WHEN THE STRESS IS JUST TOO BIG
COURSE INTRODUCTION
This course looks at how self-kindness (also called befriending) and compassion can help when everything else has failed. We experiment with different ways to discover a sense of kindness, because sometimes we find it difficult or have no idea how to be kind to ourselves. We begin to experiment with seeing what kindness is like.
Feel free to read the words and try out the invitations, or use the audio and video guided practices. You can print off the tick chart pdf and fill it in to help keep track of what you are finding useful.
Use as much or as little feels helpful.
Inspirational Poem
Naomi Shihab Nye: Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.
Download Tick Chart PDF
