Kindness is the answer. We need Kindness. Huge Kindness.

“What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. ”
— Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

We need kindness. Oh, the world right now needs so much kindness. We need big kindness. We need huge kindness. We need badass kindness.

Physicians have to take an oath that states, “Do no harm.” I wish that all of humanity would have to take that oath. Imagine a world where everyone had to take an oath that said, “Do no harm.” Or imagine it one better: A world where everyone took an oath to Be Kind.

I have worked all over the world and all over my own country and I can tell you this: People want the same things. They want to see their children tucked in bed at night, peacefully asleep. They want a safe comfortable place to live. They want to do meaningful activity and be able to provide for their families. They want to eat and laugh and drink with their friends and loved ones. That’s all. Everything else is extra. And if any of those things are missing, then the extra doesn’t matter. Are there bad guys in the world? Yes. But they are the exception. Not the rule.

We need kindness in a world that seems to have forgotten it. The internet and social media have such potential as a way to spread information and joy, and yet there is too much sarcasm, and too much hate. From every possible side. And there is really only one cure for all of this darkness: and that is kindness.

And yes, you may think kindness is naïve. It’s not. Kindness is not naïve, despite its simplicity. It has been a tenet of religion and philosophy for ages: all religions.  And most philosophies. 

Kindness has stood the test of time. But Kindness isn’t easy. It is easier to stay small and closed off. It is easier to be mean or sarcastic because it doesn’t require anything of you. Kindness takes muscles. Kindness takes effort, restraint, stretching and most of all courage: kindness requires that you will open your heart, you will feel yourself in the relationship, you will grow. 

Want to add kindness but not sure how? Start with Do No Harm. Thinking about writing that snarky thing on FaceBook, or ranting back at someone: Don’t. Look for a place to write something kind instead. Add kindness to the world. Or if you can’t manage kind, add beauty, add creativity, add love. Or simply go outside and sit in the sun and look around at the world. Sometimes we aren’t kind because we are tired. It’s okay. Rest. Be grateful. Be humble. Be still. Let your kindness grow.

Random acts of kindness are good. Intentional Acts of Kindness are Great. Write a thank you note to someone who helped you in your life and doesn’t even know that they did. Bring flowers to someone who could use them. Mow someone’s lawn. Text a friend who you miss seeing. Donate your used clothes. Bring food to a food bank. Make your famous cookies. Listen to someone’s story.

Kindness is compassion in action. It requires you to be brave sometimes. When someone on your team at work starts saying something negative about someone else, you can say, “We don’t talk about people like that here.” And then change the subject, say something kind about someone.

So if you are wondering what to do about the problems in the world--do the kindest thing you can do right now. If you are wondering how to get more from your employees or co-workers at work. Try the kind thing. If you are wondering how to shift the mood in your house or your office: try kindness. 

And kindness is not just about other people. Kindness is first and foremost an inside job: start with yourself. Start where you are. Start by saying something kind to yourself instead of what you were going to say. Take care of yourself. Get rest. Get food. Stay nourished. If you are kind to yourself you will have more to give others. Like the Roman fountains, the kindness in your bowls will build up until they naturally spill out to others. If we all did it, it would be endless.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015

“If someone is too tired to give you a smile, leave one of your own, because no one needs a smile as much as those who have none to give.”
— Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch
“Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world. ”
— Desmond Tutu
“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”
— Dalai Lama
“Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”
— Ephesians: 4:32
“Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution. ”
— Kahlil Gibran
“There is a reward for kindness in every living-thing. ”
— Prophet Muhammad
“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted”
— Aesop
“Goodness is the only investment that never fails. ”
— Henry David Thoreau

Refuge. Sanctuary. Love.

“That vague sweetness/ made my heart ache with longing/ and it seemed to me/ that is was the eager breath of the summer/ seeking for its completion./ I knew not then that it was so near,/ that it was mine,/ and that this perfect sweetness had blossomed/ in the depth of my own heart”
— Tagore

Refuge is the end of the trauma—a place where the active part of trauma is over. But it is not the end. It is a beginning. Refuge is the beginning of healing. It is a place where the possibility of healing exists.

Refuge is the minimal requisite environment for healing, but it is not the healing itself. Refuge is a place where you can rest. Often physically, but most importantly, emotionally. It isn’t the rest itself. I make this distinction because healing and mending can take a lot of work. A place of safety and refuge allow you to do this, but they are not sufficient in and of themselves. Healing isn’t just being away from trauma or grief. Healing is the work of mending, repair, grieving. And once you have sufficiently healed there is the possibility of resurgence of growth—a place I would call sanctuary. In refuge you mend, in sanctuary you grow.

No one wants to be a refugee, but I believe that anyone who has lived through trauma or severe grief is a refugee--especially if you choose to heal. Trauma and traumatic grief mean that you are cast out of a land of innocence. Not just a world where you would believe that everything is okay—or that the world is just. It’s bigger than that—because trauma and severe loss mean that you lose an innocence of self—an innocence of believing that in a difficult situation you would rise to the occasion—you would do the right thing, not the human thing. You know that you have done whatever you needed to do to survive and you know what it means to feel truly helpless. You have seen yourself at your worst in a world that couldn’t help you at that moment: and you can’t ever go back. And never being able to go back is the working definition of refugee.

And the truth is, there is no going back. For those who had peace and safety before the trauma or loss, you long for the world as it was, and for yourself as you were. But you can’t unknow what you know, and you can’t unfeel what you feel. You are changed. This is a simple, but difficult fact. And for those who never experienced anything but trauma and loss—you long for safety, for a world you have only heard about, or read about, or seen from far away. And really, it is all a longing for refuge, for a safe space. For care. For a chance to repair what was torn apart. For the chance at a heart that can love again, and can be loved.

My host mother in Germany, a refugee during World War II, recounted a story on my last visit. Her family had fled the East as the Russians approached. They had travelled terrible miles in trains meant for animals—they were exhausted and hungry and frightened. And when they got to the West, host families took in the refuges from the East. The family who took in her family gave them dinner, and clean clothes and warm beds. The host-wife took the youngest sister, a baby, and let my host mother’s mother go to sleep. The first sleep she had had in days. The host family did everything in their worldly power they could to allow that tired refugee family to rest.

That is refuge. The space to rest. To breathe. To look around, not out of fear, but curiosity. Refuge allows you to notice and see. All through the trauma you had to be nothing but vigilant. And refuge allows you the chance, the beginning, a place to practice, just being again.

Everyone needs different amounts of time in refuge. Some people need days or weeks. Some people need years. Some people need decades. In refuge the walls that helped you survive begin to come down—some you actively take down and some just fade away over time. But the walls only come down if you are in a state of refuge, if your brain and heart have an environment to rest in.

No words can capture the heart-wrenching longing that binds you to refuge like a mother to a sick child. A longing that seems to break your heart—because that is exactly what it is doing: breaking down the walls that surrounded your heart during the trauma. This longing is excruciating, intense, and ever-present. And it if you are lucky enough to feel it, to work with it, to lean in to it—it is your lifeline through refuge to healing.

And no words can capture the devotion and gratitude you have for the people who provide this refuge and the fear you can carry that they might leave or disappear. People who live through famine stockpile food. And people who have lived through terror want to stockpile safety—but it's intangible, it always feels as if it could slip through your fingers. It always feels like you could lose this place you have worked so hard to find and keep. That you might be exiled back to trauma at any moment. Refuge is to healing trauma as a cast and crutches are to a broken bone: you must rely on refuge and the people who provide it utterly—you must put all your weight on refuge and your helpers so that the bones of your heart and your life might mend. This is fierce and powerful. And takes more courage than most people recognize. 

And then one day, unexplainably, you feel a fleeting sense that you can’t lose it—lose refuge, lose the people, or even abandon yourself.  This is sanctuary. That the days, weeks, years of refuge have woven themselves in to your being. That the people who helped you are with you even when you can’t see them. In this fleeting moment you are not standing in refuge, you are standing in sanctuary.

Sanctuary is an open space. Your heart is open. Your mind is open. The future is wide open. In trauma the future is known: you are always anticipating the trauma you lived through. In sanctuary, you really don’t know what might happen next. It is lovely. And it can be scary. Like any big developmental milestone. You have arrived in a place where you can’t return. The way a toddler can’t turn back in to a baby—the way a tree can’t turn back in to a sapling.

Both as a therapist and as a client I have found that healing defies language—and this can get in the way of helping people find and tolerate healing. It’s so hard to find the language of refuge, of sanctuary, of healing. It’s so hard to tolerate the feelings of longing, of leaning, of needing that healing requires. But from my many expeditions I am here to tell you, to report back that these amazing views exist if you stay faithful to your trail. If you trust in your own hard work and the hearts of others.

A few weeks ago, I was in my own struggle in refuge—tangled in longing, in reaching, in the fear of letting go of the ‘known’ shores of the old story. I was walking up the stairs to my office and caught the sight of sunlight on the wall and decided to just turn around and sit on the stairs, half-way up. Sit there and lean on the wall and be in that space—neither here, nor there. Instead of running from the feelings, I would just sit in them. And I did. I sat there for nearly an hour. I sat there long enough to literally lean on refuge, on the walls of my home to hold me up, and find that solid place inside. Find the sanctuary of not abandoning yourself. Find that years of refuge had woven a rope for me to affix myself. To feel solid in a moment I had thought one of my worst. Find that you can lean on your own heart and it holds again. The way to sanctuary is through refuge. You must lean on it with all of your heart, and you will find that the center, your heart, holds.

“I knew not then that it was so near,/ that it was mine,/ and that this perfect sweetness had blossomed/ in the depth of my own heart.”

© 2016 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD

 

Tired of the Old Story? Ask New Questions.

“...no way/
to your future now but the way your shadow could take/
walking before you across water, going where shadows go/
no way to make sense of a world that wouldn’t let you pass/
except to call an end to the way you had come/…”
— David Whyte, excerpt from Finisterre, Pilgrim

Tonight when it finished raining, my dog politely requested a walk. He does this by sitting next to me and intently staring at me until I get the hint. I am new to this neighborhood and decided, since it was going to be a short walk, that I would walk the other way, to the end of the street. I live on a dead end and I thought I knew where the walk would end and yet as I neared the end of the paved road, I spotted a path. So I kept going and found that the path went out through woods toward the river and to what looked like an old bridge embankment. You think you are at an end in one place, and you find another end, a different end—maybe even a beginning.

The river was moving quickly with today’s rain and it was leafy and green in the woods on the banks. It was a magical spot. Totally unexpected and it was only yards away from the neighborhood, but it felt a world away. It was a lovely jolt—to be suddenly transported, out of the work I had been doing and out of the neighborhood I thought I was in.

The funny thing is that it wasn’t the first dead end I had hit today. Earlier I had hit a dead end inside myself—a place where no matter how hard I try, I run up against one of my edges. I mostly try to ignore these edges, walking the ‘other way’ to avoid these dead ends. Walking the other way means avoiding situations or conversations that would have me in that dead end. But it’s hard to avoid them all the time, so mostly I rant against these edges and despair about them. In some ways the particulars of the dead ends don’t matter. It doesn’t matter so much what my dead end or your dead end is: Loss, fear, rage, shame, abandonment, vulnerability, despair. We all have some dead ends in our inner neighborhood—places we can get into, and it seems we can’t get out.

It occurred to me today that when I hit these dead ends I don’t need answers to my problem, I need new questions. Beautiful questions, as the poet David Whyte and the Pilgrim Satish Kumar described them in my class last year at Schumacher College. David Whyte describes ‘beautiful questions’ as questions that disturb our current thinking, or as he says in his poem ‘Sometimes’  questions “that make or unmake a life….that have no right to go away.” They are questions that put you in conversation with yourself, with your core, with your past, present and future. As he says in his Letter from the House:

“One of the most beautifully disturbing questions we can ask, is whether a given story we tell about our lives is actually true, and whether the opinions we go over every day have any foundation or are things we repeat to ourselves simply so that we will continue to play the game. It can be quite disorienting to find that a story we have relied on is not only not true - it actually never was true. Not now not ever. ”

The story I had about my street was not true. It was a dead end for a car, but on foot it continued—and it didn’t just continue on, but it continued to beauty, to respite, to refuge.

So what about the stories I tell myself about the dead ends that I hit within myself? Can I ask that first question: Can you see a different path ahead? Is the story I am telling myself about this true? Is it still true today? If I kept walking, if I continued on and left the spot I call the end, what might I find? What am I afraid to find? What is the question I don’t want to ask?

These questions don’t fix your problem with your edges. You will still hit an edge, but it won’t be in the same familiar place. The thing about my walk tonight was that I still hit a place I could no longer walk forward. I stood on the path looking at the river and my dog put his paws up on the old granite bridge stones and peered over. For one thing, this dead end felt different. It felt expansive, beautiful, restful. But it was an end of the walk. Any next phase of travel would require a boat or a bridge or some other means of getting across water. But a dead end is only a dead end if you limit yourself to what you were doing before: if you only go forward in the same way you have been going.

And that is what I have to remember when I hit my own internal dead ends. You have to be willing to take a different route, different path, throw away the old plan and especially the old story. In order to ask yourself different questions, beautiful questions you must have courage. But I believe a fair warning is in order. If you ask beautiful questions you risk ending up in new places. You risk the heartache of leaving something or some part of yourself behind. You risk the story you know for a new story—and the knowledge that even this new story will also have to be left behind at some point.

So what is your beautiful question? The question that opens up a different path? The question that would change the conversation you are in? The question you don’t want to ask?

© 2016 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD

Pilgrim
By David Whyte
Buy on Amazon

Combat the learned helplessness that comes from another mass shooting.

When a traumatic event happens once—humans are generally spurred into action by their biology—a huge release of adrenaline which makes you ready to fight, ready to act, and which sharpens memory of the event so you can remember it clearly to protect yourself from it in the future.

When traumatic acts are continually repeated, as they have become now for us with acts of domestic and international terrorism, mass shootings and violence, we have a different set of reactions. Our human physiology is built for efficiency. Traumatic events require a lot of energy from us and our brains and bodies tell us that we can’t afford that much energy and attention. So if trauma gets repeated-- instead of gearing up—we go numb. When a smoke alarm goes off in your house once, you pay attention—if it goes off every day, then you cut the wires so you can’t hear it anymore. 

Going numb serves the important purpose of allowing us to go on with our lives, it is what allows soldiers to keep fighting, and survivors in war zones to keep living. It is what allows abused children to keep going to school. It keeps you from taking in each new act of violence. It protects you from the extremes of emotion that could affect your memory, your health and your safety. It is the emergency response system that your body automatically employs when trauma gets repeated—hunkering down so you can conserve energy.

Survival is important. But surviving traumatic events without being able to control what is happening or what you are enduring can lead to another psychological phenomena: learned helplessness. Learned helplessness was a term coined by Maier and Seligman  (1967) about the impact of uncontrollable traumatic events. What they found in their research was that when you can’t control repeated traumatic events, you can become passive, and as Seligman describes, “come to believe that nothing you do will have any affect on the outcome, so why do anything?” Learned helplessness is the behavior of passively doing nothing, even when the possibility of action, escape or change in the traumatic experience is possible.

This is where we need to fight our biological autopilot that is telling us to just conserve our energy, sit tight, stay quiet and survive. This is an important biological gear that we have to save our lives, but it is also a gear that can keep us from changing what is broken, dangerous and actually within our control. Learned Helplessness comes from forgetting that we do actually have control. We can act, and not just passively accept the traumatic events.

The antidote to learned helplessness is action, it is taking control of what is in your control and working toward a safer and healthier situation. So rather than watching the news all day and lamenting another shooting. Do something to change the situation in any way that fits your values and integrity to create a safer more connected community and world. Learned helplessness is changed by starting to act. Small acts that can begin to remind all of us that we matter. That our actions can have an impact. That we don’t have to just sit passively by when bad things happen.

Turn off the television. 

Write a letter.

  • To an elected official about what you think needs to change in order to have a safer community. If you live in the US you live in a representative democracy and in order to make it work, you need to act: you need to vote and you need to let your elected officials know your viewpoints. Write or call the president, your governor,  your congressional representative. Contact information for all elected officials, national and local
  •  Write thank you cards to the Orlando Police Department (100 S Hughey Ave, Orlando, FL 32801) or the Orlando Regional Medical Center (52 W Underwood St, Orlando, FL 32806) thanking the first responders and the medical personnel for their hard work and care. 
  • Write a letter of gratitude to a member of the armed services who is working on your behalf to fight terrorism. You can use this resource to write.

Donate:

Build community.

  • Create a healthy dialogue in your community about creating safer and healthier communities. Kinder communities. More respectful communities. You can use this resource or this organization. 

Do something kind.

  • Do something kind for children, for the elderly, for first responders, for anyone: Do something. Bake a cake, mow a lawn, read a book out loud, donate clothing, volunteer with a troop, offer to make or bring dinner, no matter how big or small. Act with kindness.