Happiness doesn’t mean smiling all day long or that all things are perfect in your life. It’s more about underlying sense of contentment, fulfillment and satisfaction. Happiness appears as long as you support the conditions it needs, internally and externally. Only then can we expect to experience more happiness in our life.
Kindness is having a good heart. It’s an innate quality we all have. Basically it’s wishing for ourselves and other people around us happiness. We cannot expect experience happiness if we are not experience a genuine sense of kindness to ourselves and to others.
We may hear the word so many times around us that it may sound like a cliche, but when you experience it you have an opportunity to feel a genuine sense of satisfaction. Just remind yourself a moment when someone was kind to you. Can you imagine it? How did it feel?
Whether it’s us feeling kindness towards ourselves or toward others, the sense of this feeling is genuine. There is something about it, when it’s not temporary, that reconnects us to an innate quality. We can familiarize with it. The more we familiarize ourselves with it, the more often our mind will go there.
We are sometimes better with being kind to others but not to ourselves. If it’s not the way we live, it’s in the way we talk to ourselves internally. The way we criticize and judge ourselves. How can we expect to be happy if we are giving ourselves such a hard time? it goes both ways. We need to find a way to be kind to ourselves. Be friends to ourselves. Some people say to me that they don’t want to brag about themselves. It’s not a matter of modesty. It’s a matter of being softer, more gentle towards ourselves as well as to others. It’s about speaking to yourself internally the same way you’d speak to a friend you like or to a child you care about, rather than the usual way when you might criticize or judge yourself.
Get started:
#1
Be clear with the intention to be kind. Criticizing and judging yourself are just habits, not part of who you really are. When you see it clearly and aware of it you can let go of it and start to experience contentment and easiness of mind.
Do something kind with no expectations to receive something back. don’t tell anyone about it. It may be a very small thing. Just look for an opportunity to do something kind to another person. It’s hard not to be left with a good feeling after something like that.
#2
Find an opportunity to be kind to yourself today. It doesn’t mean going and buying yourself lots of presents. It could be, but I’m talking about a situation where you are usually giving to yourself hard time and instead, just PAUSE and speak to yourself internally as to a dear friend.
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