A Random Page

For the past year, I have been reckoning with a question I never expected to ask so seriously in my life.

How do you move forward after someone you trusted deeply deceives you, manipulates you, and leaves you carrying the emotional wreckage of their choices?

How do you reconcile grief, betrayal, and psychological harm with the part of yourself that still wants to live with love, compassion, and integrity?

I don’t have easy answers to those questions.

But today, something small made me pause and think about them in a different way.

I picked up a book I've had for a number of years, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, and opened it to a random page.

The chapter I landed on was about something in Buddhism called The Four Immeasurables.

Maitri — loving-kindness.

Karuna — compassion.

Mudita — joy.

Upeksha — equanimity.

Four qualities of the heart we are encouraged to practice every day.

As I read through the chapter, my mind naturally went where it usually goes when I think about ideas like this.

To other people.

Because offering those things outward has always come easily to me.

Loving people deeply.

Trying to understand them when they are hurting.

Celebrating their joys.

Remaining steady and compassionate when life becomes complicated or painful.

For most of my life those instincts have been almost automatic. They are simply part of who I am and how I move through the world.

But the past year of my life has been different.

After experiencing profound grief, massive betrayal, and psychological and emotional harm, I have spent months doing something that once felt unfamiliar — pouring love, compassion, patience, and steadiness into my own heart.

Into the cracks.

Into the places that hurt.

Into the parts of myself that were left trying to make sense of something that, in many ways, will never fully make sense.

Experiences like that leave marks.

Not just heartbreak.

Not just anger.

They can leave you replaying things in your mind, questioning your judgment, wondering how something that felt so real could turn out to be something else entirely.

Reading about loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity raised a difficult question.

What do teachings like this mean when someone has harmed you?

When someone profoundly deceives you, manipulates you, abuses you, and then moves on as though nothing significant happened?

Because ideas like compassion and loving-kindness can sometimes be misunderstood as instructions to minimize harm or excuse it.

But that is not what they mean.

Loving-kindness does not require pretending something painful did not occur.

Compassion does not mean excusing someone’s behavior.

Joy does not erase grief.

And equanimity is not indifference.

If anything, reckoning with those experiences requires seeing things clearly.

Naming betrayal for what it was.

Acknowledging the ways it affected us.

Holding the truth of what happened without turning that harm inward toward ourselves.

And somewhere in the middle of reading that chapter, another realization slowly surfaced.

I had spent most of my life offering those qualities to other people.

Even to people who did not offer them back.

Even to people who hurt me.

What if the person I most needed to practice those things toward was me?

That realization landed differently.

Because it is often far easier to extend love, compassion, patience, and grace outward than it is to turn those same qualities inward — especially after grief, betrayal, and experiences that leave you carrying the emotional consequences of someone else’s choices.

Loving-kindness might mean offering myself the same gentleness I so easily give others.

Compassion might mean acknowledging that trusting someone who presented themselves as loving and sincere was not a personal failure.

Joy might mean allowing life to continue unfolding — laughter, connection, new experiences — without feeling as though moving forward diminishes what happened.

And equanimity might mean accepting something that has taken me a long time to learn.

I cannot control the choices, character, or integrity of another person.

Their actions belong to them.

My life belongs to me.

I used to think these qualities were something I was meant to only offer to others.

This year has been teaching me that sometimes the most important place to practice love, compassion, joy, and equanimity is within the very heart that has been broken —

Me.