The Loving Kindness meditation, is such a lovely and generous Meditation as it focuses not just on you but other people or other situations. The question is though do we practice loving kindness in our daily lives?
Mostly likely we do, by opening a door for someone, smiling at another person (although this can be hard to see these days as we are in face masks). It might be by any number of good works and all of these are generous and good for you as well as our fellow man. If you want more information about Loving Kindness, see Dr David Hamilton’s book, The Five Side Effects of Kindness.
There are however many different ways to practice Loving Kindness and in my view one of the biggest ways is to look at how we treat other people. It is about treating everyone with respect, by this I mean thinking about the ways we communicate with people. Are we polite are we thoughtful in the words we chose.
In the present World where we are in lockdown and maybe working from home, it can be easy to forget that the person you are writing too, emailing or telephoning, as you have a complaint is a real person with feelings. We need to look at our communication and think how would I feel if I received this, is there any way I can still make my point but in a kinder manner. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, these platforms can be really wonderful for sharing ideas and keeping up with friends, but again we all need to be mindful of how we write our posts.
In the real world, when perhaps you are not receiving the service you feel you should have from say a Supermarket worker. is it ok to be rude to them? It is much better to frame your complaint in a kind way, after all you do not know what is going on in their personal life, your kindness might be just the thing they need to brighten their day.
I will share this story with you, sometime ago I was in a checkout queue, and the till operator did make a couple of mistakes scanning the customers goods in front of me, these things happen and the operator corrected them. However, the customer felt it was perfectly ok to shout at the operator and call the supervisor. The supervisor calmed everything down and the customer left. When it was my turn, I told the operator I was sorry they had been spoken to in that manner, I was saddened when they said to me that their partner had died a few days before. I am sure had the customer who made such a fuss known about this they would have been mortified.
Now Road rage, really who does this help, it just makes you feel stressed and think of these inflammatory hormones racing around your body.
To sum up, I am going to try and practice all of this, if I get it wrong, I will give myself some love and Kindness.
Helen