In these weekly experiments, I revisit the subject of kindness from time to time because of how important I feel it is in enhancing our quality of life, personally and interpersonally.  Offering kindness to ourselves and others is good psychological food.  It nourishes a sense of well-being and connection.

Over the years, I have noticed that focusing kindness as a daily practice has served to consistently expand my capacity to notice moments when kindness would be a gift to myself or someone else.  It’s as though I look at myself and the world through a lens increasingly qualified by kindness and it generates a sense of a gentler world.  It’s been a great gift to me – something that has helped me through difficult times – and I want to encourage you to explore what happens when you increase the presence of kindness in your life.  Regardless of the amount of kindness you already express in your world, it can be a powerful practice to add even more.

And so, for this week’s experiment, I invite you to become familiar with the ways in which you engage acts of kindness.  Pay particular attention first to how you treat yourself.  Notice what happens when you offer yourself kind responses.  If you already experience ease with being kind to yourself, notice what happens if you focus even more on it throughout your day.  You might, for example, invite yourself to take a moment several times during the day to connect with yourself with kindness.  There doesn’t have to be a specific reason.  You might, for example, imagine that you look at yourself with kind eyes and then notice how this feels.  What physical sensations emerge in your experience and what thoughts or feelings?  If offering yourself kindness is a new practice, notice what it’s like to replace self-criticism with kind thoughts about who you are and what you do.  Kindness can express as encouragement when you do something challenging, gentleness when you make a mistake, support for yourself when you feel overwhelmed.

Next, play with offering kindness to other people during the day.  There’s no need to do anything dramatic.  It’s more a matter of observing your world through the lens of kindness and then responding when you see a need arise, or noticing that someone could use a kind word.  Your action may be as simple as offering a compliment or a taking the time to let someone know they’ve dropped something on the street.  In other experiments, I’ve suggested bringing kindness to your interactions with grocery clerks, postal carriers, people who pick up the garbage – with whomever you come into contact along the way during the course of any given day.

As with all the experiments, be sure to bring curiosity and a sense of play to this one.  Kindness is a gentle and soft expression, so I hope you’ll engage this experiment with a willingness to be kind to yourself even when you forget to be kind to yourself!

As you engage this opportunity to live more consciously around the subject of kindness, notice if the world responds to you with increasing kindness in return.  Sometimes when we focus on a particular quality or attitude, we find it reflected in our daily lives in surprising and abundant ways.