Most of us are transformed when we’re touched by kindness. Our hearts open in the presence of a person who accepts us for who we are and who sees the good in us. They look at us without judgment, they listen without finishing our sentences; they are patient.
Kindness towards ourselves makes it easier for us to be in our own company. Particularly when we have known too much sorrow or when unwanted memories become stuck in the craw, likes pieces of broken glass. We may have made a deal, in order to cope, not to look behind the curtain provided our minds leave us alone. But when we go quiet in meditation, the very things we most want to forget can make their presence felt.
When we turn kindness on ourselves, we give everything that hurts inside room to breathe. Kindness is an energy that comes straight from the heart. It is love dressed in plain clothing.
Kindness is also a powerful antidote to self-criticism. I am all too familiar with my own critical mind and its dreary one-liners. Despite reasoning with its wild generalisations for years it can still zap my energy with its negativity.
Why do I seem to hold on to these thoughts? Am I afraid of what I might become without them? Do I think they will eventually turn me into a better person? My experience has been that far from helping me to grow, they immobilise me and drive me into despair.
This week I have been conscious of trying to bring kindness into my practice. For a variety of reasons, mainly tiredness, I have found it hard to sit. Instead of lamenting the way I feel and adding it to my “all-that’s-wrong-with-me list”, I’ve tried to coax myself with different forms of kindness onto my cushion.
What I’ve noticed is that kindness makes meditation a lot more playful. It has given me a way to greet the negative thoughts that come tumbling into my mind with a smile. I see them for what they are: bullies to whom I have given too much power in my life; desperate attempts to make myself more acceptable to others. A painful waste of time.
Breathing in I see these thoughts for what they are; breathing out, I smile to them. I wonder if my resistance to meditation in the past has been partly to avoid these voices in my head? Who needs them? Who wouldn’t find some excuse to put off sitting in silence, and being open to whoever and whatever decided to turn up? Particularly when you’re already feeling under the weather.
Much easier to cook up a good breakfast, make a decent cup of coffee or turn on the radio to distract myself with news of some disaster happening in a place far from my inner world. What I realised this week is that it is precisely in moments when I feel low that I most need to be there for myself. To hold whatever is happening in awareness with kindness, to stick with it and not abandon myself.
When I hold my difficulties in this way, I see that my pain is fluid and that it is only my thoughts that tend to turn pain into something solid and fixed. Kindness allows difficult emotions and memories to become unfrozen, so that their energy can move and flow and change.
Kindness helps me to see difficult emotions for what they are: simply evidence of the ways in which life has touched me. The price that we all pay for being open and letting others in.
To know the true value of kindness, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye says that we first of all have to know sorrow in our lives. Her poem Kindness says that having a full awareness of our own loneliness, our fragility and our mortality is what enables us to be kind. It's what gives us the tenderness we need to befriend someone who feels exposed and vulnerable. And sometimes the person most in need of kindness is ourselves.