and equanimity toward the non-virtuous, the mind becomes clear”
Yoga Sutra 1.33 invites us to cultivate compassion (karuṇā) for those who are suffering — including, perhaps most importantly, ourselves.
What does compassion (karuṇā) look like when the one suffering is ourselves? How do we apply this to our own internal struggles on the mat?
The true heart of The Listening Space is dialogue. Bring your voice, your questions, your doubts, your experience. Each gathering flows organically from the last — and this month’s conversation is shaped by what you brought up last time.