What Kindness And Mindfulness Can Learn From Each Other

How can we be kind without trying to fix people, and mindful without being cold and detached? The answer: do both.

“Stop Trying To Fix Me!”

At some point, in almost every close relationship, you’ll have heard or said something to this effect. The reason is that we find suffering hard. We don’t like to look at someone feeling sad, angry, or scared and do nothing about it. “Oh, your work is going badly — maybe you could find ways to procrastinate less?”, “I’m sorry you’re angry, but it’s not my fault ”, “Don’t worry, things will get better.” These are all well-intentioned responses to someone’s distress but can end up making them feel even more alone in their unhappiness. Most of the time, people just want to be acknowledged —for their feelings to be heard, not seen as a problem to be fixed.

Psychologists are increasingly realizing that our attempts to cheer someone up or help them get over their problems don’t actually work. Instead, simply acknowledging someone’s feelings — why they feel the way they do — can help make things better even when you can’t make things right. This empathic form of attention has to power to transform a potentially traumatic experience into something that can be coped with. It provides a kind of hope.

Is Mindfulness The Answer?

Acknowledging the suffering of others is easier said than done. The temptation is always to get rid of the negative feelings as soon as possible. This is, after all, what we do with our own pain and emotional distress. We give up on the difficult task, or we distract ourselves with social media, junk food, or Netflix. Simply being with someone’s pain, including our own, is one of the hardest things we can do.

This is where mindfulness comes in. It encourages people neither to ignore their feelings nor to get lost in them. Instead, we can simply pay attention to our feelings— watch them come and go like the weather or like cars on a road. The more we can do this, the less enslaved we are to changing moods and external challenges. Mindfulness promises a kind of emotional freedom — the ability to find a sense of calm and control in any situation we face.

But, although this sounds great in theory, it’s hard to pull off in practice. Mindfulness — especially at the beginning — can often make people too calm. They can learn how to view their feelings with a kind of cold detachment. Ever had someone listened to your troubles with a vacant, glazed, blissed-out look on their face? That’s what I’m talking about.

Once More With Feeling

We need to combine the skills of mindfulness with the warmth of kindness. When someone we care about is in pain, we can learn not simply to be aware of their feelings, but also to be there with them. We can learn to say “Oh, God, that’s awful,” and make space for their unhappiness. When we do that, we can be kind without trying to fixing them and mindful without being cold. Perhaps most importantly, we can start doing this with ourselves.