Does it come naturally, for me, to offer kindness to myself?

Summon this mantra, as often as necessary: “Sweetheart, you are in pain. Relax. Take a breath. Let’s pay attention to what is happening. Then, we’ll figure out what to do.” Journal about what that works in you, and how happily — or awkwardly — it lands.

What we have in Sylvia Boorstein is someone who has actively shaped her presence in the world across her lifetime, welcoming in her frailties and glitches, toward creating a wise and graceful whole. And there is a discipline of kindness tucked inside how she finds it in herself to be able to engage contemplative tradition in the first place, with the people she’s closest to in her life and with strangers, with the people she bumps up against all day long — just as a human loose in the world.

We walk around in the most simple, ordinary of circumstances with the power to break someone else’s day, or to make someone else’s day with kindness. And, like all spiritual wisdom, we must offer that kindness to ourselves, too, if we truly, innately, and in a fully embodied way can offer it to others. This can become the way we are in the world, even if everything in our formation or what’s happening to us would suggest that we would be different.

So the invitation here is to practice kindness — kindness as a spiritual way of being, especially when the most natural move would be something different. We can begin flexing a muscle of stopping, of “recalculating.” And as you work on this, at all times let this intention of kindness to others root in a deep practice of kindness toward yourself. That’s the only way this can become truly instinctive and defining of you, and for everyone around you.