Why Kindness Matters

When I tell people that mindfulness forms the basis for how I teach writing I often watch their eyes glaze over. I can almost see what they’re picturing: me with flowers in my hair, sitting in a drum circle, eyes gently closed, swaying from side to side in the sunshine. While that’s lovely (and I’ve got nothing against drum circles), it’s not how I teach writing.

Where Mindfulness Can Go Wrong

Misconceptions about mindfulness are most prevalent when I talk about the importance of kindness. Somewhere along the way of our human cultural development someone decided that we had to be super effing hard on ourselves if we wanted to be considered “good” and “hardworking.”

Then that misguided, overzealous self-criticism got carried over into mindfulness with disastrous results. Honestly, there are very few ways you can do meditation wrong, but being hard on yourself is #1 on the list.

Imagine you’re meditating. You rest your attention on an anchor and then you realize (because you’re human) that your mind has wondered. Do you think to yourself “oops, got caught up in a thought,” then come back to the anchor and start again, no biggie, or is there a little audio clip that plays in your head that sounds something like “you idiot, you can’t do anything right”?

Pause For a Moment

Here’s where kindness matters most. The whole point of mindfulness is to try and see things as they really are, in the present moment.

When your mind wanders, ask yourself, are you really an idiot? Or do minds wander, because that’s what minds do? If you can recognize that your brain is simply doing what millions of years of evolution have trained it to do and meet the moment with kindness, you are seeing the reality of the situation. Which, again, IS THE WHOLE POINT. Then you just let that thought go, come back to your anchor and start again. Kindness moves you closer to reality, while self-flagellation moves your further from it.

If you’re terrible to yourself, you are missing the truth of the present moment, moving deeper into what the Buddhists call delusional thinking, spinning stories where there were none to tell. (As storytellers, we can be particularly good at this.)

Practice Kindness

I always tell my students: you get better at the things you practice. If you practice noticing your thoughts with kindness, you will get better at noticing when you’re distracted and this can be a total game changer for your writing. If you beat yourself up, you get better at that – and nobody needs to be better at that.

So be kind with yourself. It’s not just a woo woo, peace and rainbows thing, it’s about being intentional about the way we experience the world.

And if you’d like to know more about how mindfulness can help you with your writing, check out my free guide, Write More, Suffer Less: 4 Ways Mindfulness Can Help You Be a Happier, More Productive Writer.