Conscious Kindness
It‘s good to be kind! When we offer good words, thoughts, feelings, and actions to others, it’s nice for us and nice for them. Kindness creates harmony in our mind, making us feel happy and peaceful. We can extend kindness to those around us to contribute to a positive and loving community, and we can graciously extend it to ourselves as we learn and grow with our own personal experiences.
With kindness, we can separate from our judgmental thoughts.
With kindness, we make our mind more positive and open to new ideas.
With kindness, we can transform our relationships.
Practicing kindness is just another form of practicing mindfulness.
With kindness, we make our mind more positive and open to new ideas.
With kindness, we can transform our relationships.
Practicing kindness is just another form of practicing mindfulness.
Cultivating Kindness
Anytime we feel emotional discomfort, we can use kindness to overcome that unease. Kindness can give us strength to push through difficult feelings, help us navigate challenging social situations, build a healthy relationship with ourselves, and help us to avoid contributing any more harm to negative situations. A quick kindness-boosting practice can energize our whole day! We can dedicate five minutes to recall the many of moments of kindness that we’ve witnessed and received. Whether these events happened recently or in the past, try to remember these times in as much detail as possible. We can take inspiration from movies, books, media, our peers, our family, and our imagination. For five minutes, do nothing but breathe deeply and think of different acts of kindness, both big and small. The more familiar with and thoughtful we are about kindness, the more accepting and loving we’ll naturally feel.
Visualizing kindness in clear detail will train us to act and respond to more situations in a positive, considerate manner.
Combining this with mindful breathing will energize us with love and compassion so that we may heal our negative feelings and be happy and well.
Combining this with mindful breathing will energize us with love and compassion so that we may heal our negative feelings and be happy and well.
Offering Compliments
Everyone likes getting a great compliment! It can be a fun challenge to look for genuine things to compliment the people we interact with. We don’t have to compliment every person, but we can certainly tune into our mindfulness and look for enjoyable details in others. We can gift others with our complimentary words when it’s an appropriate time to enter their personal space with our kindness.
We can also challenge ourselves to compliment ourselves sincerely, on a regular basis. This may seem silly, but neuroscience shows receiving a genuine compliment activates the decision-making and reward-related areas in our brain, releasing dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with positivity, focus, and motivation. It may feel like being hard on yourself helps drive you to get things done, but it’s really limiting your best potential to be focused and centered with your tasks.
Get creative with your compliments! Appreciating others can improve and strengthen our relationships, open new opportunities, and help support us through times of insecurity. Most importantly, appreciating ourselves and actively praising, encouraging, and bolstering ourselves with loving-kindness will inspire us to cultivate happiness each day and achieve deep satisfaction in the process of doing so.
We can also challenge ourselves to compliment ourselves sincerely, on a regular basis. This may seem silly, but neuroscience shows receiving a genuine compliment activates the decision-making and reward-related areas in our brain, releasing dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with positivity, focus, and motivation. It may feel like being hard on yourself helps drive you to get things done, but it’s really limiting your best potential to be focused and centered with your tasks.
Get creative with your compliments! Appreciating others can improve and strengthen our relationships, open new opportunities, and help support us through times of insecurity. Most importantly, appreciating ourselves and actively praising, encouraging, and bolstering ourselves with loving-kindness will inspire us to cultivate happiness each day and achieve deep satisfaction in the process of doing so.
What are your favorite compliments to offer to your loved ones, friends, and other people?
What are your favorite compliments to extend to yourself?
What are your favorite compliments to extend to yourself?
Silent Kindness
One of my favorite mindfulness practices is to offer kindness to the people around us, silently. This practice is an excellent way to enrich our time when we find ourselves in a crowded area, when traveling, or really whenever we are in a space where other people are present. We can be walking, sitting, driving, or we can devote special time in our day to practicing this skill. To start, look at the people around you and select one person, whoever naturally grabs your attention. Take a moment to acknowledge that this person has hopes, dreams, interests, skills, and ideas just as you do. They also have regrets, doubts, fears, and weaknesses, just as you do. This person has loved ones, memories, and a unique perspective. Just like you, this person wants to be happy. We can appreciate our similarities, then we can offer this person a genuine feeling of loving-kindness. We can feel love for all the good things they've done in their life, big and small. We offer them love for being the unique individual they have grown into. We can silently offer them a phrase such as, “May you and your loved ones live with happiness” or “May you feel at ease today.” One of my personal favorites is a simple, “Kindness for you.” Focus on one person at a time, moving from person to person. If we run out of people, we can return to someone we’ve already appreciated, or we can extend some kindness to ourselves. We can do this exercise for a few minutes at a time until it becomes a natural habit of sharing secret goodness with each person around you. Each time we do this practice we reinforce our intentions to be supportive and good to others.
I originally learned this practice in a book called Practicing Mindfulness, by meditation teacher Matthew Sockolov. You can find his writings and free podcasts on oneminddharma.com
