At the end of a coaching session about a man’s relationship with his mother, Joe offers a pointer: the word “compassion” in Greek basically meant “of the guts.” He invites the man to feel the love in his heart (triggered by thinking of his dog) and then allow that love to travel into his gut — where all the stored emotions live.
This is a practical somatic technique: connecting the warmth and openness of heart-love to the contracted, stored material in the belly. The man jokes “what’s it supposed to do there? Shut up?” — and Joe confirms: exactly. The love doesn’t need to fix or analyze what’s stored in the gut. It just needs to be present there. The compassion is the love meeting the stored pain, not trying to change it.
This bridges the intellectual understanding of compassion with its embodied, etymological root — compassion as a visceral experience, not a mental stance.
Related Concepts
- Heartbreak is where love for a parent lives
- Three brains of transformation
- Body awareness is just attention