Hello Dear Community,

We say someone “has a big heart”. We refer to someone who’s been disillusioned as “broken-hearted”. When we encounter life decisions, we try to “listen to our hearts”. Although we’re taught early to lead with analysis and logic, a part of us knows that there's a kind of intelligence that lives beneath our thoughts, woven with our deepest emotions and intuitions.

Living by our values isn’t about abandoning reason, but about living from our core: cultivating compassion in our daily lives, leading with our values and making time for what truly matters. The heart may just be the beacon that leads the way.

The Growing Edge: Cultivating A Coherent Heart

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For decades, the HeartMath Institute has studied something ancient wisdom traditions have long intuited: the heart is a sensing organ with its own rhythm, and that rhythm changes depending on what we feel. When we experience stress, frustration, or anxiety, the heart's rhythm becomes erratic and disordered. But when we experience appreciation, gratitude, or compassion, the heart settles into a smooth, sine-wave-like pattern researchers call coherence. This isn't metaphorical; it's measurable in heart rate variability, and it doesn't stay contained in the chest. A coherent heart rhythm shifts the nervous system as a whole, improving cognitive clarity, emotional stability, and even how our physiology entrains with the people around us.

Why does this matter for a compassion practice? Because coherence turns out to be a doorway. Deliberately generating heart-centered positive emotions —recalling a moment of genuine care, or extending compassion outward— measurably shifts the heart into this coherent state, which in turn makes it easier to access clarity, resilience, and connection. In other words, compassion becomes a physiological resource. Practicing it, even briefly, changes the internal rhythm we bring into every interaction that follows, and that shift is available to us at any moment we choose to slow down and access it.
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Here are some HeartMath tools for you to try out!

Insight & Inspiration: Teens Who Ran Toward the Crisis

​In a piece for The Guardian, in their regular “Kindness of Strangers” section, a mother recently shared an ordinary outing that turned terrifying in seconds. She was riding a modified scooter with her seven-year-old son, who has cerebral palsy, when they hit a puddle and fell. Her son lost consciousness, and with no phone in hand, she called out into what she thought was an empty park. The only other people there were five teenagers sheltering from the rain. Without a moment's hesitation, they ran toward the emergency rather than away from it.

What followed reads like a masterclass in distributed compassion: one teen called an ambulance, another chased down her frightened younger son, two ran to guide paramedics to the exact spot, and one girl wrapped the family in the blankets they'd been sitting on. It was this last detail that lingered longest for the mother: the girl holding her as she cried, repeating, "You're doing a great job as a mum." Five teenagers met a stranger's terror with tenderness, reminding us that compassion needs no credentials. It simply moves toward the person in pain.

News You Can Use: The Unseen Dynamics of Leadership and Self-Esteem

​A large study out of the University of Amsterdam put 332 children through a group task with one child randomly assigned as leader of groups composed of three children each. Researchers found that when a more narcissistic child led, kids with lower self-esteem often felt more included and less bullied, while the leader grew less aggressive. It was a short-lived dynamic that benefited both sides for an afternoon, but the researchers caution that the result could harden over time into submission on one side and entrenched dominance on the other.

The pattern appears in adults too. Decades of research on authoritarian dynamics consistently find that people who feel uncertain, threatened, or unmoored are most drawn to leaders who project absolute confidence and offer simple explanations for a complex world. It's rarely the leader's charisma alone doing the work; it's also what the follower lacks that the leader appears to provide.

This is where compassion becomes an essential resource: the more securely resourced we feel from the inside (through self-compassion and genuine belonging), the less we need a dominant, narcissistic leader in order to feel okay. And compassion, even for the leader—seeing the fear or insecurity usually underneath the grandiosity—strips away the mystique that gives that kind of power its grip.

Take a Stand: Care Plus Accountability

​Equimundo, a global organization working to engage men and boys in advancing gender equality and preventing violence, released this report for the 2026 MenCare Changemaker Summit, authored by Professor Michael Flood alongside Gary Barker, Giovanna Lauro, and Taveeshi Gupta. Its central argument: preventing men's violence against women and girls can't rely on punishment alone; it requires cultivating "caring masculinities" rooted in empathy, relationality, and accountability rather than dominance or control. The report calls for a two-way shift — men actively practicing care, empathy, and accountability, and communities and institutions caring for men in return, since many men who perpetrate violence have also experienced violence themselves.
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​The evidence is striking: men with stronger caregiving involvement as fathers, partners, or in professional caring roles, show lower rates of violence and greater empathy, and boys raised by nurturing, non-violent caregivers are more likely to become non-violent adults. The report acknowledges that most men who use violence were victims to it as children or peers, disproportionately at the hands of other men. This doesn't excuse violence, the authors stress, but it calls for "compassionate accountability". Concrete pathways proposed include expanding paid parental leave for men, integrating emotional literacy into boys' education, and reshaping workplace cultures around care rather than stoic breadwinning.

Let's Practice: Heart Lock-in

Sit comfortably and place one hand over your heart. Breathe a little slower and deeper than usual, imagining the breath moving in and out through your heart itself. Now bring to mind a feeling of genuine warmth, appreciation or love — someone you care about, a small kindness given or received — and let that feeling settle in your chest as you keep breathing steadily “through the heart”. Stay there for a minute or two, then carry that warmth with you as you return to your day.

Created by the HeartMath Institute, this simple practice helps shift the nervous system toward the coherent state described above.

If we may, we now have a small favor to ask. Compassion grows when it's shared. If you become a monthly donor today, contributing $5, $10, $25, or more, you can help us reach our goal of 100+ new supporters. Your gift keeps these resources free and makes compassion a living, daily practice for people everywhere.

Thank you for helping us grow compassion in the world.

With warmth,
Fabiana
Editor, Coming Home

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