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It’s 2017ish. I’m working my way through the On Being archives while cooking dinner in my little Berlin apartment. From my speaker, Krista Tippett interviews Big Time Buddhists™ Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman. For the first time I hear the term “fierce compassion” and it stops me mid-sauté.
Fierce compassion is not cuddly, accepting, or accommodating. It’s love plus action—a caring force that understands when change is not just desirable, but necessary and possible. At that moment in time, I related heavily to this kind of care. It had been churning around inside of me for a while in relation to one specific person.
For most of my life I had been at odds with my dad. He was the funniest, smartest, handiest dude I knew. He was also mean and unpredictable, and when you’re a sensitive kid, that’s a scary combo. Despite the fact that this dynamic kept us from being close, part of me knew that there was a world in which we could be—we were suited to it, even! And the fact that we weren’t made me mad. That evening in the kitchen, I realized that I was sick of it and that my anger had changed into something else.
After a particularly nasty video chat with him the following day—one in which he got up and left, mid-call—I surprised us both by raising my voice. “Get back over here,” I said. “I’m not done with you yet.”
When he reappeared in frame, I told him that this couldn’t happen anymore—that I was 32 years old and had not had a real relationship with him, but I wanted one before it was too late. “What can we do to stop acting like this with one another?” I asked him, and waited for his response.
Over the next hour we both cried. He said it weighed on him that he’d been a bad father. I bucked habit and resisted the temptation to ease his guilt, because it wouldn’t have felt true. Instead, I said, “Yeah, you kind of have. But you can do something different now.”
That was the beginning of a new chapter, brought to us by fierce compassion.
When I think about this week’s Simplify guest, fierce compassion lights up neon in my mind because she embodies it so boldly. She also teaches skills that I really could’ve used during that slow, cautious period of reckoning with my pops—the tools needed to go beyond seeing the potential for change between people and to enact it, rep by rep.
It’s strange that nobody ever really gives us a protocol for repair. So too, we’re never taught to channel our rage in a clean, collectively-interested way.
And that’s where Christabel Mintah-Galloway comes in.
Christabel is a relational skills teacher. She’s also a beautiful writer, a podcaster, and a registered nurse who manages a 28-bed inpatient cardiac oncology unit and leads a staff of 84 people. She is Nigerian/Ghanaian, and has made a life and a career for herself in the US. She’s also an ex Jehovah’s witness who has done the painstaking work of becoming who she really is, minus the scaffolding of the church. I’ll sum it up by saying that she is a damn good good-ancestor-in-the-making who helps people build true, sturdy circles of connection and care. This work takes equal parts guts and skill. Most of all, it takes someone who understands the importance of community.
“We're relational beings, as much as the modern world and technology and capitalism would have us convinced that we can function independent of others, nature, and the universe around us. And as much as I've worked in therapy, it didn't get as good as it could until I brought it into my relationships—that’s what solidified this idea for me that I am no one without the people I choose to relate to.”
Christabel says that it’s essential for us to be true mirrors (more on that in the episode) to one another, which doesn’t always mean that relating will be comfortable. In fact, it can bring up anger—even rage—which also has its place. And rage can be powerful when wielded with intent to unify rather than destroy.
“I believe that our true nature is love, which means injustice will rankle if we're in touch with our true nature. So when we see injustice being perpetrated, be it in our interpersonal relationships or otherwise, it brings up anger. It's never to be wielded against someone. But when it is as a result of a natural reaction to injustice, I say wield that so ferociously—because what we're fighting for when we're fighting for justice is incredibly important to collective liberation.”
So. This episode, pull up, dig deep, and tune in to recover the lost relational skills needed to actually be closer to one another. We’ll cover how to repair after shit gets real and using anger for good. Christabel’s work is a reminder of how ferocity can be exercised in the interest of love, and that telling the truth might be the greatest kindness of all.
Come and listen, then attend or sponsor one of Christabel’s workshops (there’s one coming up on February 28th!), get her repair toolkit, and follow her on instagram to level up the way you show up in your community.
‘Til soon,
Caitlin
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