Kindness

“You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere.”

- attributed to Guatama Buddha

This essay has been edited from its original form, first published to the True Nature community on March 14, 2025

Several years ago, before the pandemic, I offered a mindfulness lesson on kindness to a middle school classroom, as part of a broader pilot study I was conducting over the school year.

As usual, I came away from the experience feeling I had gained more than I had given. I learned something conceptually about kindness and how to approach the subject while I prepared, but I learned something deeper, more moving, and more fulfilling from the students when I brought what I’d found to them for exploration together.

Character and community values are regularly promoted in schools, yet something about the way they are presented has long made me uneasy. I had the opportunity to look into my discomfort when I needed to fit my mindfulness interventions with the school’s selected positive quality of the month. From themes of generosity to citizenship to kindness, I realized that they tended to be presented in a superficial and “top-down” fashion, informing students of desired behaviors with colorful signage and explicit teaching of the concepts - as though learning to act with responsibility and empathy would be successful with the same pedagogical approaches schools took with their academic subjects. 

Setting aside whether even academic pedagogy is adequately effective, I focused on what I’ve learned from therapy, recovery, and meditation when it comes to character development that nourishes individual and community well-being: always start with personal, subjective experience in order to create a foundation for meaningful connections, normalizing, and identification.

Therapy can help people uncover deep wounds by offering a safe, private environment, for example. Recovery programs emphasize a “searching and fearless” moral inventory in order to uncover the humility and clarity required to live free from addiction and in harmony with others. Meditation at its core is intended to reveal one’s true nature - a radical self-awareness assumed in most traditions to be a prerequisite for effective and appropriate action in the world. 

To take just one example from a traditional meditation practice, metta (otherwise known as unconditional love or loving kindness) is advised to be directed always toward oneself first. Without warmth, softening, and compassion for oneself, it’s between difficult and impossible to access unconditional love for another.

I spent several days considering how I could leverage classical lessons on self-compassion to help a classroom of disengaged young teens find authentic interest in the theme of kindness.

What emerged was a discussion on why we even need to focus on kindness since they have already memorized all the platitudes about how to be kind and why it matters. If the answers are so obvious, why do we keep revisiting the topic?

I suggested we look for clues by examining what some respected thought and spiritual leaders have had to say. The Dalai Lama, for example, has said: “Be kind whenever possible. . . it is always possible.” Is that true for you? Is it always possible? 

Ask yourself now, as I asked the classroom of 13 year-olds - when is it hard to be kind?

I’ll go first.

It’s harder for me to be kind when I’m tired, when I’ve been giving beyond my resources, when I see no evidence of kindness among the most powerful people in government - when, in fact, they openly display contempt for empathy. It’s harder for me to be kind when I feel distressed, like I do when I see large swaths of American citizens so overwhelmed and/or confused due to their own trauma and upbringing that they are unable to stand up for themselves and others. It’s hard for me to be kind when the people I was told were my best chance at loving me unconditionally - parents and spouses - treat me with suspicion or hostility.

This is kindness, starting with myself. 

Now there is an opening to forgive myself for feeling on edge, for overextending until I exude irritability instead of peace. It’s how I was raised: when in doubt, do more, give more, anticipate someone’s needs. Within this acknowledgement, though, are also the seeds for change. They are watered and warmed by self-compassion.

The middle school students wrote down their own reflections on when it was hard to be kind, and then eagerly volunteered to speak them out loud when invited: “When my mom tells me to stop a video game right now, but she doesn’t understand I can’t stop something that’s live;” “When my friends ignore me, and I don’t know why.” “When my little sister is bugging me on purpose and my parents act like it’s my fault.” 

How about you? When is it hard to be kind?

Start with yourself. This is kindness.

I was as surprised as anyone when, after having their own struggles heard and not being shamed or corrected, the students softened and were able to see a misunderstanding at the heart of each conflict where they had previously only seen opposing positions.

In my experience, life and situations and people tend to be surprising (and often wondrous) when I set aside what I think I know and set my sights on being present rather than aiming for a particular result. 

Only to the extent that we develop self-awareness and self-compassion can we hope to be clear, effective, and satisfied with how we relate to and interact with the world around us.

Be kind to yourselves above all, then. Honest, and kind. Now more than ever, or as our friend Daron says, “now more than never.”

For those who find it hard to be kind to yourselves and to your own minds, I leave you with this poem from Dantika, an early Buddhist nun:

While walking along the river 

after a long day meditating on Vulture Peak, 

I watched an elephant splashing its way 

out of the water and up the bank.

Hello, my friend, a man waiting there said, 

scratching the elephant behind its ear. 

Did you have a good bath?

The elephant stretched out its leg, 

the man climbed up, 

and the two rode off like that—

together.

Seeing what had once been so wild

now a friend and companion to this good man, 

I took a seat under the nearest tree

and reached out a gentle hand 

to my own mind.

Truly, I thought, this is why 

I came to the woods.