Daya (Compassion)
The Softest Barrier Between Me and the World
Daya (दया, dǎyā) is the practice of responding with care where harm could live. In yogic practice, it’s known as compassion — not as pity or performance, but as protection. An act of care that stops harm from reaching someone else. Daya doesn’t mean looking away from harm. It means choosing care and refusing to replicate it.
To offer softness in a world that demands survival. To hold pain quietly so someone else can stay whole a little longer. These are some of the ways Daya lives through us.
My memories from childhood don’t come in order.
Some are fragments. Some are buried. Some come with tears. And some, like this one, show up clear as day.
This memory takes place somewhere around 1985. I was little. My Nana was raising me while my mom was raising her other children. That wasn’t uncommon. Our people have always raised each other in clusters (aunties, cousins, elders, chosen family).
In many Mexican and Central American families, abuelas and tías often became the emotional and logistical center of the household. They weren’t just caregivers. They were architects of survival.
The tradition of la comadre (a co-mother, godmother, or chosen kin) reflects how raising children was never a solo act. It was collective. Rooted in community bonds.
This isn’t new or unheard of. In Chicano culture, it was the mujeres who organized, protected, nurtured, and led (especially when the spotlight never found them). They ran the kitchens, coordinated childcare, wrote the pamphlets, showed up for court dates, kept folks fed, and made sure the next generation knew where they came from.
My Nana was part of that tradition. She didn’t need to say she was leading. She just led.
She was a small woman, maybe five foot three, and all protection.
Nana was born in 1920. By the time I came into the world in the 80s, she had already lived through segregation, Jim Crow, and displacement. She came from the generation after the land was taken. Her grandparents had witnessed the shift firsthand—when borders were redrawn and entire Indigenous and Mexican communities were renamed, relocated, or erased.
In her own lifetime, she watched neighborhoods bulldozed so freeways and stadiums could rise.
She lived through the police raids in the 60s and 70s.
She watched her children be brutalized by LAPD under Daryl Gates (an era where policing in LA was designed to target, contain, and criminalize Black and Brown families).
She witnessed her children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren suffer under the weight of police violence, the carceral system, displacement, surveillance, generational poverty, and racism.
She had seen some shit. But on the outside, you’d think none of it broke her.
She was the matriarch. She didn’t have the luxury of surrender.
We lived in an incredibly poor neighborhood in LA that doesn’t exist anymore. It was erased to make room for what would become the LA Convention Center, then the Staples Center, then Crypto Arena (or whatever new name it’s got now). Sometimes when I exit off Pico Blvd and the 110, I peek left at the parking lot no one ever uses, remembering my first home (now nothing but cracked concrete and faded lines).
This day in memory, she took me shopping downtown, just a few miles from home.
*Side Note: I’ll always lowkey believe Nana fucked with Black people on the low, because even though she spoke to me in Spanish, stayed mostly on our side of the tracks and was clearly Mexican, she knew how to take care of my skin and hair like a Black woman.
My hair had all the potions, berries, and conditioners.
My baby fro stayed clean, detangled, fresh and my curls juicy!
She kept my skin moisturized and hydrated.
And I always had jeans that fit my ever-growing booty perfectly.
Nana would even travel to South Central or near Skid Row to get my hair cut by Black barbers who knew what they were doing. My Nana was probably the only human in my life to reaffirm and nurture my Blackness, while I was growing up.
That would have been a BIG no-no to the uncles and aunts who were heads of gangs, however she was ‘NANA’ and nobody ever challenged her. She was a real one!*
It had been a full day (probably only a few hours, but I was five — and anything over 15 minutes felt like forever), and it was time to catch our bus and head home with our bags, my fresh haircut, and new clothes.
Back then, buses didn’t run often. If you missed one, you might wait an hour for the next. When the bus finally pulled up and opened its doors, she reached for my hand, bags in tow, and stepped forward. The driver looked her up and down, glanced at me, then blocked the fare box with his hand.
“You can’t get on with that.”
Nana looked down, thinking maybe it was the bags or something in her pockets.
Nothing looked unusual. She glanced back up at him, confused.
“With what?”
“THAT!!!” (He pointed at me.)
And he shooed us back off the bus.
I don’t remember exactly what Nana said, but it wasn’t quiet.
Mostly curse words. Definitely a few “fuck you’s.”
She turned and looked through the windows, searching for someone — anyone — to speak up, to co-sign her outrage.
No one did.
“It’s not getting on my bus!”
The driver shut the doors and pulled off.
Nana grabbed my hand tighter and walked away.
I knew that grip meant stay quiet.
We walked back to J.J. Newberry’s.
(It had everything back then. A diner. Haircuts. Clothes. Groceries. You name it, they had it.)
She sat us down at the diner counter and placed the bags beside us.
The silence was thick.
Our routine had been disrupted.
“Nana, why did the bus leave us?”
She didn’t answer.
She ordered me an ice cream sundae instead.
My eyes lit up. I didn’t understand why, but I wasn’t about to question it.
And then I looked at her.
In my lifetime, I’d only seen my Nana cry a handful of times.
This was the first.
It wasn’t loud.
But the tears were there.
She stared at me, holding it all in.
In quiet, devastating contemplation.
I remember her face — worn, cracked, and wrinkled with battles I still don’t know the names of.
Her knuckles were swollen from arthritis.
Her hands were rough from decades of labor, and her fingers were pressed against her lips, holding back whatever sobs were trying to make their way out.
She never said a word about what happened.
Didn’t wrap it in meaning.
Didn’t give the moment to me (she kept it).
Instead, she moved.
She absorbed what should’ve hit me.
That memory lives close, even now.
I didn’t see it for what it was until much later.
Nana handed me a spoon.
“Just eat your ice cream, mijo. Everything’s okay.”
And so, even though that would be my first moment of real world racism, non familial racism, that man’s hate never touched me.
As I sat devouring that dessert, my Nana ran her fingers over my hair and caressed my face.
She let me stay five.
Let me be a Black boy with a new haircut, a messy face and Black Joy!
My Nana carried what needed carrying so I didn’t have to.
No doubt, as she touched my face, she was holding every reality I’d grow into as a Black body in this country.
She didn’t say it. But I know now she was grieving for me — and probably for herself too.
I imagine that moment brought up everything she’d already survived, everything she watched her children survive.
And here I was, four generations down the line, still facing it.
But she didn’t hand it to me.
She carried the burn of that man’s words and kept it from reaching me.
She just made sure I stayed five.
Nobody backed her up.
Not one person moved.
She was alone in that moment.
But she moved the world back into my hands (with a plastic spoon and a quiet stare that said: not today).
When I was done, she hugged me tight.
Grabbed the bags. Asked if I was ready.
My belly was full and I felt loved.
I was ready for whatever.
And as we walked out, I asked, “Are we catching the bus now?”
She said, “Not this time, mijo. This time, we’re gonna walk.”
And on that three-mile walk back home, not once did she let go of my hand.
I didn’t have language for it then.
Didn’t know that what she had shieled me from.
But this memory lives close now (as instruction).
When harm is right there — visible, undeniable — compassion doesn’t get to be theoretical, poetic, or delayed.
It has to become something.
It has to move.
My Nana didn’t talk about care.
She didn’t wait for someone else to intervene.
There was no hiding.
No escape hatch.
There was me, and the harm coming toward me.
So she did what compassion becomes in a moment like that:
She held the moment and absorbed the blast.
Her sacrifice lives in me now. It is my lineage and history.
That kind of care. That kind of clarity. It would be the first time I would see that kind of Daya.
That practice belongs to me now and when I move with it, I’m not reaching for some distant concept— I’m walking with what she gave me.
A small way to bring Daya into your day:
Think of someone who carried pain so you didn’t have to.
Ask yourself: Where did their protection show up in my life?
Offer that same protection — first, to yourself.
Next, Choose one act of care you weren’t taught to give: say no, rest without guilt, speak kindly to yourself.
Lastly, offer it to someone else — not for praise, but because you know what it’s like to need shielding.
Let them rest. Listen without fixing. Show up without being asked.
That is a part of Daya — compassion passed down quietly, through what was done, not said.