One method I learned from my teacher, Diana Winston, is elegantly simple. In your meditation, simply add a few words to each time you notice your attention wandering: May I meet this too with kindness. Whatever comes up, repeat this phrase of loving-kindness toward your thoughts, feelings, or sensations.
See if you can notice how it feels to meet yourself with kindness instead of judgment or reaction. And then, as you move through the day, try repeating the same phrase – “may I meet this, too, with kindness” – whenever you notice you are being hard on yourself, judgmental toward yourself, or unkind in any way. Often, learning to meet yourself with kindness can feel like the medicine your heart and inner life yearns for, especially if you’re used to meeting yourself with all kinds of judgment and past conditioning.
Finally, see if you can extend this intention toward anything that happens in your day, or to anyone you encounter, especially when things aren’t going the way you would like them to. Lean into the intention to meet all that is here with kindness.
~ Amanda Gilbert, May I Meet This, Too, With Kindness
~ This quote is a repost from the wonderful Mindfulbalance.org
~ Image Credit: yyryyr1030 on Pixabay
So many of us live with an underlying sense that we are not enough. We believe that if only we were smarter, more disciplined, or more lovable, we’d finally be at peace. Yet the real prison is not our imperfections, but the belief that we should be perfect.
In My Control
Here’s to the bridge-builders, the hand-holders, the light-bringers, those extraordinary souls wrapped in ordinary lives who quietly weave threads of humanity into an inhumane world. They are the unsung heroes in a world at war with itself. They are the whisperers of hope that peace is possible. Look for them in this present darkness. Light your candle with their flame. And then go. Build bridges. Hold hands. Bring light to a dark and desperate world. Be the hero you are looking for. Peace is possible. It begins with us.
… we should be careful
Don’t worry if you feel you can only do one tiny good thing in one small corner of the cosmos. Just be a Buddha body in that one place.
It’s quite sufficient a challenge to seek to follow what the philosopher Iddo Landau calls the ‘reverse golden rule’ – that is, not treating yourself in punishing and poisonous ways in which you’d never dream of treating someone else. Can you imagine berating a friend in the manner that many of us deem it acceptable to screech internally at ourselves, all day long? Adam Phillips is exactly right: were you to meet such a person at a party, they’d immediately strike you as obviously unbalanced. You might try to get them to leave, and possibly also seek help. It might occur to you that they must be damaged – that in Phillips’s words ‘something terrible’ must have happened to them – for them to think it appropriate to act that way.
Curating Quietude 