We stayed with the one who felt dead inside, acknowledging his protective value, even though we had no cognitive awareness of who and what he was sheltering ...'What is this depression, this one who is so still, wanting to tell us?

listening to one another activates our mirror neurons and resonance circuitry (Iacoboni, 2009) so that we can be said to literally begin to inhabit one another's embodied emotional universe.

It wasn't that I gave up on her healing, but, as she continued to struggle to get in the door and actively needed her self-hatred to stay functional, I began to realize more deeply that her patterns had meaning and that it wasn't useful for me to predetermine what recovery might look like for her.

This shift from intellectual to embodied compassion is at the heart of deep forgiveness, or what we call compassionate release that gives us the gift of not needing to fend off the ones who hurt us anymore. It is a letting go at a different depth.

The depth at which we take in the preceding generations astonishes me. There is likely an epigenetic component to this as well as transmission through the internalizations that get passed down through the generations. Whole cultures are carried forward that way, so it makes sense that family legacies might be transmitted that way as well.

The challenge - which is also at the centre - is that what illuminates the process of letting go of certainty, control, planning, clear-cut goals, and so much more may feel settling even as it separates us from those we want to help. This letting go requires cultivation in the trust of the innate processes that support the movement towards healing, something that grows with time and experience, especially when compassion for this depth of challenge to our need for security is present.

Anything we determine to do in advance has already separated us from being in this emerging moment with ourselves as well as the other person.

Even though we have been so influenced by the left hemisphere's ascendency, we also have an inherent capacity to be rooted in the relational right because we are, after all, first, last, and always beings whose embodied brains hunger for connection with others, literally shaping one another's ongoing experience in every moment.

We may find that the words we are naturally drawn toward when we speak to others or ourselves have a great deal to say about our ability to be present with one another.