Stress

What if Kindness was the Cure All Along?

Before I begin. I want to mention a couple of milestones that occurred this week. As this is post number 38, I’ve been writing here for 9 months now. I passed 300 subscribers this week and over 765 followers. If I could be more grateful for that, I’m honestly not sure how. So, from the bottom of my kindness organ (heart for you newbies) I thank you. If you are getting value from these posts, please share with someone you know who could use a little more kindness in their lives. Thanks again… now, where was I?

Two weeks ago, I wrote about how kindness is not something you do, but an embodied state. A way of experiencing life when awareness widens to include the heart instead of staying confined to the head. This occurs through the awareness of your breath.

So, let’s begin by becoming conscious that you are breathing in and out and stay conscious of that while you read this piece. Take 3 breaths in and out before you read on if you’re up for it. If not, I love you anyway. And keep it plutonic people, the world is currently weird enough.

This week, I want to explore what happens when we abandon that state. Because stress isn’t what happens to us. It’s what happens when we protect our heart from what happens to us.

We talk about stress like it’s delivered by circumstance. The traffic, the deadline, the weather, the hard conversation, the unexpected bill, the person who never listens. I’m sure you could easily add to this list or picture yourself in at least one or two of these circumstances. We point to our lives and say, “ See, this is why I’m stressed.” And, given the way we are raised and that those things are real, uncomfortable, sometimes painful, and often frustrating, I totally get it.

But I’ve noticed in my own life and in the lives of the people I work with: stress isn’t actually caused by what happens. It’s caused by how tightly we contract around what happens. There are many ways to say that, and my background is as an educator so, if that isn’t clear, hang in there. If by the end of this article you still don’t know what that means, please ask below. I’ll do my best to clarify.

As you continue to be aware of your breath (caught you didn’t I) think about it. Two people experience the same event. One stays relatively calm, maybe even curious. The other spirals into tension, worry, and might even lose sleep over it. Same circumstance; completely different experience of stress.

What if I told you the difference was kindness?

When the Heart Closes

Remember that exercise from last week? The one you’re doing right now by noticing your breath while reading; that simple shift of awareness from head (thought) to include the chest (heart), from thinking about life to experiencing it? Stress is what happens when we ignore that connection. It happens the moment you protect against what is. The instant you tighten, the internal narrative becomes; “why would he say that!?” or “I can’t handle this” or “why is this always happening to me?”

Your nervous system reads that contraction as danger. Your body floods with cortisol. Your breathing gets shallow. Your muscles tense. Your mind starts racing, trying to fix, control, or escape whatever triggered the closing. This is stress. Not the thing alone, but your triggered feelings and subsequent thoughts about the thing.

That closing happens so fast, so automatically, that most of us don’t even notice we’re doing it. We think the stress is the problem, when really it’s our own contraction in response to the problem. We abandon the embodied state. We retreat entirely into our heads. We become, once again, nothing more than a system for getting our head from point A to point B.

Kindness as Relaxation

So what does kindness have to do with any of this?

Everything.

Because kindness, when you actually practice it inwardly, is fundamentally an act of relaxation. An act of ‘being’ at the speed we were designed for, not the one we have come to take for granted. It’s the willingness to stay connected to your breath instead of anticipating an enemy. To open instead of close. To stay present with what is, instead of fighting it. And since uncomfortable situations are going to happen anyway, what do you have to lose?

In last week’s post on defiance, I wrote about kindness being soft the way water is soft; yielding, persistent, and capable of reshaping what it touches. But before kindness can reshape anything externally, it has to illuminate something internally.

It has to relax the contraction.

When you meet a difficult moment with kindness, you’re not making the difficulty go away. You’re staying present long enough to see (in the vast majority of cases) that the reaction is practiced and outsized . You’re saying, “This seems hard, and I can be with it.” That “being with” is the opposite of stress. It’s your heart opening instead of closing. It’s your nervous system remembering it can feel safe, even when things are uncomfortable. It’s the recognition that you don’t have to add suffering on top of difficulty. It’s awareness dropping back down from the spiral of thought into the coherence of the body.

The Moment-to-Moment Practice

This isn’t some grand philosophical concept. It’s practical, immediate and available right now. The next time you feel stress rising, pause. Just for a second. Notice where you’ve tightened. It is often your chest, your jaw, your shoulders, or your belly. If you’ve had a particularly egregious childhood, you may notice more acute reactions like clenched fists or a blood-flush to the face in addition to the tightening.

That physical contraction is your heart closing. Your system saying “no” to what’s happening. Your awareness retreating from embodied experience back into the narrow band of cognitive commentary and problem-solving.

Now breathe. And as you breathe, let your awareness spread the way it is doing now as you notice your breath while reading this (right? 😉). Let it drop from your head into your chest.

See if you can ‘be with’ (be aware of) that contracted place just a little. This is the opposite of ‘giving in’. This is the bravest choice you can make. Ask yourself: Can I be kind to myself right now? Can I let my heart relax around this instead of protecting against it? Sometimes the answer will be yes. Sometimes it’s won’t yet. Both are fine. But even asking the question creates a gap. A moment of choice between contraction and presence.

What Changes

When you begin to practice this, even inconsistently, subtle changes occur. You start to notice that some of the things you thought were inherently stressful actually aren’t. What’s stressful is your microsecond habit of closing around them. The difficult conversation becomes less overwhelming when you meet it with an open heart instead of defensiveness. The uncertainty becomes more bearable when you stop trying to anticipate how it will turn out. The mistake or failure stings less when you can hold yourself with kindness instead of harsh judgment. Your stress level drops because you’re no longer adding layers of resistance and tension to so many daily things.

You start to exist in a more complete state of awareness. The one where thoughts are still present but transparent. Where emotions have space. Where you’re inhabiting your body from the inside instead of using it to transport your image of yourself. In this way stress can no longer ‘accumulate’ because each difficult situations is processed and passed through (flow) instead of blocked.

The Real Freedom

This is what 360° Kindness offers: the freedom to experience life without constantly protecting against it. You can still feel challenged and/or uncomfortable. But those feelings move through you instead of getting stuck. They don’t compound into chronic stress because you’re not closing your heart around them. You stay open, present and kind. And the openness that dissolves stress in the beginning, allows you to realize less stress moment to moment day to day. In time you’ll notice that circumstances do not change, but your relationship to them has.

This is the defiance I wrote about last Friday. Certainly not the loud, arrogant type of resistance that demands attention. But the silent power that accompanies presence, not to let the world pull you out of alignment. The refusal to abandon yourself by retreating into the head and closing the heart.

When you stop defying yourself, something deeply peaceful arises. You discover that peace is not the absence of difficulty. It’s the presence of meeting that difficulty with an open heart. And to speak purely from the clinician in me; '“wow, it is fun!”

The Practice, Again

When stress arises, fall back on your practice; notice the feeling. Where you’ve tightened.

Breathe into the feeling and bring your focus to the heart so that the mind narrative doesn’t become too loud for you to ignore. Let awareness spread from your head to your chest.

Stay embodied.

That’s it.

If you’re old enough to read this I can guarantee two things. No matter what you think, 1. You’ve been through difficult things. 2. You didn’t die. The old saying “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is actually bullshit if you avoid what doesn’t kill you like the plague. It doesn’t make you stronger. It allows you to practice avoidance. Avoidance is closing your heart. This actually makes you weaker in the moment and less resilient for future difficulties.

Remember, you are not trying to make the stress disappear. You are bringing awareness to the circumstance so that you don’t add unnecessary suffering to what’s already difficult. Because it keeps your heart open.

That’s the power you actually have. You cannot control what happens, but you can (in time and with practice) choose how you meet it. With contraction or with kindness. With a closed heart or an open one. Moment to moment, breath to breath.

Once you make this a matter of course; eventually, the choice is always yours.