when it’s here and take time to savor the moment, particularly in the body. Even just a few seconds of registering the positive feelings of gratitudewhen they arise help to strengthen their impacts. Here are a couple of ways we encourage the practice of gratitude, first in adults, then in kids: Gratitude meditation for adults To experience a taste of gratitude, try sitting quietly in a relaxed posture and focusing on your heart center. As you inhale, visualize breathing in kindness; as you exhale, allow negativity to be released. Then reflect on some blessing in your life—any person or thing that you are grateful for. It could be as simple as having eyes to see, f... posted on Oct 22 2016 (21,140 reads)

else can you give yourself the good medicine of moral elevation? In everyday life, look for, notice, and appreciate acts of virtue. Make it a goal to witness compassion, character, and courage. When you do, savor the feeling of being uplifted. Be present for the experience. Let it soak into your cells and remind your DNA that there is good in the world. Tell the story to someone else, so that it might inspire them. 3. Be the good Practices for Compassion Learn loving-kindness meditation. Try letting go of anger through compassion. Discover how to cultivate a sense of shared identity. Look for ways to make an immediate difference in your communit... posted on Nov 6 2016 (37,750 reads)

of Harvard that failure was the bedrock upon which she built her real life. Failing utterly by worldly standards granted her the freedom to strip her life down to the essentials, to tell the story of a lonely boy who, unknown to himself, was really a wizard. Lying in bed that night, I remembered that the Buddha also believed he was a failure. Alone on a riverbank, split off from his yogi brothers, he broke his vows and took food offered by a young woman. Nourished by this simple act of kindness, he remembered a simple time from childhood. He had sat alone under a rose apple tree, watching his father and other men from his village plow the fields for spring planting. Peaceful and hap... posted on Feb 18 2017 (20,444 reads)

of fulfill our mission. BS: How does A Kind Voice work? DL: First, we recruit volunteers, and we ask them, “What are you passionate about talking about? What do you enjoy talking about?” So we have topics on books, movies, sports, music, travel, big ideas and philosophy. And we get volunteers who are interested in talking about them. And these people send in the most beautiful applications you can imagine! They’re just very beautiful people who want to share this kindness. We’ve gotten about 300 applications in total, and it’s just a wonderful thing. Then when a caller calls the line, the first question they get is, “Are you experiencing a... posted on Aug 7 2017 (9,416 reads)

ties, but rather just falling into the web of our existing interconnections. In 2005, my wife and I to embarked on a walking pilgrimage to push ourselves a bit more in this direction. Since Gandhi inspired us, we decided to start at the Gandhi Ashram in India. We walked south, doing small acts of service along the way, trying to purify our minds and hearts to find a greater stillness. We ate whatever food was offered, slept wherever place was offered, and survived entirely on the kindness of strangers. It was a profound and humbling experience. What I started noticing was the growing tension between my training of parsing the material world with algorithms and my stumbling ... posted on Aug 17 2017 (21,640 reads)

by others’ happiness, reminded by their good fortune of what you long for, or lack. If so, you aren’t alone. Philosophers and psychologists have observed that, for many people, empathy for negative emotions is more instinctive than for positive states. Fortunately, you don’t have to rely only on instincts; empathic joy can be cultivated. In Buddhist psychology, empathic joy is considered one of the four brahmavihāras (sublime attitudes), alongside equanimity, loving kindness, and compassion. Like other mindsets, empathic joy can be deliberately trained as a way to deepen your wisdom and well-being. With practice, you can strengthen your capacity to notice, resona... posted on Nov 21 2017 (24,797 reads)

this may indicate a change of policy or an oversight, you take it to be a favor worthy of a smile for the fellow that hands it to you across the counter. It may be difficult in a given case to say whether the favor I receive was meant for me personally. But my gratitude will depend on the answer. At least the favor must be meant for a group with which I am personally identified. (When you wear a monk’s habit you not infrequently receive a bigger piece of pie or some other unexpected kindness from someone you never met before and who you will never meet again. But there, the people do mean you, in so far as you are a monk, and it is quite a different case from the painful experien... posted on Nov 23 2017 (17,236 reads)

is a bit, but then he’s still Steve. I think I have this scene in the book where they all come out to meet him at the private airport when he comes back from his liver transplant, and by the next day, he’s berating everybody for having screwed things up in his absence. He doesn’t fully change, but his spirituality and his feel for other people definitely deepens, and his brutal honesty is at least channeled for a purpose. It’s also balanced by acts of extraordinary kindness and inspiration, where he just really does kind things for people. That kind of surprised them, because he would have berated them the day before. He becomes more complex, but not just more s... posted on Apr 6 2018 (12,502 reads)

everything because I believe that different kinds of diversity are important to the success of any venture.      I thought about why I was teaching the course, what it was about, and I realized that my intentions for the class were about nonviolence, otherwise known as love, and also about social justice and social change. I decided to change the title to “Love as a Force for Social Justice,” because the purpose was to explore how actions grounded in loving kindness and compassion could be powerful tools for approaching and working on social justice. This new title, which I used the following year, attracted an extremely diverse group. There was only one... posted on Apr 4 2018 (13,068 reads)

stuff. I am so proud of their work. I’ve had a cottage twice, and it is the best place to write that anybody could possibly imagine because they totally take care of you and honor your work. They’re particularly attuned to the fact that women are not used to being treated this way. Alicia: I’m in the Skagit Valley, which is close to Whidbey Island, on the other side of the water. I have experienced the flow of order that you're talking about. I wonder if the reason kindness heals is that there's something about kindness that must be in that mathematical equation. Do you think that's possible? Ann: Yeah, it's like Jose said in the Alhambra, “... posted on May 10 2018 (11,632 reads)

“Gmail Will Now Auto-complete Whole Emails.” On the surface, this disruptive technology also invites us to be a trailblazer into the unknown. Think big, think fast, think impossible. You do it simply because you can. In many ways, I was a product of that culture. Yet, at some point in my early twenties, I shifted from what -- to why.  That led me to apply that logic to a very different set of questions. What do exponential love, exponential forgiveness, and exponential kindness look like? Silicon Valley didn’t have an answer for that, so I had to expand my search in other directions. And I found something startling. I discovered that technology’s ques... posted on Jun 11 2018 (14,380 reads)

love?” or “What have you enjoyed about your child this week?” Then these beautiful things become part of the child’s official medical report. Actually, some health professionals are calling this section “the Awesomeness Report.” Which is so cool! And both parents and professionals are seeing great progress when this attitude of ability and humanity is adopted. Amazing. It’s so amazing! And so I’d also really love to hear about some of the kindness you did experience in the healthcare system, I imagine you did amongst the difficult ones—how did that affect your experience? Yeah, I remember we were in the Pediatric Intensive Car... posted on Aug 27 2018 (8,895 reads)

note: I met José Juan in 2013. I had just returned to Spain from India and was participating in a 21-Day Kindness Challenge. During a 21 day period 5000 people from all over the world performed an act of kindness every day, totalling almost 11,000 transformative actions! The first day of the challenge I decided to buy a cake and gift it to someone random on the street. I wanted it to be anonymous so I needed to enlist a partner in kindness. The first person I met was José Juan! He gave away the cake and since then we have been connected in many adventures of service and generosity, including community experiments like Awakin Circles (which we started in his ... posted on Sep 2 2018 (15,103 reads)

and wail and cry out in pain in order for the healing to begin. On some level we know that this is a requirement when facing loss, but we have forgotten how to walk comfortably with this potent emotion. There is another place of grief that we hold, a second gateway, different than the Iosses connected to losing someone or something that we love. This grief occurs in the places never touched by love. These are profoundly tender places precisely because they have lived outside of kindness, compassion, warmth, or welcome. These are the places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farther shore of our lives. We often hate these parts of ourselves, ho... posted on Oct 22 2023 (48,484 reads)

gratitude in the United States, China, and Brazil. Despite these age-related similarities, differences were still seen between countries. Overall, children in China and South Korea tended to favor connective gratitude, while kids in the United States leaned toward concrete gratitude. Children in Guatemala—where it’s common to say “Thanks be to God” in everyday speech—were particularly partial to verbal gratitude. Such variations in how children respond to kindness may set the stage for how they talk, act, and feel when they get older—and other research does find that adults give thanks differently worldwide. In one study, Vajiheh Ahar and... posted on Aug 11 2019 (9,939 reads)

few minutes, though, because I have to get to an event for the shelter.” Lee sat on the floor, hugging an all-black cat, rubbing his face in its fur. The others waved furiously for me to come in too. “Are we taking too long?  Is it okay if I go in too?” I asked. “Go right ahead.” Before I went in I wrote out a donation check to Headwaters Rescue, folded it over and handed it to her. Tears started again, this time I think because of her unexpected kindness. I blurted, “I have stage four cancer. I’m trying to do everything, trying to keep him on the trip and trying to make happy memories for all of them. I can’t thank you en... posted on Feb 12 2020 (7,653 reads)

and healing. One friend described sending $100 each to ten strangers who were in dire need. My son, who until a few days ago worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, said people were tipping at five times the normal rate – and these are working class people, many of them Hispanic truck drivers, who are economically insecure themselves. Doctors, nurses, and “essential workers” in other professions risk their lives to serve the public. Here are some more examples of the love and kindness eruption, courtesy of ServiceSpace: Perhaps we're in the middle of living into that new story. Imagine Italian airforce using Pavoratti, Spanish military doing... posted on Apr 16 2020 (14,025 reads)

have brushed through their days. She confesses that it was difficult initially to stay true to the commitment of finding gratitude every day but found an unwavering strength to believe that there is no day without joy and she felt moved to look for one each day. Many of her followers are inspired as she shares, “It’s easy to feel that what we do is so small, but none of us will ever truly be able to grasp the profound impact that our lives will have on one another. Happiness and kindness are just another way to express love and that’s something I think we could all use a little more of right now.” “People are good, people are kind and they want to take ca... posted on Feb 2 2021 (5,945 reads)

the fullness of things,” she insists, “is our human task.” And that’s the ground I meander with Jane Hirshfield in this conversation: the fullness of things, through the interplay of Zen and science, poetry and ecology, in her life and writing. [Music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating] Jane Hirshfield:I have been given this existence, these years on this Earth, to accept what has come into my lifetime — wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness. I must take them. I must find a way to live in this world. You can’t refuse it. And along with the difficult is the radiant, the beautiful, the intimacy with which each one of us enter... posted on Jan 12 2022 (4,568 reads)

the doctor tear every item of clothing from my body with a pair of scissors. Each cut made me realize that material wealth, physical beauty, academic achievements, and money might make us comfortable here on earth, but they won’t return home with us. Even the bodies that house our souls won’t return home with us. What I believe returns home with the soul is spiritual current. Which is the continuous flow of light in the soul –compassion, goodness, gratitude, peace, kindness, joy, and love. We are all born with spiritual currents. However, our human experiences can either deem or dim that light. The light in my soul was dim for weeks as I wrestled with des... posted on May 12 2022 (3,429 reads)