Karuṇā Needs a Backbone

Over the last couple of , my personal yoga practice has softened outwardly while becoming more demanding inwardly. I am drawn to Yin. To stillness. To long, quiet holds that ask for patience rather than performance. From the outside, it can look like a gentler practice. But from the inside, it requires something far more exacting.

Presence.

This has led me to reflect more deeply on Karuṇā, compassion, and how easily it is misunderstood in modern yoga spaces. Compassion is often framed as softness. As kindness that soothes. As emotional warmth that makes things easier to bear. And sometimes, yes, compassion is comforting.

But Karuṇā is not synonymous with comfort.

In the Buddhist teachings on the Brahmavihāras, each divine abode has both a far enemy and a near enemy. The far enemy of Karuṇā is cruelty, obvious and easy to recognise. But the near enemy is far more subtle. The near enemy of Karuṇā is pity.

Pity masquerades as care, but it creates distance. It positions the witness above the one who suffers. It reduces complexity. It often centres the observer’s emotional response rather than the reality of what is being witnessed. Pity disconnects precisely because it does not stay present. It replaces presence with narrative.

True Karuṇā does not ask us to feel sorry for someone. It asks us to stay with what is actually here.

Yin practice has, in some circles, become synonymous with ease. With props, blankets, reassurance, and comfort. But Yin, when practised with integrity, is not easy. To remain still inside sensation, without distraction, without numbing, without checking out, requires an enormous amount of nervous system capacity. For many practitioners, especially those newer to yoga, Yin is far more challenging than movement-based practices.

This is where Karuṇā becomes embodied.

Not as indulgence.

Not as collapse.

But as steady presence.

Yin asks us to meet sensation without trying to fix it. To witness discomfort without dramatizing it or dissociating from it. To notice what arises, physically, emotionally, mentally, without immediately making it mean something.

This is compassion in practice. In modern yoga, especially in Tantric-rooted spaces, there is frequent language around oneness. Non-separation. The idea that we are all one. At the absolute level, this teaching is true. There is no separation between consciousness and form, between self and world.

But at the lived, human level, this truth can be easily misused.

When we flatten difference in the name of oneness, we risk erasing lived experience. We risk bypassing the very real differences of body, history, trauma, culture, privilege, and access. Saying “we are all the same” is not Karuṇā.

Fierce compassion allows difference to exist without hierarchy. It acknowledges that while we are not separate at the level of essence, we are not interchangeable at the level of experience. This kind of compassion does not collapse into sameness, and it does not retreat into distance. It stays close, awake, and discerning.

Fierce Karuṇā is not unfeeling. It is deeply affected, but not overwhelmed. It does not steal another’s suffering and make it about the self.

It does not look away.

And it does not rush to resolution.

Instead, it asks, can I stay present with this, exactly as it is? And then, what response is being asked of me? Sometimes the answer is to hold space. Sometimes it is to set a boundary…

And sometimes it is to act, to speak, to disrupt.

This is compassion with a backbone. Not calm as passivity - Not softness as collapse. But steadiness that can hold complexity without turning away.

In this way, Karuṇā becomes not just a feeling, but a capacity. One that is cultivated slowly, patiently, through practices that teach us how to stay.

Yin does not teach us to disappear - It teaches us how to remain.

This inquiry into Karuṇā, presence, and fierce compassion is not abstract for me. It is shaping how I practise, how I teach, and how I relate. It forms a core thread of the work I am developing now through the Embodied Heart Immersion, and the retreats and longer spaces of practice that grow from it, including the upcoming retreat in Portugal.

If these reflections resonate, I write more long-form pieces like this in Musings & Reflections on my website, where I explore how yoga philosophy, nervous system awareness, and lived experience continue to inform each other.

This is the work I am interested in now.

Not perfect calm, but the capacity to stay.

Not soft compassion alone, but compassion with clarity, steadiness, and fire.