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It’s time for part three in the toolkit series. In previous episodes, we explored the value of diligence and patience as meditation tools. Today, we’ll look at how kindness facilitates your practice. I’m talking primarily about practicing kindness toward yourself, but kindness toward others comes into play here, too.

To begin with, let’s note that practicing meditation is being kind to yourself. Sitting regularly teaches you to focus on the present moment and to transform your habitual reactions. The practice brings you a wealth of cognitive, physical health, and emotional health benefits.

But your meditation practice also benefits others. For those who worry that taking time out to meditate is selfish, it’s important to be aware of the ways your mindfulness benefits those around you.

Mindfulness teaches you to be more present for others, so you listen more deeply to them, understand them better, and demonstrate more compassion for them. You become calmer and are, therefore, better able to negotiate conflict and help others. You may even be better at avoiding conflict to begin with, because you’ll be able to gain a broader perspective on the actions of others. This small sample of benefits demonstrates that your mindfulness practice is not selfish at all.

Kindness is also valuable because it is a partner to patience when you come up against obstacles or distractions in meditation. I use the term obstacles a lot in my blogs, but the things that seem to get in your way when you meditate are only obstacles because you react to them as if they are obstacles. 

Thoughts, for example, cause a lot of concern for some meditators, especially beginners. You might worry that having a thought is problematic, because it takes your attention away from the breath where you think it is supposed to be.

But, a thought is just a thought. It isn’t a problem or an obstacle. It is simply something to notice and then let go of so you can get back to focusing on the breath. But if you react toward that thought with frustration, impatience, concern, etc. or, if you start thinking of yourself as a poor meditator because you had a thought, you create a problem that wasn’t there to begin with.

Learning to sit with thoughts typically happens in stages. The first stage is to notice your thoughts - because prior to learning to mediate, many of us don’t even realize how active our mind is. We don’t notice that our thoughts are separate from us and that we can observe ourselves having thoughts.

Stage two involves noticing how you react to your thoughts. Most people start off having negative reactions to their thoughts, because they judge thoughts to be obstacles to their meditation.

The third stage is accepting then letting go of both the thoughts and your reactions to them. To get to this phase, you need kindness. You need to realize that it was your reactions to the thoughts that created the distraction, not the thoughts themselves.

And you need to be kind to yourself when you make this discovery. Realize that being upset or judgemental was your way of trying to get the meditation right. You were reacting in the best way you knew how, but now you’ve discovered a better way, to avoid reacting automatically as if thoughts were problems.

Kindness allows you to forgive yourself for making mistakes during the learning process. And you certainly should be kind about this. Any good teacher will tell you that making mistakes is an essential and integra...