Kindness is a practice of inclining the mind, of intention. Rather than laying a veneer of idealism on top of reality, we want to see quite nakedly all the different things that we feel and want for what they are. Perhaps it is anger or fear or repulsion rather than the kindness we would so much more strongly prefer. The mistake that most of us make at one time or another with a practice like compassion or kindness is to try to deny what is actually going on: “I mustn’t feel resentment; I must only feel love. Because, after all, that is my dedication—to be kind.” It is a very delicate balance to bring together pure awareness, which is completely honest in seeing what is happening, with an unwavering confidence that reminds us we are genuinely capable of love and compassion. We manage to do so to some extent by practicing love and kindness toward ourselves and by seeing the negative feelings that arise as not our fault. We must learn to view the fact that we have negative feelings not as an irreversible personal defect or as some kind of portentous setback on our path to liberation, but simply as the result of conditioned habits of mind. We can hold both a vision of our heart’s objective and a compassionate acknowledgment of whatever truth is manifesting in the present moment.
Six Ways of Increasing the Force of Kindness in Your Life
One of the terrible things about experiencing the cruelty that can flow from others toward us— whether through racism or sexism, through being dismissed as secondary, or through any of the varied ways we might be categorized, filed away, and ignored by someone—is the way it grinds us down. It is all too easy to begin believing this projected image of ourselves as someone not worth much—and to take that in and begin to live from that reflection as though it were true. To get back in touch with kindness is to get back in touch with our own bigger, vibrant, more expansive potential instead of being defined by the limited, biased vision others put upon us. Why see ourselves through the distortion of their particular lens? Even if others don’t intend to harm us, their careless disregard or easy assumptions about us can be demeaning. Any of us might recall being misunderstood, overlooked, abandoned, treated unjustly. Even if we are encountering cruelty, we must try to understand its roots and determine not to be the same as those acting it out. We must determine not to simply keep perpetrating the forces of separation and disregard. If we don’t make that effort, what will we really have accomplished? Can you imagine seeking strength without hatred, power without vengefulness, authority without dualism and division? Can you imagine having that much openness, that much courage, and that much imagination itself? Practicing kindness doesn’t at all mean that we will like everybody or acquiesce to everything that he or she does. It doesn’t mean that we become complacent or passive about naming wrongdoing as wrong or about seeking change, sometimes very forcefully, with our whole heart. We use the practice of loving-kindness meditation as a way to recover our innermost knowledge of the fact that we’re all linked, as we dissolve the barriers we have been upholding and genuinely awaken to how connected we all are.
Six Ways to Offer Loving-Kindness to Others
Practicing loving-kindness does mean that we learn to see the lives of others, really see them, as related to our own lives. It means that we open up to the possibility of caring for others not just because we like them or admire them or are indebted to them in some way, but because our lives are inextricably linked to one another’s. We use the practice of lovingkindness meditation as a way to recover our innermost knowledge of that linkage as we dissolve the barriers we have been upholding and genuinely awaken to how connected we all are. Excerpted from “The Force of Kindness: Change Your Life with Love & Compassion” by Sharon Salzberg. 2005, Sounds True.
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Sharon Salzberg March 13, 2019
Sharon Salzberg September 21, 2018
