When you grow up in a life filled with trauma, most genuine acts of kindness seem suspicious. They make you question what the body else wants from you and how or when you'll have to repay them. It's a never-ending cycle that ultimately makes you hate kind people. Actually, I used to tell myself that if I gave away an excessive amount of my kindness, no one would give it back. This notion shaped me for years. I surrounded myself with situations where I didn't have to be vulnerable or undergo any true pain.
After keeping myself stuck for thus long, I decided to make a drastic life change to focus on myself as an individual. This changed started a travel journey, a faith journey, a motivational journey, and a journey to feeling safe within myself. My new lifestyle allowed me to see true loving-kindness. Although opening myself up to kindness scared me, it genuinely was beautiful.
The past year was challenging for me personally and so many others, but it taught me an important lesson about kindness. Through conversations with strangers and being the recipient of random acts of kindness, I soon realized probably the most important truths about kindness:
In order to accept kindness, you first need to be kind to yourself.
When you are not showing yourself kindness, you can't open the doors for honest, loving and kind people to come into your life. Life is all about the energy you give off into the world, and if you give off bad vibes you will not get any good vibes back. To ensure that me to accept this transfer of my thought process, I changed my daily habits. I began doing gratitude work, devoting time to myself, and giving back to others as often as I could.
These steps weren't easy at first, but they taught me how to be kind to myself to ensure that I could make the space to become kind to others. Each of these actions may seem small-scaled, but their shift created the biggest development in my life thus far. In being kind to myself, I associated with some incredibly kind people who truly want to help improve the lives of everybody around them. These people believe that this world should be full of kindness because everyone needs a chance to be at peace with themselves as well as their stages of life.
Life is really a magical journey, just do not forget that we're all on a single path so be gentle with one another and be kind to yourself.
Stay safe, stay healthy and spread kindness as opposed to a virus!
