"There were perhaps 30 people - mostly elderly, along with a few young families and some teenagers. What struck me was not devotion, but density: a quiet, shared weight of lived suffering. Not dramatic or loud - just present. Many faces seemed marked by difficulty. I had entered seeking calm. Instead, I encountered vulnerability. Then I looked up at the crucifix - Christ suffering on the cross - not as doctrine, but as an image."
"I closed my eyes and unexpectedly felt warmth, light, and compassion. It felt regulating in a precise way: suffering could be held, not denied; accompanied, not solved; carried without being erased. There was room enough for all of it - wounds from what should never have happened, and wounds from what never happened but should have. The feeling was simple and powerful: suffering does not cancel love - it invites it."
Psychological safety is described as a relational, bodily-felt condition that makes honest experience accessible. Compassion functions as a regulator of the nervous system, enabling experiential truth by allowing vulnerability to be felt and accompanied rather than denied or fixed. Phenomenological therapy prioritizes sensation, feeling, and meaning before explanation. An encounter in a Barcelona church revealed a shared, quiet weight of lived suffering, and the image of the crucifix evoked warmth and compassion that felt precisely regulating. Suffering was experienced as able to be held and accompanied without being erased, creating space for love alongside pain. Therapists cultivate such relational spaces.
Read at Psychology Today
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