Why a Loving Kindness practice is good for you and won't make you a doormat.

Finding Your Right Mind — with Vanessa Potter

Show Notes:

This week’s self care episode centres around kindness. I talk to Julieta Galante, a healthcare researcher about how kindness towards oneself and others is the foundation of a meditation practice called loving kindness (LKM).
You may have heard of it. You may even do it. Or you may have heard of it and thought that’s all a bit fluffy and well, pointless. Loving others (even our enemies) unconditionally is a sign of weakness and will make you a pushover in life.

But even recording this episode taught me something very important. As a relative newcomer to podcasting I swapped recording platform recently and made a rookie mistake. My immediate default was to criticise myself, to be really cross that things didn’t go to plan. Ironically, it was only as I was listening to what Julieta has to say that I realised I had to apply kindness — to myself.

Once I had stopped laughing at the irony, I saw how it illustrates just how easy it is so talk about this stuff, to offer solutions about self care (which lets face it, is being kind to ourselves) and yet there I was being more hard on myself than I would be on any other ‘newbie’ podcaster. My own perfectionista was out of control.

A loving kindness practice is a really, really good way to stop beating yourself up. This episode goes way beyond the theory and breaks down this practice into its component parts and explains all of the barriers many of us come up against. It’s easy to find instructions for this practice, but not the ‘inside story’ of what happens when you try and it how to deal with some of the resistance we can feel.

Kindness is what we need NOW. Studies suggest that kindness and compassion are innate - even if that might not feel like its the case - we were born with this skill and we can train ourselves to get better at it. Research on toddlers suggests they will instinctively offer up a toy before the social conditioning of what ‘kindness’ is has been taught. Toddlers also seem to be happier if they help another and don’t expect rewards. This seems a little sad that society might ‘unteach’ this innate kindness. But rest assured that kindness is there within all of us — if we want to find it. If you think generating kindness is a luxury or a waste of your time. This interview might change your mind.

Links:

Here are two loving kindness guided meditations: https://ggia.berkeley.edu/practice/loving_kindness_meditation

https://insig.ht/nyjbFmqLPeb

Toddler research, but there is loads more ! https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/being_kind_makes_kids_happy

Julieta’s research on LKM:

Trial publication https://iaap-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/aphw.12074 (full text freely available here, not the friendliest format: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/270517)

Review on kindness-based meditation: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-26574-001 (full text freely available here http://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4739/74de2ee3da90084decb37e80e87e0f2efbdd.pdf )

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