Loving Kindness
So much of day-to-day living revolves around maintaining a degree of comfort and sustainability. We have bills to pay and rent or mortgages to cover to ensure we have a roof over our heads. We need to buy groceries, household supplies, clothing, shoes, and fuel for our vehicles or gear for our bikes. Part of growing up and maturing in this culture involves recognizing that unless we're extremely wealthy, comfort is a luxury that we only get to experience in a very sporadic and inconsistent way.
It's no wonder that many of us navigate life with an underlying buzz of anxiety and neurosis. I would even suggest that this anxiety is unavoidable, a consequence of our overactive minds constantly reminding us of what we lack or what dangers might be lurking around the corner—whether it’s the disappointment of a partner’s frown when we were expecting a smile or the close call of a truck that could have turned a few seconds earlier.
Simply existing and navigating the world inundates us with awareness of reasonably frightening things, leading to a low level of fear, anxiety, and insecurity that surfaces from time to time. It's no wonder we often feel agitated and uncomfortable. Life is hard. And if we have the misfortune of experiencing significant trauma or abuse, or if our brain chemistry predisposes us to mental health struggles, emotional dysregulation, or difficulty staying content or calm, it just makes life that much harder.
Navigating the world on a day-to-day basis can be exhausting. It can be challenging, if not impossible, to recognize our own emotional and spiritual needs, let alone take any actions to attend to them consciously and intentionally. I suspect that our psyches and mental processes, which constitute what we call our character and personality, are inherently geared toward fulfilling these emotional and spiritual needs. Even though many people might not use the same terminology to describe what I'm talking about, they are nonetheless driven by the same inherent need for emotional and spiritual fulfillment.
We often describe these needs in terms of values, morals, and ethics. From my perspective, we all operate from the desire to seek love and kindness, even if such terminology sounds off-putting or "hippie-dippie nonsense." This is evident because every culture and society's conception of a higher power contains some measure of love and compassion at its core, even if interpreted differently. The general sense that "God is love" persists across cultures. While someone might argue that some cultures or philosophies do not center on love and kindness, I believe those are exceptions rather than the rule. The very nature of humans as social animals who tend to form communities—villages, towns, cities, states, nations—suggests that, at our core, we seek love and kindness as a means of binding us together harmoniously.
Reconnecting with this sense of love and kindness within ourselves is our goal when we seek help from a counselor or therapist. This is the project we struggle to articulate when we reach out for help because things don't feel right—we're full of anxiety, dread, sadness, and insecurity. We feel unbalanced. At the core of this imbalance is a struggle to identify what love and kindness mean within ourselves and in our relationships with others, a topic I present as though it is two separate things when, in reality, it is one simple thing.
However a person frames it to themselves, whatever language they use for their own internal narrative, when I work with someone, my intent is to help them recognize the path within themselves that leads back to finding what love and kindness mean for them. This involves vulnerability, compassion, self-awareness, and, ultimately, present-moment contentment and consciousness.
Yes, writing about this concept can become immediately esoteric, but it need not be off-putting to the pragmatist. No matter how emotionally disconnected we may be from ourselves or how "hard" and "realistic" we consider ourselves, deep within us is a tiny little infant that was once utterly dependent on emotional and spiritual connection with a loving caretaker—a loving parent if we were lucky. In our work together, you may frame this idea differently, and that is wonderful. It all boils down to seeking love and kindness in some form or another. And often, the path towards balance, contentment, security, and mental well-being aligns with this journey towards love and kindness.
Those who work with me know I encourage taking that path—the path of love, kindness, and compassion. Truly, the only course towards contentment and living a fulfilling life comes from following the direction of love and kindness.
