“Your acts of kindness are iridescent wings of divine love, which linger and continue to uplift others long after your sharing.”—Rumi
Sometimes, in the throes of use, we were too busy with ourselves to be kind to others. Such was the life of a practicing addict. We were intent on more important things than kindness, we thought—like the next score. If we were kind at all, it tended to be a duplicitous kindness. We had a hidden agenda. We mimed kindness, in order to extract the wanted goodies from the unsuspecting mark. And we weren’t only misers in kindness to others. We doled out meanness to ourselves just as readily as we doled out meanness to our relatives, friends and colleagues.
Yet kindness extended on a rubber band is no kind of kindness at all. As the band snaps back against our hand, we sting from the rebound. And a frown will pass across the face of the one we just betrayed, a grimace, a look of hurt. The cost of fake kindness can be measured by the cupful… Conditional kindness is bitter in the giving, bitter to receive. And nobody is finally fooled. Such unrepentant caginess may have appeared to serve our short term needs as practicing addicts, but the formula fell apart when we entered recovery.
We learned in recovery of a more noble path—the path of unconditional kindness. And the path began in our own hearts. We learned to be kind to ourselves, first. Because we came to understand that there can be no genuine kindness given to others from an unloved heart. When we shower our own hearts with acts of kindness, those hearts respond by radiating kindness back. We learn to feel good about ourselves that we may be authentic in feeling good about others.
For today, let’s commit an act of kindness with our own hearts as the recipient.
Sit or lie in a relaxed position. Put your attention in your heart. Breathe gently for a moment, just being aware of that beating heart. Put a gentle half-smile on your face. Inhale through the nose as slowly as you can manage without strain. As you inhale, imagine you are drawing in a sense of benevolence from every direction and let it be naturally attracted toward your heart area. Exhale slowly through the nose, smile some more and feel all that benevolent energy condensing in the heart. Repeat ten times—or more if you want. Feels pretty transcendent does it not?
It feels so comforting to feel my heart accept my own kindness.