Finding steadiness begins when you stop carrying what was never yours to hold.
Introduction
There’s a particular kind of tired that doesn’t come from lack of sleep. It comes from caring too much, too often, without a place to put it down. That’s the tired my guest and I circled for most of this conversation, and it’s the difference between compassion fatigue vs empathy — a distinction that sounds academic until you’ve lived inside it.
I sat down again with Mary Richardson-Perez, a longtime yoga teacher and current program director working with asylum-seeking families, now in graduate school pursuing her clinical social work license. We’d talked once before. This time felt different — less like an interview, more like two people checking in on what’s shifted, what’s broken, and what’s still standing.
We didn’t plan a tidy arc. We started with a poem, drifted into gaslighting and toxic groups, landed hard on compassion fatigue, wandered through yoga philosophy, and ended up talking about road rage. That’s honestly how the best conversations go.
Compassion Fatigue vs Empathy: Why the Distinction Matters
Mary made a point early on that reframed the whole conversation for me. Compassion, she said, is being able to help someone through their trauma without absorbing it. Empathy — at least the kind that burns people out — is standing so far inside someone else’s experience that it starts rewriting your own nervous system.
She described a session with a client that started as a simple conversation about why her kids wouldn’t go to school. It unraveled into a story about trauma the children had witnessed. Mary felt herself moving from steady presence into something else entirely — imagining her own children in that same scenario, tearing up, carrying the weight home with her for the rest of the day.
That’s the mechanism of compassion fatigue. It’s not a mood. It’s what happens when someone else’s pain finds a hook in your own life and won’t let go.
We talked about what we called the “stickiness” of these moments — how a single story can ripple through an entire day, coloring interactions that have nothing to do with the original conversation. Mary’s response wasn’t to numb out. It was to get more precise about what she needed to release, and when.
Spiritual Bypassing and the Privilege of Positivity
One thread that stuck with me was our detour into spiritual bypassing — the tendency to reach for acceptance and love-and-light language as a way of skipping past something that actually needs to be looked at.
I got a little worked up about this one. There’s a strain of wellness culture that treats enlightenment like it’s available to everyone equally, when in reality it usually shows up several layers up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s easy to be infinitely positive when your basic needs are already met. Telling someone working three jobs to “just do the inner work” isn’t wisdom — it’s insulting.
Mary pushed back gently, noting that her own studio tries to hold space for the full range of what people walk in with, not just the performative good vibes. But she agreed that yoga spaces, in general, tend to attract people whose needs are already relatively stable — a kind of selection bias that can make certain rooms feel more peaceful than the world actually is.
Joy Is a Practice, Not a Given
If compassion fatigue was the heavy half of this conversation, joy was the counterweight. Mary works daily with families carrying real trauma — displacement, grief, dysregulation. In that context, joy can start to feel inaccessible, or even suspicious, like it’s out of place.
She talked about how the work she does has actually made her better at noticing joy, not worse. A breeze on her skin while walking to her car. Fifteen unexpected minutes in the day that she spent pulled over, listening to rain and an audiobook instead of rushing to the next thing. A phone call with an old friend. Coffee, made the same way every morning, just for the ritual of it.
What struck me is that neither of us is naturally a “ritual person.” Mary admitted she’s never been good at the every-morning-candle-and-meditation routine, and I’m the same way — my ADHD brain loses interest the moment something stops feeling novel. But we landed somewhere useful: joy doesn’t require a ritual. It requires attention. You don’t have to manufacture the breeze. You just have to notice it when it comes.
The Koshas: A Framework for Depletion and Replenishment
We got into some genuinely nerdy territory around yogic philosophy — specifically the koshas, the layered model of the self used in Ashtanga tradition. Mary walked through it: starting with the physical body, moving inward to the breath and energetic layer, then to the mind, and eventually toward something more still and internal.
The practical version of this, translated out of Sanskrit, is something like: notice your body, notice your breath, notice your thoughts, and then practice withdrawing your attention from the constant input of the outside world — what’s called pratyahara, or withdrawal of the senses.
For someone doing trauma-adjacent work all day, every day, this isn’t abstract. It’s a literal off-ramp. A way of choosing, even briefly, what you let back in once you’ve had a moment of quiet.
What’s Actually Changed: A Real Check-In
Toward the end, we dropped the frameworks and just checked in on the past year of our lives. Mary talked about giving fewer expletives about things that used to consume her — not the work itself, but the noise around it.
I shared the deeply personal journey of my daughter, who is now in a residential treatment facility in Utah, and the slow, ongoing process of learning to love her life as it is rather than mourning the life I imagined for her. We explored what it means to accept reality with compassion, as I reflected on raising a neurodivergent daughter and gradually relaxing into her reality instead of fighting for an idealized version of what I thought life should be. I also shared the story of a new relationship and the significance of giving someone the door code to my house for the first time in years—a small but meaningful act of trust and an invitation to slowly let someone in.
And then, because life doesn’t stay tidy, I told her about a road rage incident from two days earlier — a guy driving down the middle of a narrow street, a near miss, an exchange of words I’m not proud of. All my practices, all my language around nonviolent communication, evaporated the second someone cussed at me through a truck window.
Mary didn’t let me off easy, and I didn’t try to dress it up. Sometimes the work doesn’t hold. Sometimes you just need somewhere to put the anger — a punching bag, a pause, an honest “I’m frustrated, I need a break” instead of escalating.
Personal Reflection
What stayed with me after this conversation is the honesty around failure — not failure as a dramatic collapse, but the small, daily version of it. Mary talking about needing a clinical supervisor because she was in over her head. Me talking about losing my composure over a truck in the middle of the road.
I think I came into this expecting a conversation about tools and frameworks, and I left with something more useful: permission to admit that even the practices we teach and believe in don’t always work. What matters more is what you do next — who you ask for help, where you put the anger, whether you notice the breeze on the way back to the car.
I also keep thinking about the spiritual bypassing conversation. I get frustrated by wellness spaces that treat presence and stillness like a universal prescription, when for a lot of people, survival is still the daily task. I don’t think Mary and I fully resolved that tension, and I’m not sure it’s meant to be resolved. It’s more of a thing to keep checking yourself against.
Practical Takeaways
- Name the shift from compassion to empathy when it happens. Compassion holds space; empathy that takes over is a sign you’ve stepped into someone else’s experience too far to be useful to them.
- Watch for “stickiness.” If a conversation or story is still running in the background hours later, that’s a signal to actively process it, not just push through the day.
- Don’t wait for a ritual to feel joy. A single moment of attention — a breeze, a phone call, fifteen quiet minutes — counts, even without a formal practice around it.
- Be honest about when your tools fail you. Nonviolent communication, yoga, therapy training — none of it works every time. Asking for outside support (a supervisor, a friend, a group) isn’t a failure of the practice.
- Give your anger somewhere to go before it finds the wrong target. A physical release, a pause, or naming your frustration out loud can keep it from spilling onto people who don’t deserve it.
- Question who gets to preach acceptance. Positivity is easier to access from a place of stability. It’s worth noticing when advice assumes a safety net that not everyone has.
Conclusion
We never landed on a single theme for this one — compassion fatigue, joy, an honest check-in, they all bled into each other the way real conversations do. Maybe that’s the point. The work of staying present for other people’s pain and the work of finding your own joy aren’t separate projects. They’re the same muscle, worked from different directions, and neither one stays strong without maintenance.
I don’t know if we solved anything. I don’t think that was ever the goal.
Guest Bio
Mary Richardson-Perez has 23 years of yoga practice and more than 12,000 hours of teaching experience, having studied Ashtanga Yoga under the lineage of Pattabhi Jois and pranayama and shat kriya under her teacher, V.K. Shesadre, in India. She completed her teacher training through the Living Yoga Program and holds a BA in Studio Art from UT Austin, with continued study in Indian Philosophy and Sanskrit, including private study of the Upanishads with professor Stephen Phillips. Mary is currently pursuing her LCSW, with graduate work focused on meditation, somatic practices, and yoga-based interventions for anxiety, depression, and nervous system regulation.
Find Studio Satya:
📍 Address: 1308 W. Anderson Lane, Suite A, Austin, TX 78757
🌐 Website: studiosatya.com
📸 Instagram: @studio_satya_austin
👍 Facebook: Studio Satya Austin
📞 Phone: (512) 400-0168
If This Resonated
These conversations explore similar themes.
Finding Balance Through Yoga, Breath, and Nervous System Regulation
How yoga helps you stay grounded through stress, change, and emotional swings
Building a Real Yoga Community in Austin, Inside Studio Satya’s Story of Connection and Practice
How Studio Satya became a space where yoga turns into real community and connection