There is no better time than now to spread some kindness. As our country and the world is racked by hostility, riots, and civil unrest, let us look at ways to spread kindness so that we can heal our world.
The following is an excerpt from an article, “Kindness – the Recipe for an End to Hostility in the World” by Teal Swan
(Teal Swan is an American spiritual teacher, author, and social media personality.)
Kindness is what people need in order to break free from that vicious cycle and to be able to allow their vulnerability to surface again. Therefore, we must make a practice of kindness and be the first to act kind, and not ask the world to be kind to us first. If we don’t do this, it will be a game of “you lay your shield down first… No you lay yours down first!” To help with this, I’m going to give you a list of things you can do to enhance your new practice of kindness.
1. Work with the parts of yourself that do not want to be kind or are only kind as a narcissistic strategy for the sake of personal best interests. In other words, work with your own protector parts that have developed ways of staying safe that enhance the harshness, coldness, separation, rigid thinking, violence, narcissism, stinginess, indifference and unfriendliness in the world. But work with them, with kindness. Kindness does not make you weak, vulnerable, permissive, stupid or naïve. …
2. Start with yourself. It makes no sense in a mirror construct (which is what this time space reality is) to be unkind to you and kind to them. How could you be more gentle, soft, understanding, warm, compassionate, affectionate, friendly, generous and considerate with yourself? One way to figure out the answer is to think about ways to be kind to others and then do those things for yourself. …
3. It is easy to love and let your guard down around vulnerable things. It is harder around things that feel dangerous, threatening or hostile. This is why to take your enemy as a part of yourself is one of the hardest things to do. But, one trick you can use before mastering the art of doing that is to look past the protector part of people to see the vulnerable part that it is hiding. …
4. Commit to doing whatever it takes to understand people. We spend an inordinate amount of time in relationships trying to figure out how to make the other person happy. We want to love them in a way that they can really feel that love, but we don’t know how. To really love someone in a way where they will feel loved, you must understand that thing. I am going to go even further and say that you should stop trying to love them and start trying to understand them instead. …
5. Give to give, not to receive. Pure kindness is not dependent on an audience or on a return. It is true that if you take someone as a part of yourself, their happiness will be felt as your own. But we can be transactional about kindness and this makes it not kindness, but instead a way of manipulating to get our own needs met. …
6. In your day to day life, create and/or look for opportunities for kindness and take them. … Look for those opportunities and ways to be perceived as safe and friendly to others. When an opportunity presents itself, be gentle, soft, affectionate, understanding, warm, compassionate, friendly, generous and considerate with them. …
7. Mentally, kindness flood people. To do this, close your eyes or simply bring to mind someone or something that you feel the most overwhelmingly compassionate and loving and kind towards. … Feel this sensation of overwhelming compassion and love and kindness inside your own being and mentally increase it so it floods you. … Now when it is amplified to the degree that you are bursting at the seams from that energy, mentally see or sense yourself sending that energy towards the other person. …
8. Appreciation scan. Our minds scan the world for things that we don’t like, things that pose a threat and are unsafe. We are more likely to walk around noticing the differences between us and others as well as the things we dislike about them. When we practice kindness, in order to get into the energy of kindness, we can do the opposite. …