Kindness

Imagine the quality of softness. Internal softening when harshness – towards yourself or another – arises. Internally or externally. Harshness can feel prickly, tight, uncomfortable. Whether it is the inner critic, another person’s mood affecting your relationship to the moment, to scary happenings in your community or world wide that bring up fear or simply thinking this moment should be different than it is and balling up inside.

“The attitude of kindness can act like fabric softener for experience. When kindness is present, judgment and harshness will recede. We see what happens in a different light.” Christiane Wolf, MD, PHD and J. Greg Serpa PHD (excerpt from their book: A Clinician’s Guide to Teaching Mindfulness).

Softeness has space. Tightness is limiting. When we feel safe, when leaning in and opening up is possible, we can see with a broader lens. When we tighten, we narrow our view and limit our perspective and experience.

While kindness is related to softness, it is important to remember this is not a weakness. The attitude of kindness takes courage, heart, awareness, compassion and practice. The attitude of kindness is in being which is different than the act of kindness which is in doing. Being and doing are equally valuable as is understanding of the difference between the two.

Somewhere in between being kind and carrying out acts of kindness is metta, loving kindness, a compassionate practice of internal action.

Compassion arises when a situation touches our heart and we want to take action with the intention of alleviating suffering. Compassion is not sympathy or pity where one might feel superior to another. Compassion is a practice of equals. There is no hierarchy. Loving kindness, the practice of metta can bridge the distance between being and doing and offer us some kind of internal action taken through the repetition of phrases. This can be heartening and refill our well of hope when we don’t know what to do to better a situation. Lovingkindness does no harm and there is no harm in offering phrases of well wishes to another being.

I remember years ago going out for lunch with a friend and noticing our waitress was a bit short in her words and tight in her face and body language. I noticed that I started to tighten too, feeling like I was asking too much in ordering drinks and food, even though this was her job, it was palpable that she was having a difficult time. What I am about to share was – full disclosure—partly self serving as an enjoyable afternoon lunch with my friend was on my wish list of the moment. Silently, I began to send the waitress well wishes:

 

May you be filled with lovingkindness

May you be free from harm and suffering

May you experience peace and happiness

May you be well

 

A little while later, when the waitress reemerged from the kitchen to check on us, her face and body language had transformed into softness, a smile and she put her hand on my shoulder before asking if there was anything else we needed.

I saw the waitress again months later, at a different restaurant when our family went out for dinner to celebrate Saint Patty’s Day. The place was packed with people. She was working other tables and saw me from across the room. She walked over to me smiling, gave me a huge hug and said, "It is so good to see you!" I said, "It is so good to see you! How have you been?" It was an unexpected exchange and I could tell that we are both a little taken aback by the spontaneity and warmth in our reencounter and touched by it too. I credit metta and the practice of loving kindness for the experience of connection with this lovely lady who I have seen again from time to time around our small beach town and when we see each other, we smile and wave.

When we offer well wishes to another human being, these words run through our own hearts and minds softening our being inside as the well wishes flow out into the world.

While there are different ways of practicing metta (loving kindness), one teaching I have heard across the board is the encouragement to create our own phrases so the practice feels infused with personal resonance. And, while sometimes repeating the phrases might feel mechanical, all my teachers have said invariably, Do it anyway. You never know when the practice of lovingkindness might arise to wrap you in its warm embrace.

I remember a morning when I was spiraling in shame after reading an email from a client who’s project we are in the final stages of completing. The client was disappointed, not in the product or design itself, but in the amount of attention I gave them. Their expectation was to receive more of my time, my creative energy, one on one. Our company was constructed of a talented team. Not a one person show. I was proud of the design and I knew in my bones that the quality of attention our team had provided was top notch. Nothing lacking. Still, that disappointment felt personal and hit a sore spot that I’ve worked on for years to heal: The belief that I didn’t do enough, that I let someone down, that someone suffered because I fell short. All of the latter arose and hurt after reading that email from the client. I took that shame spiral out into my yard and puttered around. After a while of feeling like human sludge, metta and loving kindness arose in these words: May be I be held in loving kindness, May I be held in Compassion, May I be well. And I felt a deep relief begin to emerge, a softening in my center, gratitude for practice. I felt my vulnerability, humanity and wish to alleviate suffering and do no harm to myself or another being. And the wisdom to remember that I cannot control another persons experience or perception or fullfill all external expectations. Then, instead of internalizing the experience and keeping it private as I often do, I walked back into the house and shared with my husband who listened, didn’t try to fix or change what I was feeling and he made me breakfast.

Metta can be like balm for the heart. Practicing loving kindness phrases does no harm and it can be helpful in moments when there may be nothing we can do to change what is happening but feel the deep need to do something to alleviate suffering. Well wishes flow through the heart and all hearts connecting as one. No hierarchy. Compassion is  a practice of equals.

Mindfulness Meditation is a practice in befriending ourselves, family, friends, community, the entire world. A lifelong friendship with this moment to moment experience of being human in all its  complexities and simplicities and all the spaces in between.

May you be filled with lovingkindness

May you be free from harm and suffering

May you experience peace and happiness

May you be well

With Metta,

Tehroma

 

A Friendship Blessing by John O’Donohue

May you be blessed with good friends.
May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.
May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where
there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness.
May this change you.
May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold in you.
May you be brought in to the real passion, kinship, and affinity of belonging.
May you treasure your friends.
May you be good to them and may you be there for them;
may they bring you all the blessing, challenges, truth,
and light that you need for your journey.
May you never be isolated.
May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your anam ċara.