Kindness to You is Kindness to Me; Kindness to Me is Kindness to You
True kindness is a two-way street: caring for others eases your mind; caring for yourself strengthens your heart. From this balance, joy and connection grow.
Be at Peace with the Pain of Others
Being at peace with others’ pain helps us be supportive of their pain.
Admit Fault And Move On
Get beyond the hassle and bad feelings by admitting fault. Remind yourself how it’s in your own best interest to admit fault and move on. It takes a strong person to admit fault, and it puts us in a stronger position with others.
Receive Generosity
Life shows us generosity in a magnitude of ways including our senses and the natural world. The best thing we can do is to receive generosity.
Recognize Suffering in Others
Where does it hurt? The practice: Recognize suffering in others. We’re usually aware of our own suffering, but seeing the suffering in others: that’s not so common. All the news and pictures of disaster, murder, and grief that bombard us each day
Twelve Good Things 2024
Each year I use an issue of the Just One Thing newsletter to offer Twelve Good Things that I think are really wonderful and worth your attention. May you and those you love and the whole wide world be truly well, truly happy, and truly at peace. —...
See Progress
If you don’t see progress in your own life, then you will feel stagnant, or declining. Learn to notice the things that are improving all around you.
Minimize Painful Experiences
Painful experiences range from subtle discomfort to extreme anguish – and there is a place for them. Sorrow can open the heart.
Take Heart
What do you do when the bottom falls out? Take heart. By “taking heart,” I mean several related things: Sensing your heart and chest, finding encouragement in what is good both around you and inside you, resting in your own warmth, compassion, and
Don’t Be Intimidated
Humans are vulnerable to being alarmed, manipulated, and even intimidated by threats, both real ones and “paper tigers.” Understanding how your brain became so vigilant and wary, and so easily hijacked by alarm, is the first step toward gaining more control over that ancient circuitry and is less rattled or distracted by exaggerated, manageable, or false alarms.
Let Things Change
We have a choice: we can let things change and do what we can, or we can fight it and likely end up feeling even worse.
Receive Faces
Understanding facial expression gives us a chance to feel connected to others. Try to open to and receive the faces of others.
One Breath at a Time
To know yourself more deeply, track the breath inside yourself. Inhale, oxygen surges into your brain and activates and accelerates the heartbeat. Exhale, you activate the soothing peaceful nervous system. In the breath you are home in this moment, this Now.
Have Compassion
To have compassion is to have the wish that beings not suffer combined with feelings of sympathetic concern.
Give No One Cause to Fear You
Much of the time the fear we trigger in others is mild but people can feel threatened by stimuli they’re not actually aware of.