Cultivating Kindness

Cultivating kindness starts with self love.

This is a garden that needs to be tended on-goingly, like anything you’d like to see flourish.

Self compassion, as I see it, includes tenderness with yourself, patience, gentleness, nurturing of yourself.  Unconditionally accepting your humanness, all the emotions, your mistakes (learning experiences), being able to look at how things in life that might have been hard have served you in some way. Learning to self regulate our emotions, to feel, to understand, handle, and discharge the intense ones. Being mindful of your thoughts, and seeing how they make you feel, and knowing you can think about something else. You do have a choice.

Hugging my Quan Yin statue

Being able to take responsibility for your part in things that have occurred.  Not blaming others, nor circumstances.  And though you take responsibility, you don’t blame You either.  It’s not like “it’s all my fault”.  But more like "Who have I been and what have I been doing, thinking, feeling that led me here, and how do I want to feel, and how can i proceed from here to create what I want for myself?  When you blame, it doesn’t empower anyone.  When you take responsibility, you get to choose.  You see you do have power in the situation.

I have learned it’s important to have clear boundaries about what you do and don’t want and the willingness to communicate them and enforce them as needed.  When you get good boundaries in place, it feels like someone has your back, and…YOU do!  So, with those boundaries in place, you can relax inside the protective container of them   It’s not a cage or a box, though.  It’s more like a force field or aura that travels with you.  It actually makes you more free!  It’s part of knowing who you are and what you need and how you feel and who you are becoming.  It’s a comforting kind of clarity.

Radical self love.

By Bridget Welch, LMT