Earlier this week, I launched The School of Kindfulness. This is the work I’ve been fumbling toward for years. This past year, I created a vision that I worked on all year, one practice goal at a time.
And the biggest question I’ve received this week is this:
what the heck is kindfulness?
I’d love to share this with you.
What is kindfulness?
Kindfulness is when we practice mindfulness, with the connected intention of becoming kinder to ourselves.
What is mindfulness? Social media might show you a woman in Lululemon pants, at the top of a mountain (or in a golden field of wheat) sitting cross-legged, achieving enlightenment.
Nope. That’s not mindfulness.
Mindfulness is a practice. That means there is no final goal. We’re not trying to achieve something when we’re practicing mindfulness. (And by the way, you can practice mindfulness when you do the dishes or take your dog for a walk. Or make a pie.) We’re practicing being more present to our lives.
We practice being present.
That’s hard work. We humans are driving to distraction easily, especially in the days of social media, smartphones, and the endless news cycle.
Anything that requires practice is hard at first. But that work is worth it.
Why?
When we practice being present to what is happening right now, we’re creating space in our bodies for joy. For noticing. For remembering that we are only part of a larger world. And our fears and anger will disappear soon, if we don’t clutch onto them.
When we practice being present, on purpose, we’re creating a habit. We recognize that even a few moments of practicing being present every day is helping us to hear our thoughts more clearly.
Over time, by practicing being present, on purpose, without judgment of ourselves, we start to hear our own minds. When we learn that we don’t have to attach to our thoughts, we can start to hear the stories we’re telling ourselves. When we hear them as stories, and not blame or shame or admonition, over time we realize we can rewrite our stories.
Our families, classmates, teachers, and simply living in this culture has taught us that we have to behave. Be good. Produce good work. Then you’ll be worthy.
Those stories are not true.
You are not your thoughts.
You are worthy simply because you are alive.
What if we are meant to live our lives with as much ease and joy as possible? To feel good in our bodies and minds most of the moments of the day?
To be present. To let go. To let other people feel your kind and warm-hearted aliveness. They might want to start living more fully alive too.
I have this quote from William Butler Yeats on the wall at my office.
“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us, that they may see, it may be: their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”
Still water. Quiet. He’s not talking about the lack of talking.
He’s talking about a deep peace of mind and body. We don’t have anything to prove. We’re no longer stressed. We are present and fully alive.
When I saw this print in the shop at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1999, I reached for it immediately.
I knew that I had never known that quiet. But it’s what I wanted more than anything in the world. For most of my life, I had been living in high-alert stress. And I was exhausted.
That year, I met the Dalai Lama. I felt this in him, in powerful waves. That quiet. Stillness. Kindness. Presence. That moment of meeting him is why I began practicing mindfulness. I’m still going, 23 years later.
Practicing kindfulness has changed me, for the better. I’m more alive. I’m more clear. And I’m far more at peace inside myself than I have ever been before.
Here’s what the Dalai Lama said in a talk he gave about the meaning of life, which was published in India Today in 2021. It might surprise you that this is the answer of one of the powerful spiritual beings in the world.
(I’ve shortened the piece here and moved paragraphs around to add more clarity to my cuts. I’m always editing.)
“I often ask myself what the purpose of life is. I conclude that it is to be happy.
The basic source of all happiness is a sense of kindness and warm-heartedness towards others. We are all the same as human beings. We are born the same way, we die the same way, and we all want to lead happy lives.
Today, the world is mostly focused on external development. However, ancient Indian traditions emphasize looking within to find the real source of joy. To be happy it is our minds we must transform. This is the basis of the longstanding traditions of ahimsa, doing no harm, and karuna, wishing others to be free from suffering.
The key to happiness is peace of mind.
This is not something that can be bought. Inner peace has to be cultivated by each of us from within. All our religious traditions, despite whatever philosophical differences there may be among them, carry the same message of love and warm-heartedness that is the foundation of such peace of mind.
I sometimes wish that we were more like children, who are naturally open and accepting of others. Instead, as we grow up, we fail to nurture our natural potential and our sense of fundamental human values. We get caught up in secondary differences and tend to think in terms of 'us' and 'them'. Education can change this. We need to learn to distinguish the destructive nature of emotions like anger, fear and attachment, which disturb our peace of mind, from the positive qualities of compassion that are genuine sources of happiness.
Compassion, an active concern for others' well-being, is not only part of religion, it also belongs to our lives as human beings. From compassion we develop self-confidence; that brings inner strength, allowing us to act with transparency and candor. If a person is happier, his or her family is happier; if families are happy, neighborhoods and nations will be happy. By each of us working to transform ourselves, we can change our human way of life and make this a century of compassion.We must continually consider the oneness of humanity, remembering that we all want to be happy. And indeed, everyone has a right to a happy life. Along the way we may be faced with problems, but we must not lose hope. We must keep up our determination without being impatient to achieve quick results.
If you agree with anything I have written here, I hope you will follow it up in your day to day lives. As I have said before, if you want others to be happy, practice compassion, if you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
This is why I have created The School of Kindfulness.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Our Kind Kitchen to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.