The Kindness Box

[Geoff-Allen]

Ah ... not quite finished for today ... these kids books are about friendship and the best friendships are based on mutual-kindness -

24 Fabulous Kids Picture Books About Friendship

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[Geoff-Allen]

The suffering of others

Here is a video of a spiritual teacher Christina Lopes.

She discusses being empathic and kind and sensitive towards other people's suffering.

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[Geoff-Allen]

Be of service to others. For me, there is no greater joy in life than giving others a helping hand. I first learned this lesson as a new mother, and then later as my daughter grew, I looked for other ways to share my time and resources. I found many opportunities to support causes and organizations in the quest to improve the lives of others. With a little research, you too can find a cause that speaks to you and offers you a sense of fulfillment.

Comes from this site -

Barb Schmidt

Cheers!

 

[Geoff-Allen]

Try -

Kindness service to others

Plus suggested searches - yet to fully explore them myself ...

I think most of us get caught up in our own lives and the daily busyness that we put on ourselves, forgetting that the simplest of things can make the most significant impact on someone else. A smile, a compliment, paying for a meal. Throughout the year I am looking for easy ways my family can show Random Acts of Kindness. Just think how different this world would be if everyone took a few minutes out of their week to do something for someone else. Start today and make someone’s day better.

I hope these Acts of Kindness Ideas are helpful to you, so we can all spread joy to others.

101 Of The Best Random Acts of Kindness Ideas

All the best!

 

[Geoff-Allen]

Just found another huge page at that previous site - more kindness ideas & printables -

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Random Acts of Kindness

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[Geoff-Allen]

A California psychologist asked a group of her students to perform five small weekly acts of kindness for two months. The results showed a significant increase in their happiness levels compared to the students who didn’t take part.xv Acts of kindness are free and easy tasks that shouldn’t take too much time out of your day to complete. You should expect nothing in return when completing an act of kindness. Kindness will leave you feeling warm and wonderful, two of the perfect ingredients for happiness. If you want to be happy, here are some ideas for acts of kindness that you can do right now:

• Leave your change in the vending or ticket machine as a pleasant surprise for the next person.
• Take a family member or elderly neighbour to do their shopping, especially in times of bad weather.
• Help a charity by donating money/clothes/items, volunteering, and raising awareness.
• Volunteer around the community. You could volunteer your services at a food bank, soup kitchen or community centre. There are always volunteering opportunities available around the local community.
• Volunteer to help friends and family. You could help with tasks like dog walking, gardening, babysitting and decorating.

Comes from this guide to a more positive life -

How to Be Happy: The Complete Guide

All the best!

 

[Geoff-Allen]

Practice kindness -

Scroll down maybe four-fifths down this page I have been reading ...

Positive Emotions: List, 90+ Examples, Theories, & Tips

The actual link to the kindness page has this -

Kindness has been defined as actions intended to benefit others. It may also be defined as "having or showing a friendly, generous, and considerate nature, and as encompassing gentleness, respect, amiability, and concern" (Johnstone, 2010).

Some have suggested that kindness should be distinguished from "acts of kindness" or ethical behavior because true kindness—the type of kindness that improves our well-being—comes from a desire to be kind. In fact, practicing kindness when you don't want to can make you feel obligated or even resentful. That's why I believe each person needs to define kindness in their own way.

Read more here -

Kindness: Definition, Ideas, & Examples

All the best!

 

[Geoff-Allen]

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Wikis give us a place where anyone who is kind, thoughtful and intelligent can come and join us in building a better and more rational world. Jimmy Wales Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.

George Sand

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[Geoff-Allen]

Best Poems about Kindness

You can find a few at this "interesting" site - It must be interesting because it claims so in the website's name!

10 of the Best Poems about Kindness

Cheers!

 

[Geoff-Allen]

Try the very well mind site!

Amid the challenges of the pandemic, now more than ever is a time to be kind. Simply sending a thoughtful note to a faraway friend, shoveling snow from an elderly neighbor’s driveway, or agreeing to an afternoon of free babysitting for a busy parent can make a huge difference in someone’s day.

But random acts of kindness aren’t only meaningful to the recipient—they provide important benefits to those who perform them, as well.
“Performing a selfless act increases one’s sense of gratitude, as one is in a position to do something generous for another person,” explains Desreen N. Dudley, PsyD, a licensed clinical psychologist at Teladoc. “Doing a kind act for another person can increase the sense of feeling connected to another person, which in turn helps people see the worth and value in their own lives.”

With National Random Acts of Kindness Day coming up on February 17, let’s take a look at the science-backed health benefits of being kind to others and how these acts of service can offer extra emotional support during the pandemic.

The full article below -

How Random Acts of Kindness Can Boost Your Health During the Pandemic

Loads more at that site!

Cheers!

 

[Geoff-Allen]

Try - psychology today kindness - here is one example -

Kindness is widely praised—from parents telling children to share their toys to saints preaching the Golden Rule—because it has so many benefits:

• Kindness toward oneself is needed to fulfill our three fundamental needs: to avoid harm, approach rewards, and attach to others. When these needs are met, your brain shifts into its responsive mode, in which the body repairs and refuels itself. You feel peaceful, happy, and loving.
• Kindness toward others reduces quarrels, builds trust, and is the best-odds strategy to get good treatment in return.
• Kindness within and between nations promotes the rule of law, educates children, feeds the hungry, supports human rights, offers humanitarian aid, and works for peace. Kindness toward our planet tries to protect endangered species and reduce global warming.

Of course, this is just a partial list of benefits. Bottom line, benevolence is good for individuals, relationships, nations, and the world as a whole.

Be Kind

But yet to fully explore - you know what I am like

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[Geoff-Allen]

Comes from this site! ->

Search Results

 

[Geoff-Allen]

“Unexpected kindness is the most powerful, least costly, and most underrated agent of human change.”

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[Geoff-Allen]

Hugh Mackay kindness - seems like a few - mainly book-stores online ...

Meet the author? -

Hugh Mackay is perhaps our most experienced social researcher, having spent sixty years travelling the country, interviewing Australians.

He returns to Conversations to talk about how his early-pandemic prophecies on community, loneliness, and resilience have played out.

Hugh is advocating a kindness revolution, and in this conversation, he shares his ideas to restore hope and trust in a fragile world.

What might a kindness revolution look like?

Cheers!

 

[Geoff-Allen]

Try - show kindness to people you don't like -

Plus the suggested searches ... for example -

Tuesday was World Kindness day, a day for people around the world to reflect on what kindness means, and ways they’ve received and shown kindness. A lot of people celebrate by practicing “random acts of kindness,” like paying for the person behind you in the toll lane, leaving a hefty tip in your hotel room when you check out, or giving someone your seat on a crowded train. I have joyfully done all of the above, but what about the acts of kindness that aren’t so easy? How willing are we to be truly kind—and how far are we willing to go to create a kinder, more giving/forgiving world?

I don’t know about you, but I find it a lot harder to be kind to certain people in certain situations: the check-out cashier who seems angry that you chose his line, the driver who took the space you had been waiting for in a crowded parking lot or the stranger who is sitting in “your spot” in the pew in church. The aunt who will be at Thanksgiving dinner gossiping mercilessly about your favorite cousin. The friend on Facebook posting political articles that make you wonder how you were ever friends.

Read more -

7 Ways to Be Kind When You Really Don’t Want To | Verna Myers

All the best!

 

[Geoff-Allen]

Ways to spread kindness -

We’d all like the world to be a better place, right? So let’s do as Gandhi taught us: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

It doesn’t take much to turn someone’s day around. A smile, a compliment, a small gesture. If you’re looking for inspiration, here are 10 simple ways to spread kindness today.

1. Really listen

When you’re chatting with someone, do you really listen to their words and try to understand their point of view? Or is your mind way too preoccupied planning what you’re going to say next? (Ooohh, that reminds me of the time I…) Try turning down the volume on your inner dialogue and really listen to people. It’s such a gift to be heard. David Ausburger once said, “Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable”.

Read more suggestions here -

10 Simple Ways to Spread Kindness -

Loads more at that site!

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[Geoff-Allen]

Lion's Roar is a huge site - here are a few of their articles on kindness & generosity -

Kindness & Generosity

Scroll down a bit to this one -

I recently realized that I’ve lived most of my life without knowing the definition of kindness. For a long time, when I thought about what kindness looked like, I pictured the classic example of helping someone carry groceries to their car. I figured kindness had something to do with being friendly, perhaps with a pinch of generosity thrown in.

But what would be left if I peeled kindness away from action?

The Dalai Lama famously said, “My religion is simple. My religion is kindness.” If kindness is so radical that it can define someone’s entire spirituality, then it has to be more than a good deed.

My partner recently went through a bout of severe anxiety. She was battling demons I couldn’t see. Wanting to fix her pain, I tried to become a rock she could lean on continuously, without hesitation and without limits. As I started to burn out, I slowly realized that the support I was offering my partner didn’t include kindness toward myself.

After that, my partner and I promised to proceed with a sincere willingness to protect and not cause harm to each other and ourselves. This was the definition of kindness I had been searching for.

Read the full-piece here -

What Does It Mean to Be Kind?

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[Geoff-Allen]

Recently, a student of mine told me a story about babysitting her five-year-old cousin. They watched a children’s sitcom in which the adolescent female protagonist is characterized as a sweet, morally upstanding A-student. Her best friend, by contrast, is portrayed as the main character’s rebellious and sarcastic counterpart — leaving class before the bell rings, sticking her tongue out in dismissal of her peers, shoplifting jewelry from the neighborhood boutique.

When my student asked her cousin who her favorite character was, the little girl replied simply, “the cool one.” My student knew what her cousin meant. The show writers and producers were clearly aware of which character garnered more admiration from young girls: the one who shies away from kindness in pursuit of being “cool.”

Of course, as we grow up, the idea of “coolness” becomes more tiresome and less relevant, but I remember how I felt during my adolescence: kindness was never portrayed as a particularly sexy virtue. Instead, movie heroes and heroines were, like the best friend in the sitcom, sarcastic, powerful over others, witty.

For the full article try clicking below this line

A New Vision of Kindness Starts with Paying Attention

Cheers!

 

[Geoff-Allen]

Sylvia Boorstein kindness

I wish it were true that regular meditation and prayer guaranteed equanimity, but it’s not that way for me. I began to practice mindfulness in 1977, and I meditate and pray and study and teach, and I still get angry or worried or impatient or frightened. The difficulties—great and small—of my regular life present ongoing challenges to peace of mind. I feel annoyed when my personal plans don’t work out, and I often feel chagrined and dismayed when I see that my personal plans are taking up so much space in my mind when the world is in such terrible trouble. I’m also continually surprised to find how the pains of my past—shame, sadness, guilt, losses, fears of even long, long ago—remain easily activated sensitivities that upset my heart all over again through memory. A grandchild, coughing the benign cough of a child turning over in bed in the next room, frightens me out of a sleep because the sound matches the sound of my mother coughing the cough of congestive heart failure in a bedroom down the hall from me sixty years ago, and I wake up sad.

Restoring the Mind to Kindness

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[Geoff-Allen]

Another lucky hunch pops into my head during the day -

Interviews kindness authors

For example -

November 13th is officially World Kindness Day. But hey! We can totally be kind to each other on any and every day of the year. Right? And we should. For a deep dive into what it means to be truly kind and how to put kindness into meaningful action, we interviewed author and speaker Houston Kraft.

His book, Deep Kindness: A Revolutionary Guide for the Way We Think, Talk, and Act in Kindness, launched this fall. Kraft co-founded CharacterStrong, a program that teaches social and emotional skills to students all over the world. And he’s basically a kindness guru.

Comes from this site -

Meet Kindness Guru Houston Kraft