As a student in the 2023 cohort of the Applied Compassion Training at CCARE Stanford, I was invited to explore what compassion truly means — not just as a concept, but as a lived, embodied practice. The journey led me deep into the heart of my own parenting experience, where I began to see how compassion could be both a healing force and a daily guide. From that exploration, my Capstone project, Nurturing You, Nurturing Them, was born.
Motherhood cracked me open — in the hardest and most beautiful ways.
I found myself nursing my newborn — fresh from a NICU stay — beside a teetering tower of parenting books promising answers: sleep routines, feeding schedules, developmental milestones. Each one offered a new version of how to “do it right.” In the haze of postpartum anxiety that familiar perfectionist voice in my mind grew louder than ever. Never had my sense of not-enoughness been more challenged than in those early months of motherhood.
It was in those tender, disoriented days that the roots of my compassion work for parents began to take hold. I realized that what I needed wasn’t another method or framework — it was a place to feel human, held, and whole. A space where compassion wasn’t about doing more, but about making room for what was already there: the joy, the ever expanding capacity to love, the self-doubt, the tenderness.
That realization became the seed of what would grow into my Capstone project through my compassion training at CCARE. The training helped me see that compassion isn’t just something we offer others, it’s something we must also offer to ourselves. And when self-compassion feels out of reach, beginning with compassion toward others can gently guide us back to ourselves.
My project, Nurturing You, Nurturing Them, an eight week course for parents, emerged from a simple but profound need: to create a space where parents can first explore compassion through teaching and experiential practices, and then learn how to access compassion in their daily lives while parenting.
Parenting is a messy, vulnerable, and deeply human process. This course was designed to meet that reality — honestly yet gently. Doing it in community felt essential, as a living practice of our common humanity.
While shaping the course I carried a quiet image in my heart: a hug for parents. Not advice. Not judgment. Just the feeling of being held — seen, understood, cared for — amid the imperfect, beautiful work of raising a family.
Throughout the course, we practiced noticing and responding to suffering– our own and others’ – in everyday moments. — a child’s meltdown, the weight of daily responsibilities, the ache of self-doubt. We reminded ourselves that things don’t have to be neat or solved. This is a process — and that’s okay. Compassion isn’t about fixing. It’s about staying. The shifts were often subtle — a softening, a bit more self-compassion, a bit more room to stay connected and respond to one’s self and one’s children even when things felt hard. But these subtle shifts grew to have large impacts on their relationships with themselves, partners and children.
The pilot course was just the beginning. In Fall 2025, I’ll be offering Nurturing You, Nurturing Them both in person in Berkeley, CA and online, creating more space for parents to reconnect with themselves — and each other — through compassion. I’m deeply thankful to the compassion program at CCARE Stanford, and to Neelama Eyres, whose steady presence helped guide this work into being.
