Today’s post will be brief so that you have time to soak in the beautiful words of the poem I’m sharing. I journeyed at the start of the week to see if there was any guidance I could share with clients seeing me individually or in journeying groups. I was shown a piece of yarn and I held onto it as we traveled. We flew up, up, up…and then I looked down to see a beautiful tapestry. The poem below flashed in my mind.
After hearing client’s experiences, kindness makes sense. Not only that we are kind to one another…but even more so, that we are kind to ourselves. So many of us have very loud internal critics who are judging, attacking, and demeaning us throughout the day. It takes courage, and time, to allow an inner voice of kindness to arise. I encourage you to take time each day and give yourself the gift of kindness. Acknowledge yourself for all that you are, all that you do. There is enough sorrow and anger and hatred in our world. Let’s work on cultivating an inner landscape of kindness, which we can then offer out into the world.
I look forward to seeing you on the path: Journeying groups on Tuesdays at 6pm at Soul of Yoga during the month of September!
KINDNESS
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.
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 voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
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