Compassion as Action and Qigong for Lasting Stress Relief

In a raw, unscripted conversation with Tam Villeaux for the Energy Almanac, meditation teacher Amy Pattee Colvin makes the case that compassion is a trainable skill rather than a fixed personality trait, and that most people stall because they stop at feeling. Drawing on a meditation path that blends Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism, a year-long compassion certification at Stanford, and qigong classes she has taught to Google employees since 2011, she lays out a three-part definition of compassion, a practical way to extend it to people who wear on you, and a view of qigong as energy cultivated through flow rather than force. The thread running through all of it is that stress relief which lasts is built by small, repeated acts, not by a single dramatic reset.

How does a massage therapist end up teaching compassion at Google?

The story begins on a massage table. Pattee Colvin has been a massage therapist since 2004, and her first big professional engagement was working at Google. The people who came to her, she recalls, were largely stressed out, and she began to see that what she could do with her hands could also be taught, so that the tension never had to build to the point where a person needed rescuing from it.

"I would rather have them not be in pain and have them come because they just wanted to."

— Amy Pattee Colvin, Energy Almanac conversation with Tam Villeaux (around 7:30)

That shift, from treating pain to preventing it, is the hinge of the whole conversation. Her Google classes ran about half an hour of standing, moving qigong, followed by roughly fifteen minutes of seated meditation. Even the sitting portion stayed active: participants held a mudra, a hand position, for about a minute at a time. She also notes that one of her regular students was a man who has taken her multi-week classes three times since, a small rebuttal to the idea that compassion practice is only for women.

Why is compassion trainable, and what is the three-part model?

Pattee Colvin's first and most important move is to separate compassion from empathy, which people tend to use as if they were the same word. Her view of how people typically talk about compassion is that it usually means feeling for someone. Her Stanford training, she says, reframed the whole subject. Before that, she describes a mindfulness culture that leaned heavily on explanation. Her own teacher, by contrast, is a "do it this way" kind of teacher, and she found that approach more useful for practice than an extended account of why. She has carried that instinct into how she frames compassion.

The Stanford program, as she explains it, defines compassion in three steps, and she has adopted the model as her own:

"The first thing is being aware of distress or suffering in something or yourself. The second is emotionally moved by which is that empathy piece. And the third part is taking action."

— Amy Pattee Colvin, Energy Almanac conversation with Tam Villeaux (around 4:00)

The first step is perception: you notice that something is hurting, whether in another person or in yourself. The second is the emotional response, the part most people already recognize as empathy, the feeling of being moved. The third is where the model becomes trainable. Action turns a passing emotion into an intentional choice, and it makes compassion less passive and less emotional in the sense that you are no longer simply absorbing someone else's pain. You are doing something with it.

The action can be modest. Pattee Colvin describes wishing someone well, giving away something you own, or volunteering with an organization such as the Red Cross, and then she makes the point that it can be far smaller than any of those. In her example, a friend mentions that a cat is unwell, and the response is simply to send the cat some good wishes. She calls that compassion, and she is clear that it counts because it is an act, not because it is grand.

"It can be as subtle as saying, 'Oh, you just told me that your cat's not feeling well... I'm just going to send your cat some well wishes.' And that is compassion."

— Amy Pattee Colvin, Energy Almanac conversation with Tam Villeaux (around 4:30)

What does a birthday email reveal about action?

Pattee Colvin tells a story from the morning after her birthday. She had been working through a long list of greetings on social media, liking every message and replying personally to the people closest to her. Then a private email arrived from one person. It contained three gifts: a video he loved, a project close to his heart, and a third item she has left in the background of the story, while the emotional arc stayed on what he did. Each one, she says, made her jaw drop a little further, because of the level of caring behind them and the work it took to present them.

Tam Villeaux picked up the point immediately, and it is the clearest illustration of Pattee Colvin's framework in the whole conversation. The gift was not a sentiment announced in a sentence. It was awareness of what would matter to her, an emotional response that showed in the choices he made, and then concrete action in three separate forms. As Villeaux put it, "it was compassion, but it was action."

— Tam Villeaux, Energy Almanac conversation with Amy Pattee Colvin (around 6:20)

The lesson travels well beyond birthdays. Feeling warmly toward a colleague who is struggling does very little for that colleague until the feeling gets routed into something visible. Pattee Colvin's model asks a simple question at the end of any moment of awareness: what will I actually do?

How do you practice compassion with someone who gets under your skin?

The most useful part of the conversation may be her account of working with someone she found difficult. She admits that the problem was largely hers, which is an honest starting point, and that she had been carrying it for a while. What changed things was a piece of the Stanford training built around common humanity: the recognition that the other person also has problems, just as she does. That recognition, she says, let her diffuse the way she was feeling about the woman.

"And that lightened the load off my shoulders."

— Amy Pattee Colvin, Energy Almanac conversation with Tam Villeaux (around 8:40)

Pattee Colvin is clear that the benefit of this practice is for the person doing it, not for the difficult person. That framing matters. It is not a method for winning an argument or for reforming someone else. It is a way of loosening your own grip on a grievance, which is exactly the kind of quiet, self-directed change she says tends to last.

What makes qigong a foundation rather than just a workout?

Qigong is the second pillar of her teaching, and she approaches it as a practice of energy rather than exertion. Pattee Colvin explains the term as joining qi, internal energy, with gong, a word connected to sustained practice and skill. In describing the work, she emphasizes the relationship between movement and breath, and she contrasts it with more structured physical training by saying that qigong is more free flowing. The practice asks you to open the heart and allow energy to move, not to push through a set of positions.

— Amy Pattee Colvin, Energy Almanac conversation with Tam Villeaux (around 11:50)

The video's own framing sharpens the point. Its description presents qigong as "energy mastery for flow, not force," and argues that the practice builds an inner reservoir of energy, which is the difference between feeling vibrant and simply feeling not tired. That distinction is worth sitting with. Rest restores you for a while; a steady practice of attention, breath and gentle movement is an attempt to change the baseline from which you operate.

This is also why Pattee Colvin treats qigong as a foundation for what she calls self-management rather than as a standalone fix. The movement creates the conditions in which compassion becomes easier to practice, and compassion in turn reduces the internal friction that drains energy in the first place.

Why does patience matter when life feels chaotic?

The video closes its promise on patience, which it names as a kind of superpower. The description frames embracing patience and detachment as the means to ride out chaos and reach lasting integration, and it speaks directly to readers who feel adrift after a life transition such as retirement, who feel selfish when they prioritize self-care, or who want to quiet a harsh inner critic. Those are not quick problems, and the conversation's implicit answer is that they are not solved by quick fixes either.

Taken together, the three ideas in this talk form a usable pattern. Notice distress, in others or in yourself. Let yourself be moved without being overwhelmed by it. Then take one concrete, often small, action. Add a daily movement and breath practice to build reserves, and when a difficult relationship drains you, return to common humanity: this person has problems too, and their problems are not yours to carry.

Where to go from here

Watch the full conversation with Tam Villeaux, which runs about 28 minutes, to hear Pattee Colvin's extended examples and the Q&A-style back and forth that gives the exchange its rawness. Then try a single experiment for a week. Each day, notice one moment of distress, let yourself feel it as empathy, and choose one small action in response, however minor. Pair that with a short daily practice of standing movement and breath, and watch what changes in how you handle the next hard conversation. The video's description also points to a set of bonus lessons on compassion, qigong and mindset for readers of the Energy Almanac, for those who want more structure.