What’s the difference between kindness and kind acts?

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Kind actions, Kindness

People talk about being nice to one another and consider it an upgrade to go from being nice to being kind. It is similar to having loving feelings in one’s heart, as if a loving feeling is an end in itself, and then progressing on to having loving feelings directed to a particular person or thing. It is still an internal feeling and as I’ve posted before, those unexpressed feelings will go to the grave with the death of that person holding them. They may have only held that feeling for a few moments and then moved on to other things. If they haven’t expressed those feelings with an intentional physical manifestation of that feeling directed toward that other person’s needs, then it was a fruitless feeling. Those fleeting emotions are as meaningless to the potential receiver of kindness as a summer cloud passing overhead.

Kind actions that are intended to help another specific person achieve a specific goal are easiest to conceptualize, but actions intended to help the general public can be just as kind, and might have greater consequences. For you to choose to seek to develop an automatic kindness response is one of the finest things that you can do. Finding tiny things to exercise your kindness potential is the place to start because there are vast numbers of tiny things that can be found and done.

Of course the flip side to the kindness response is to learn not to do an unkindness, no matter how small that unkindness may be. Here is an easy one to get started with.

“I am not too proud to pick up litter, but I am too proud to toss it down.”

The goal is to learn to react reflexively to a discovered opportunity for a kindness.

 

Teaching a class on kindness

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Class in greeting, Class in kindness, How to learn kindness, Kindness, Saying Hello

If I, or you, were to teach a class on kindness, how to be kind, how would we conduct that class? To begin it would be necessary to give an introduction as to what was meant by kindness. Perhaps, even before that short speech, we could stand at the entry door to the event and greet each individual coming through the entrance in a kindly manner.

What does a kindly greeting consist of? It begins with a glance, a turning toward the newly arriving person, the presenting of a friendly facial expression, an open facial acknowledgment of our approaching one another, a friendly accepting verbal greeting, such as, “Welcome! I am so happy you came to our class.” An offering of a greeting hand combined with a statement of your name, “My name is Charles Scamahorn. “Hello, my name is John Doe.” “I am so glad you could attend our gathering Mister Doe. Please be seated wherever you would feel comfortable.”

That is a formalized form of a standard greeting at the door, but for every occasion, there will be something similar and probably routine. If you think about these routine encounters you can understand better what you need to do, and thus learn to do it better. For a class on kindness, the greeter can intentionally choose to set the tone toward friendly helpfulness for the rest of the meeting.

The introductory speech can make the point that we want to help the people present to develop the ability to respond kindly with ease and spontaneity. This isn’t intended to be an abstract lecture only, rather it is intended to give you personal experience with the techniques for being kind and some easy practice at being kind.

First there will be a description of a typical kind act, like a friendly greeting, which we will perform. Basically, this will be the kind of greeting that you encountered when coming in the door. There will be a demonstration of this typical greeting, which you probably have already done yourself many times. The difference in these examples is that they will be done in a consciously friendly way. They will be very easy, and we repeat these exercises a few times until they become an introduction to a habit.

Let us begin by watching these two actors perform a simple greeting. (That will be done physically).

That was easy. Now, close your eyes and imagine yourself as Mike the actor in the white shirt walking up to Jack Black, the person in the black shirt, and saying what Mike said and did: “Hello, My name is -Mike- (your name). Imagine Jack saying, “Hi, My name is Jack Black.” Now in your mind, hold out your hand with a greeting feeling, and saying, “I’m happy to meet you, Mister Black.” On the first meeting with a person it is okay, even proper, to use a more formal greeting. After this first greeting it is polite to speak to them using their first name, unless it is an older person in a position of authority, then keep using the formal Mister Black.

We will practice this greeting in our imagination a few times and then discuss briefly what happened. Then we will do it a few more times, and once again discuss what happened.

We can do three different short sequences like this with actors performing a simulated situation that would typically follow from a simple greeting. Then we could form inner and outer circles of five people each and step forward doing the first greeting just like we imagined. After five encounters we would be facing the person we met a minute before, and then practice our greeting to them again, but with an acknowledgment that we know them, and the greeting would be slightly more expanded. We could do this a third time with a bit more welcoming.

This is how we can begin the kindness classes, and then move onto some examples of training for kind actions.

There are many opportunities for kindness.

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Cultivating the habit of kindness, How to be kind to yourself., I seek to help a fly., Learning to be kind to yourself., Opportunities for kindness.

Wherever there is a living thing there is an opportunity for kindness. That is an important idea for you to consider implementing because the more opportunities you have for being kind the more stable will become your habit for seeing where a kindness might be done and doing it. Why would you want to use your personal energy to be kind to others when it would seem to be more beneficial to yourself to be kind to yourself? I discussed this a couple of posts ago in Old age isn’t for sissies, or is it? The key to living a long, healthy, happy and productive life is a good relationship with one’s self and that is generated by habits that create those end results.

“Those people who are in the habit of being kind to other people are cultivating the habits of being kind to themselves at the same time.” If you have an abundance of kind actions that you have cultivated for treating other people, animals, insects, plants and even non-living things, then you have also created the habit of doing those same kinds of actions for yourself. The non-living things are included because if you cultivate the habit of treating non-living things well by helping them to perform the functions they were designed to perform, then you generate in yourself those same habits. When you are taking care of your physical things—your car, or house, or shoes—you are not only helping them perform their function better, you are generating the habits necessary for taking care of your physical self better.

When you help any living thing to get through its life better, you simultaneously help develop that habit for taking better care of your own needs in that realm of behavior. Catching a fly in your house and putting it outside helps you to be more aware of your own needs for being in the environment where you can thrive. Here’s a video to illustrate that point. To catch a fly. Save his life and yours too.

In some ways helping the fly through a door is better than helping a human being through a door. The reason is that the fly doesn’t have an economic transaction with you, and your actions are totally altruistic toward him and are satisfying your own human needs for generating habits of being kind to yourself. When you open a door for a human being they will usually thank you for that kind action, which is fine and expected, but their thank you is a form of economic transaction, and that makes your action into a completed action of making human society a little more comfortable for everyone. That is great, but a greater practice for your development of treating yourself kindly is to do that deed in such a way that there is no thank you solicited or expected. You open the door for the other person in such a way that they don’t owe you anything. It takes a little effort at learning but you can get the swing of it such that you benefit the other and cultivate the habit of kindness simultaneously.

Wherever there is a living thing there is an opportunity for kindness.

“Kindness costs nothing,” claims an Irish proverb.

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It takes maturity and effort to be kind, Kindness, Personal growth, Politeness

I was disturbed when I came across the proverb “Kindness costs nothing.” I would be quick to agree that politeness costs little, is easy to learn and usually easy to practice, but kindness is a subtle concept; few can learn it and very few can practice it. Children begin learning to be polite at a very early age, not only to their elders but also to their companions. In nearly all situations it improves the polite person’s social relationships, and the payoff is having many friends and few enemies. Kindness is different; it is difficult to practice and is generally only seen in motherly love. In that case it may be a genetically inherited trait and should have a separate name, like mother-love. This form of kindness is the wholehearted helping hand a mother gives to her children in particular and to most children in general. But the kindness at its root is different from mother-love.

When I read, “Kindness costs nothing,” my immediate thought was oh yeah, it costs nothing but … growing enough maturity to have forethought for other people’s needs and problems, thinking through how one might do something to actually help other people, making some decisions on how to cultivate those helping actions, cultivating habits than can spontaneously spring forward with the appropriate actions, being aware enough in the moment of other people’s needs and knowing automatically what needs to be done, and then having enough awareness to identify opportunities and do the right thing before the moment has passed. Kindness costs nothing in the moment but it takes a lifetime of costly preparation to practice kindness.

Kindness isn’t easy because all of the short-term benefits go to the recipient of the action, and the benefits come only to the giver of kindness at later times, because they treat themselves better than they would have, had they not cultivated the ability to do kind acts. Also, kindness enhances humanities survival and fulfillment. A subtle point of kindness is that it usually isn’t doing something for someone; it is removing the impediments to the other person doing something for themselves. Kindness isn’t giving people money, food, shelter or other things that help them live better lives; rather kindness is removing the obstacles that are preventing them getting those necessities for themselves. Thus kindness is different from helping. A helping person gives money, food, or shelter to a needy person, but unfortunately that action decreases that needy person of the abilities and satisfactions of doing those things for themselves; it deprives them of the knowledge and courage to do those things. Unfortunately, direct giving makes people even less able to live abundantly.

Kindness is a deeper kind of helping because it gets at the root causes of what the individual needs most, and that is the experience of how to think about what they really need, to plan on how to fulfill those needs, and physically do what is needed. Think in terms of removing what is obstructing the view of what is needed. When people see what is needed and see a clear path to that goal, and know the easy actions that need to be done they will simply do them. Life is easy when you see what needs to be done and do it.

Kindness is revealing a worthwhile goal to another person that is attainable with doable actions.

Exploring the idea of games for creating habits of kindness.

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Games for a new world order

Games are wonderful things. Usually we think of them as fun activities for children to distract them from annoying us adults. Of course they have benefits for the kids too, because they learn all sorts of useful skills, like getting along with other people with whom they are in conflict for the duration of the game. Some games create the need to understand the thoughts of other people; both your partners’ and your opponents’ thinking needs to be understood to play some games well. Games like American football require great assets of native physical ability, great mental knowledge, flexibility of thoughts, cultivated skills, and competitive spirit for each of the many positions. All of this is admirable for cultivating a culture of advancing economic growth, and it has served humanity well for developing those skills necessary to dominate nature and other people.

Humanity is now entering a new phase of what is being called the anthropocene era. It is a period of time in which humans are the dominant force in changing nature, and it will leave a record to be seen in future geographic strata. Humanity is moving from the role of dominating and using nature and its products to husbanding them. The whole world has become like a farm that must be maintained by man, rather than a wilderness upon which we prey like any other wild animal. If we are to create a human culture that is resonant with the role of balanced husbanding of the world, we need to raise our children and cultivate our adults into a new personality. We must create a new kind of common person set within a new kind of society. That may sound outrageous, but only because it is spoken of in clear terms, rather than in the style of political rhetorical spin to which the public has become accustomed. I see this as less manipulative of an individual’s life and rights, and more of a change of the rules of compensation for personal behavior. The idea is to reward people for taking the whole processes of society and the world into their monetary transactions, in such a way that those entities also benefit.

How might games, and business too, be structured to generate kindness and mutual growth as opposed to the current paradigm of maximizing personal profit? Nowadays, a business transaction is designed to maximize the profit of the various parties concerned, but the situation needs to be changed to one that includes maximizing the health and sustainability of those not directly involved in the transaction, and it must be something more than obeying socially imposed laws, with their enforcement and punishments of violators. How can the transactions of the world be conducted in such a way that those outside of a private transaction also benefit by the transaction? That would somehow have to include the maintenance of the world environment while enhancing their own. Adam Smith’s analysis of this problem suggested that each transaction that benefited both parties also benefited the whole society; it was called the hidden hand of commerce, and that has worked well enough for generating world wealth. The unfortunate side effect is that it has worked so well for promoting human wealth, and so poorly for maintaining the world’s ability to provide long-term largesse.

I don’t know how to generate a system that is more productive than the evolutionary business model where those who are best overall at producing good cheap goods succeed, and others fail. That idea was developed by Smith, but now that we are approaching the exhaustion of the resources to maintain that style of supplying goods to people, we need to consider a system that sustains rather than conquers. Perhaps that isn’t possible; perhaps it will always be the short-term winner who survives for ever and ever, always the winner of the current battle. It’s a tragedy of the commons writ large enough to cover the whole world.

To begin this process we need people raised from childhood with the practice of kindness as a virtue.

My goal is kindness made available to humanity. How?

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Clearing away blockages, Kindness defined, Making life available to others, The evolution of DNA, What is kindness?

Last night in conversation with several of my friends, I was espousing my theory of kindness. Briefly stated, “Kindness is to remove those things which are blocking people from attaining their goals.” It isn’t completing their goals for them, it is only seeing what might be preventing them from doing what they need to do, and making it possible for them to do it. R was asserting that I was doing these helpful things as a form of personal self-aggrandizement, and it was only fulfilling my need to feel intelligent, important and in control. I felt that it was altruism.

I said that the ideal kindness was something so small and seemingly insignificant that even if the person noticed you doing it, they wouldn’t feel the need to say thank you, because my action appeared so trivial, or even random. After a couple of personal near-present examples, I got into discussing looking back at the present from the very distant future, after our present concept of humans had ceased to exist. I said that my stated goal was to maximize the totality of human life and human well-being, and the way to do that was to remove the things that were blocking humanity’s well-being from happening. Aside from the grandiosity of the idea, which might seem absurd to most people, R was insisting my motivations were for personal gain, that everyone is always trying to maximize their self-interest. I said that at my age, I wasn’t going to be around personally for very long, and that I was now thinking of a postmortem me. I was now thinking of my human DNA and not of my personally active body’s needs and its DNA. This is an argument that could be made by any living thing, if it had rational powers and could communicate, and in fact I could extend my argument to include all things potentially living here on Earth.

What DNA based life forms will become possible is now greatly expanded, and it impossible to guess as to what be might come into being, based on extending the already proven works of Craig Venter and Jennifer Doudna. Does that unknown potential now mean I must support any living thing whatsoever that can be created? How about living things that eat other living things, or simply kill them? Lots of living things do that. Do I support things that are purposefully designed to eat specific living things, to support their own life, perhaps eating people, . . . such as me? Hm? Operating on the principle, “If it can be done it will be done” [“If it can be done, it will be done. If you’re not doing it, someone else will” – I just Googled that sentence and found Daniel Burrus, CEO of Burrus Research, published it last week.], and a variation, “Anything that can be digitized will soon be worthless,” and “If we and our friends don’t do it, our competitors and their friends will do it, and that may be to our discomfort and eventual demise.” This thought has been around for a long time, as a moral question.

That was the tenor of that conversation, and it evolves to my present concern, not discussed. Does CRISPR cleaning of DNA to remove a disease, such as sickle-cell anemia, change the person from being the human they are to being the human they never were? Does removing all genetic disease, and making a future human resistant to all disease, leave in the world human beings as we now know them; or are they fundamentally different beings? When I want to be kind to our human DNA of ten thousand years from now, am I even talking about living things that any of us would recognize as human? Even now, if a mouse has an entire human chromosome inserted into its genome, is it now one twenty-fourth a human being, and rightfully possessed of one twenty-fourth human legal rights? I don’t know, but last week I wrote, “The Universe is infinitely wonderful! It permits all things that can be done; it prevents all things that can’t be done.” Combining those two bolded bon mots, as if they are valid, it would seem reasonable to continue seeking kindness for those distant future people, even if they become unrecognizable. To paraphrase Jesus —

I clear the way, that they might live and live more abundantly.

Everyday Kindness by Stephanie Dowrick – Book review

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Advanced forms of kindness, Book review, Cultivating the habit of kindness, Everyday Kindness, Kindness, Stephanie Dowrick

This is a good book for those people seeking to live an everyday, middle of the road, ordinary comfortable existence. Everyday Kindness: Shortcuts to a Happier and More Confident Life by Stephanie Dowrick, delivers what it claims in the title. As seen in the video Stephanie is a nice person, a clear speaker and writer who will appeal to a great majority of people. Her book gives basic good advice on how to live a pleasant life here on Earth. Reading this book and listening to Dowrick speak will calm everyone and help them to be nicer people.

I read this book in my effort to get a broader base for my understanding of the essence of kindness, and how to create the habits of kindness. My quest is somewhat different from most seekers, including Dowrick, in that it seeks the root cause of human suffering, to find and propose techniques for finding a way out of destructive habits and into ones which enhance all humanity. I seek ways of discovering and revealing habits that will enhance every individual forevermore  and all of those people with whom each individual comes into contact. The habits sought are general ways of approaching every instant with an action which will enhance the energy of all humanity.

The goal is more than a pleasant life for the person involved; it is to create a fully realized life for every person from this moment forward. The way to achieve this isn’t by just being nice. Nice is a social behavior that doesn’t annoy other people; nice sets others at ease. Kind is quite different, in that it seeks to help the other person on their life journey by fulfilling some need. The need may be great or small, but the idea is to practice tiny deeds of kindness constantly. When the opportunity for larger acts of kindness appears, the person practicing kindness constantly will be instantly able to do what is necessary. This instant response requires a habit, and habits are established by intentionally creating them and then practicing them in various situations until they become automatic.

The habit of kindness can be learned intentionally, but the practicing of kindness will communicate automatically to other people, and they too will learn the habit of kindness. Being polite is a learned behavior; it is rather like being nice but in a more socially developed manner, and the more developed politeness is a behavior learned by copying the behavior of those with whom we come into contact. However, it can also be learned by careful study of proper behavior. Kindness is different in that it isn’t routine.

Kindness requires paying attention to the other person and seeing and feeling their needs and responding to them with a helpful action. Thus kindness requires compassion for the other person, but it goes further because it requires interpreting what that other person needs, and furthermore it requires instantly providing what is needed.

Kindness is more than love; it is compassion in the form of helpful actions.

Cultivating the habit of kindness is essential for all humanity.

Tags

human evolution, Human kindness is learned., humanity's survival

I have gone through most of my life without thinking specifically about kindness, and coming to that concept so late has been a little strange. Way back in 1994 I published a series of easily photo-copyable one-page personal discoveries on how to improve one’s life. Proba 95 – Pass It On, actually published in November of 94 so it would have a current date for a year, was originally thought of as coming up with a significant idea once a month and writing it up on a single standard typing sheet of paper. The current Probaway is basically the same idea but coming up with a worthwhile new idea every day and publishing it to the internet.

In part this blog may have come from several ideas which had been percolating within me for years. One from Burris Cunningham, loosely quoted, “What awesome thing have you discovered today?” This man shepherded many a man to his Nobel Prize, for example, Glen Seaborg, Yuan Lee, and when Burris asked that simple question, he really meant it.  Another moment for me came from Bob Westerburg, “Get wisdom my son, and with all thy getting get understanding.” He was one of the strange Berkeley gurus whom I was close to for years. Another challenge, in this case originating from me to my Mediterranean coffee shop (2400 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, CA) friends, “You can change the world with an idea written down on this sheet of paper. Do it! Do it now!” I don’t know if Jerry Rubin heard me say that, and took it to heart, but I did have several conversations with him about the time I was annoying my closer friends with that idea. It was years before Jerry made that command “Just do it!”popular and decades before Nike did.

All of those ideas came about in the 1960s, each of which I pursued for years. Those were not about kindness per se, except the “Pass It On” idea, written up years later, was similar to a kindness in that it didn’t require, or expect, a repayment of any kind for the good deed. There was a hope that people would photocopy the document they received and Pass It On, but so far as I know that never happened, and it certainly didn’t go viral as hoped. There were some very good ideas in Proba-95, so it wasn’t lack of content that didn’t work but the method of promoting those ideas which was ill-conceived and therefore a failure. I probably would have been much more successful simply sending them out as letters to the editor to various newspapers. I have had some more recent projects which I wasted a huge amount of personal effort on that were good ideas, but which I promulgated improperly on the internet, such as The World Heritage Sites With Links. The Life Haven Project is another one of my desperately needed ideas to be implemented by humanity, but which is still stillborn. I hope I have learned enough from these failures to modify The Kindness Project in such a way that it becomes a success. Perhaps it is even more important than The Earth Ark Project. The Earth Ark is simply a way to help future people recover from the disasters current humanity is wreaking on our Earth, even before WW III, but The Kindness Project is a way to train humans to be kinder to one another and to themselves, and until that happens we will always be at profound risk of extinction.

When people have the habit of being kind to themselves as a core value, humanity will have a happier, healthier, wiser and wealthier place to live, and all of the members of humanity could approach contentment.

Magnificent Obsession and kindness.

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Finding happiness via kindness, Magnificent Obsession 1954 movie review, What is kindness?

The 1954 movie Magnificent Obsession corrupts the idea of pay-it-forward with some magical thinking and converts a disgusting playboy into successful brain surgeon. Rock Hudson plays the successful medical student whose fabulously wealthy father just died at an early age. Rock sets about living life fast and furious and over the edge into various near-suicidal actions. In the first scene he flips an expensive hydroplane speed boat at very high speed. He survives because of the use of a resuscitator rushed in from a local doctor’s home, but that doctor dies because he has a heart attack while the miracle device is away. Rock continues his appallingly arrogant behavior in the hospital, which incidentally was owned by the now dead doctor. Rock and the Dr.’s widow have a few unpleasant encounters culminating in an accident where she is blinded.

Rock must have been a fine young man prior to his own father’s off screen death, but as the movie progresses he starts seeing the folly of his own callous behavior. His reversion to being a decent human being begins after a conversation with a successful artist, and friend of the dead doctor and the doctor’s widow. The artist’s idea was to give large gifts to people in need. He learned this life lesson from the now dead doctor. Part of the gift was that those who received the gift were required as part of receiving the gift not to repay it to the giver, but to help some other needy person. It was a one-direction transaction, resulting in eternal and unresolvable debt which magically transferred saintliness to the givers. In an effort to reclaim his blackened soul Rock begins giving huge gifts to the widow secretly through her lawyer, who is instructed to claim the money came from an insurance policy left by the late doctor-husband.

Rock then changes his name and sets about pursuing the blind widow romantically and via the unlimited money he makes available to her through the secret money he is transferring to her, he gets her to the world-renowned brain surgeons in Switzerland who proclaim her blindness to be permanent. Rock, in his alternate fake identity, eventually confesses his love for the widow, asks her to marry him, but as part of his moral clarity confesses his true identity as the one who inadvertently killed her husband and blinded her. She forgives him, but overnight, with the aid of her maid she runs away. Years pass and he has returned to his medical career and graduates into a brain surgery specialty. The artist finds Rock working at his hospital and tells him the widow is dying at a clinic in Arizona. Rock flies out on the next plane. She is comatose. He operates on her brain. She lives. She wakes up. Her sight is restored. They promise eternal togetherness. – THE END –

Rock Hudson’s performance was astonishingly modern. It takes this hokey story and with his many emotions clearly portrayed on-screen makes it come to life. At first, as a playboy, he is so disgusting it is painful to watch the screen, but slowly he develops through stages of understandings and feelings for humanity. His demeanor goes through many changes and by the end he has grown into a very lovable and honorable man.

I was told this movie was about pay-it-forward and I wanted to compare this idea to my concepts of kindness and kindness training. There is some similarity in the idea of giving without requiring a return of favor. A standard economic transaction is giving of a value for another value received. Pay-it-forward is the giving of a very large and valuable gift to a person other than the one to whom you owe a debt. It is like owing a debt to your dead parents and paying that debt forward by creating and providing for your own living children. The expectation is that the children will pay-it-forward by providing for their children. For people in general we pay-it-forward to humanity what we owe to our ancestors by leaving the world a better place than we found it.

Kindness is a little different; it is the giving of very small things of little value in themselves but which help the recipients find their way to what they are doing. They are best when they are fitted to the immediate situation; they are actions that are so brief they go almost unnoticed and require no response from the recipient. These kind acts open the way to a better life.

A good life is one based on trust earned with frequent acts of simple kindness.

The method for accessing the infinite power is described more clearly in the 1935 movie Magnificent Obsession. “You merely go out, find people who need help, and give them help.” … “But, what ever help you give, must be in absolute secrecy; the world must never know, and you must never let anybody repay you.” You can repay me, “By giving this theory a trial.” In the 1935 version the playboy is more a more responsible and even guilt ridden from the beginning because of accidents, only randomly related to his behavior. During six intervening years studying medicine abroad he gets a Nobel Prize. — He says, “But, not to better myself in any way. It was for one person, one person, a woman I happened to have cared for and to have lost, and needed help; the kind that doctors can give her; all I did was done indirectly for her, hoping that she might be one of those helped, somewhere without my knowledge.”

A strange and unrelated thing I saw in this movie was the car driven during the accident.

A still showing the car accident where the widow lost her vision.

The rather rare car used in the scene may have been owned by my father. He exhibited an identical one in the Santa Barbara, Concours de Elegance 1958. I drove it around Santa Barbara a few times, but never picked up any rich widows.

The giving and receiving of a kindness is a wonderful moment

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A school for kindness, Giving kindness, Receiving kindness, The goal of wisdom is kindness

The giving of a kindness requires empathizing with another person’s mental and emotional state and a recognition of their needs and goals. It is an event which takes place in such a brief span of time that there is little time for the conscious mind to think about and analyze these complex interactive moments. Instead what is required is a preexisting set of habits which operate automatically in the giver of the kindness when he encounters a situation where the person about to receive the kindness can accept and use the gift. The time frame for this type of action is in the range of one to five seconds. For a person to be kind requires them to intentionally practice acts of kindness. The popular idea of “random acts of kindness” requires intentional training because the moment when an act of kindness can be given and accepted passes by so quickly.

The Kindness Project is a set of very simple actions which can be learned and practiced as in a classroom training drill. Also, those habits can be made into a public event in the form of a pass-it-on activity. The goal of these simple training activities and their public counterpart is to learn to do spontaneous acts of kindness. Another slightly more advanced level of training is to have situations preplanned by the instructor but unexpected by the student, situations where the student can react with an appropriate act of kindness. Doing these exercises in a training situation makes it possible to do them in real world natural situations because they have become a spontaneous habit. It takes several of these training session practices to be able to do them automatically and quite a few repetitions to get smoothly spontaneous.

These kind actions are helpful to the person receiving them, but they are also helpful to the person giving the kindness. Simultaneously with becoming adept at giving kindness to strangers, one also becomes skillful at giving kindness to oneself. Although the giver is gaining a benefit in giving the kindness to the other person, it can’t be seen as a selfish act because in the immediate action the receiver of the kindness is the sole beneficiary of the act. It is only in the future that the giver can gain a possible benefit from the abstract learning and enhancement of his skill at performing kind acts for his own self.

Receiving of a kindness will be a similarly helpful form of activity, and it needs to be practiced also by the person who seeks to improve their relationship with themselves. To give a kindness is only half of the skill set needed to attain the contentment available to one who can also receive a kindness when it is available. One learns to be skillful at receiving kindness by being exposed to people who are giving kindness. The practice sessions of The Kindness Project for training in giving kindness require a recipient of the kind acts. Thus when in a training session people get to receive as well as give. The recipient of a kindness learns how to integrate the gift into their personal being. When one is skilled at receiving these tiny personal gifts, each of which helps them along their life journey, they are on the path to serene happiness and contentment.

It is as important to be able to receive a kindness as to give one.