Get Involved — Honor the Struggle

Look Inward

Every journey toward compassion begins with your own story. Before you can truly witness another person's struggle, you must first be willing to witness your own.

One of the most powerful ways to begin is through story. Story is more than entertainment—it is an exchange of experience and a mirror that reflects our own lives back to us. When you encounter a story that models self-compassion, you begin to recognize your own patterns, your own pain, and the parts of yourself still waiting to be understood. Honoring your story with honesty and compassion is where self-compassion begins, preparing you to extend genuine compassion to others.

Stories come in many forms. Sometimes they arrive as a novel that gives language to your experience. Sometimes they appear in a film that reveals something you couldn't yet see in yourself. Sometimes they are found in a photograph that captures resilience after the unimaginable. Sometimes they live in three minutes of music that expresses what words never could.

The resources below are stories that model self-compassion, inviting you to look inward so you can better see yourself—and, ultimately, better see others.

Movies

Inside Out (2015). Every emotion has a place and a purpose; avoidance isn't the goal, integration is.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019). A cynical, guarded man is slowly healed by someone who simply witnesses him without judgment.
The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019). Being seen for who you are, chosen family, and pursuing what you value despite obstacles.
Soul (2020). Presence over ambition; meaning found in showing up for life as it is, not chasing an idealized future.

Novels

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. Grief, isolation, and the slow, reluctant opening of a closed off heart to community.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. A literal and emotional journey toward facing the past instead of avoiding it.
Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore (a true story). An unlikely friendship that shows what it looks like to truly see someone others walk past.

Short Story

The Weight of Grace by Tom Tenney. A man named Sam moves through a dream where crosses become a way of understanding the burdens we carry, and what it looks like to finally set them down. Companion workbook available.
A Small, Good Thing by Raymond Carver. Grief met with an unexpected act of compassion from a stranger; a quiet picture of being carried through pain.
The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry. Sacrificial generosity between two people who have very little, offered simply out of love.

ACT Principles Book

Underneath every resource on this page is a simple idea: healing doesn't come from avoiding pain, but from making room for it while still moving toward what matters. This book, written by the co-founder of that idea, is the clearest place to understand it in full.

A Liberated Mind by Steven C. Hayes. Written by the co-founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), this is a thorough, foundational guide to the framework behind everything on this page.

Art

Some of the deepest truths about compassion have been carved in bronze or painted on canvas long before either of us had the words for them. These pieces don't just depict pain or healing. They hold both at once, the way real reconciliation usually does.

Reconciliation by Josefina de Vasconcellos. A bronze sculpture of two exhausted figures kneeling in embrace. Cast copies stand today in Coventry, Hiroshima, Belfast, and Berlin: real places once torn apart, now marked by this same image of two people choosing to hold each other again.
The Embrace by Hank Willis Thomas (2023, Boston). Inspired by a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King embracing after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, this large bronze sculpture turns one private moment of love into a public symbol of what solidarity looks like.
The Runaway by Norman Rockwell. A police officer sits beside a runaway boy at a diner counter, offering warmth instead of judgment. A small, quiet picture of what it looks like to simply show up for someone.

Photography

Some pain is too real for allegory. These photographs don't symbolize compassion. They document it, in the actual lives of people who lived through the unimaginable.

Portraits of Reconciliation by Pieter Hugo (New York Times Magazine, 2014). Twenty years after the Rwandan genocide, survivors sit side by side with the people who once harmed them, after a long process of confession and forgiveness. These are not symbolic images. They are real people who chose, after unimaginable pain, to see each other again.

Music

"I Am Not Okay" by Jelly Roll (Country). Naming pain honestly, while holding onto hope that things will be alright.
"Therapy Session" by NF (Hip-Hop). Music as an outlet for facing what's real instead of performing perfection. Note: the official video carries a viewer discretion notice for intense imagery.
"Carry You" by Novo Amor (Indie-Folk). A quiet, aching promise to stay present in someone else's pain.
"The Sound of Silence" by Disturbed (Rock). A haunting reckoning with isolation and the failure to truly hear one another.

Bring It Back to You

Whatever you chose above, pause for a moment before moving on. A good story can loosen something in us that everyday life doesn't reach. But the story was never the point. You are.

The five questions below borrow the same tools used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the framework behind everything on this page. They're here to help you take what you just felt and turn it toward your own life, and toward the people carrying something alongside you.

You don't need to answer all five. Sit with whichever one lands.

What pain is this story not running from, and how is that pain treated?
Notice whether the character, narrator, or artist meets their pain with judgment or with gentleness. What would it look like to treat your own pain the way this story treats theirs?
Which feeling in this story do you usually push away in yourself, and what do you normally say to yourself when it surfaces?
Notice the harsh inner voice that shows up around that feeling. What's one kinder thing you could say to yourself instead, the way you might say it to a friend?
Where in this story did you feel most "in it," and what would it feel like to sit with your own pain that closely, without trying to fix or flee it?
Presence is the first step toward compassion. You can't be kind to something you won't look at.
If this character's chapter were yours, would you judge them the way you judge yourself?
This is the heart of self-compassion. Most people would offer a struggling character, or friend, far more grace than they offer themselves. Notice the gap. What does it suggest about the voice you use with yourself?
This story suggests you're not the only one who has carried this. Who else might be carrying something similar, and what does that shared humanity change about how you feel toward yourself?
Pain isolates us less when we remember it's shared. That's the whole idea behind Carried too.

Want to Go Deeper?

These questions are a starting point. If you want a more guided path through this work, the ACT workbook that accompanies The Weight of Grace walks through these same principles in more depth, with space to write, reflect, and return to when you need it.

Explore the Workbook →

Where to Begin