I just wanted to share this.
It started in the early hours of last Wednesday morning, around 2:30 am. I woke up because my right arm, from my shoulder to my fingers, was in a fair amount of pain. I couldn’t find any position that would ease it, as moving it one way would bother my shoulder and it moving another way would pain my elbow or triceps. It was awful. I eventually had to take some ibuprofen so I could at least get some sleep.
I can’t say I was entirely surprised my arm was sore because I had spent about 5 hours on the Tuesday afternoon/evening sanding and compounding one of the rooms in my house. I didn’t take many breaks, maybe two, because I had a goal: I wanted to get it all sanded and re-compounded by 6 pm . I had no idea why I chose that time frame as it wasn’t very urgent. It was a completely arbitrary goal, but I did it, and felt like I had accomplished something. Until the crippling pain. What made it worse was knowing that my arms and hands are how I earn my living, and I had treatments booked for the next day.
After getting my Other Half to roll out my arm then do a few stretches on Wednesday morning, I did my usual choose my cards for the day. I generally pull 4 cards from 4 different divination decks: Tarot, Animal Totems, Archetypes and a Goddess deck. Well, the card from the Goddess deck said: “There is no need to hurry or force things to happen. Everything is occurring in perfect timing.” I’m really not a Type A personality, but I play one on t.v., and I interpreted this to mean that the bigger goals I am working on didn’t need my whip that day. Yeah, right. Like that’s going to happen! I have a business plan to write, emails to catch up on, marketing to do...easy does it ain’t goin’ to get it done.
I finished my morning routine and started on my way to work. While driving in, I noticed a car coming the other way with a license plate that wasn’t standard. I always like trying to figure out what the cryptic lettering is meant to say. It read “RUKIND”. Exactly like that. I thought that was great! I even had a generalized thought about how important it is to be kind. When I got to work, I started checking my email. Among them was an update from Spirit of Change that had some wisdom from the Dalai Lama. I could always use his wisdom, so I had a look. “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”
As someone who lectures and teaches about intuition, this is the equivalent of a slap upside the head.
I thought, “Okay, I’m missing something here. What is the message I’m supposed to be receiving?”
Ask, and you shall receive...
Then it occurred to me. What does being kind really mean? To me, it seems it is another platitude that gets bandied about as if everyone understands what it means, but not how it plays out in their lives. So, what does it mean to me? My first thoughts were around acts of kindness, or doing things for others, usually with no thought of reciprocity. (Think Mother Theresa.) It didn’t feel wrong, it just didn’t feel complete. More like just scratching the surface, but knowing there is a deeper, more complete understanding.
Go deeper...
I think I had a bit of a moment at that point. It’s hard to tell because a thousand moments cascaded through my mind. It seemed I could sense every time in my life I set unreasonable goals for myself, beat myself up either mentally or physically to accomplish them, then beat myself up mentally if I couldn’t reach them. Up to and including Tuesday when I actually felt good about reaching an arbitrary goal that I couldn’t even pat myself on the back for because I had crippled myself in the process. I saw how I focussed on kindness as being an outward act for others, but how many of us do unkind things like this to ourselves? And then the real kicker, how often do we beat ourselves up for beating ourselves up?
I’m starting to see that kindness is much more than an outward act reserved only for others. Kindness is about allowing and not forcing, compassion and non judgement. Kindness to others is an extension of kindness to the self. If I can see that my own struggles with the difficulties of life in Earth’s classroom are a mirror of the struggles of every other person I meet, I can connect to others by offering myself the kindness of compassion, understanding and acceptance that I would like to have for others.
What is kindness to you?
