The Practice of Kindness

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

—Naomi Shihab Nye

It is hard to make sense of what is happening in our world. My heart has a hard time understanding it all. My personal remedy is to practice through the lens of Ahimsa or kindness because as Naomi Shihab Ney says, "It is only kindness that makes sense anymore."

Although Ahimsa can be translated as non-violence, I prefer to think of it as kindness. Ahimsa is an attitude of being gentle with yourself and others, it is breathing to all the dark spaces in your body and mind, it is accepting even that which is most difficult to accept, it is love for yourself on the deepest level, love that has to roll around in your heart before it radiates across the landscape and jumps through the barriers of screens and masks and fear to finally settle in the hearts of those you care about.

Sending love and gratitude from my mat to yours.

Namaste,

Kathryn