Choose kindness
This week my thoughts keep twisting back around to kindness. The sort that's directed inwards, towards ourselves.
There's so much going on in the world right now - the pandemic is still floating around, natural disasters, wars, as well as the stuff that’s closer to home - illnesses, worries and fears. It's a lot.
I often think of our grand adventure through life, from birth to death, as a journey through the deep dark woods (as a child I was fascinated with the deep dark woods in fairy tales, as an adult I very much still am).
It can be easy to get lost in them and lose the path. Or look back and find the road we were walking has disappeared and that we can't turn back. Or we reach a crossroads and don't know which way to choose.
As we navigate our way through, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the monsters who live there - by self criticism, comparison and a tangle of 'shoulds', by feeling that we're not enough or not doing enough, that we can't glide through the trees with grace and ease, that we stumble and fall. It can be easy to be scared by the shadows that reach for us, seeking to claim us with their insubstantial fingers in the night.
And so I want to offer kindness, as a lantern in the dark.
Kindness as a recognition of our own humanness. Kindness that tends to our fears and hurts. Kindness that sees we need a loving word or a gentle touch, and offers it to us, unasked. Kindness that feels like a gentle breath, a softening through our bodies, knowing that we've got this, knowing that we're here for ourselves, knowing that we're walking with ourselves through the woods, knowing that we're deserving of this kind of solid, unwavering love.
We are worthy of kindness from ourselves.
Kindness is one of the core elements that underpins the work I do with clients - if you’re feeling the need, perhaps you’d like to get in touch and see if a few sessions might feel like a kindness to you.