Excerpt from “The Force of Kindness: Change Your Life with Love & Compassion” by Sharon Salzberg
I have been engaged by kindness nearly my whole life, fascinated by it at times, repulsed by it at others. Particularly when I was young and others extended kindness to me, I felt humiliated by the apparent evidence of my pain. I hated that anyone could see that I was hurt. And yet, now I see that those early gifts of kindness planted the seeds of a nascent self-love within me. Those seeds were really what allowed me, more than anything else, to survive the often painful circumstances of my childhood. As I got older, I was less resistant to acts of kindness, more moved by them, more able to acknowledge how important they had been and still were to me.
Since then, the pursuit of kindness has magnetized much of my spiritual journey—that is, once I got over my disdain of it as an “also-ran” quality, the kind of characteristic you cultivate if tougher, finer things like wisdom elude you. As I continue my meditation practice every day and try to live out my deepest values every day, kindness has only grown in importance as a crucial element of those efforts.
It is not a cushy, undemanding path. It is easy to overlook the power of kindness or misunderstand it. The embodiment of kindness is often made difficult by our long-ingrained patterns of fear and jealousy. Those around us may devalue our dedication to kindness. We may devalue it ourselves. There are many challenges, many subtleties, many intricacies. But if we can commit to the open-hearted exploration of kindness, it will reveal itself as a force that can change our lives.
yogidennis 