Kindness

I’m taking the first part of a 2-part series on EMDR, a psychotherapeutic method that is often associated with PTSD support. I’m really enjoying it. A big part of why I enjoy learning this and other therapeutic techniques is that we get to practice on each other. We get to personally feel it working, and make genuine and kind connection with each other.

Kindness is, for me, a cornerstone of psychotherapeutic work. It’s a big part of why I love what I do. And I get to do it every day.

Every time I exit from experiences like mine this week, and emerge into the ‘real’ world of today, I miss that sense of kindness. I don’t feel it that much in my community. It isn’t because people don’t want to be kind, I believe, but that they are burdened with too much worry and responsibility to be kind.

To be kind, as Naomi Nye reminds us in her poem Kindness, requires that we notice our world, others in our world, and our relationship to everything and everyone in our world. To be kind requires that we take the time to notice and feel.

As with the rest of my community, I’m burdened with responsibilities and worries. I received a gift from my course this week, and for a while at least, get a chance to be kind outside of my professional work.

Quote of the Week

“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.You must wake up with sorrow.You must speak to it till your voicecatches the thread of all sorrowsand you see the size of the cloth.Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,only kindness that ties your shoesand sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,only kindness that raises its headfrom the crowd of the world to sayIt is I you have been looking for,and then goes with you everywherelike a shadow or a friend."- Naomi Nye, Kindness, last stanza

The Power of Kindness

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