Saturday, June 11, 2011

Choosing kindness, compassion, and love

Anger can be useful. It can propel, motivate us to stand up for ourselves when we are experiencing an injustice or difficult situation. It can be the impetus for righting a wrong, defeating a politician (often the lesser of two evils), or to make changes in our own lives, such as to stop repeating self-defeating actions over and over.

The point is to use our higher brain processes to guide those actions, not to get stuck running the same emotional loops over and over. The right hemisphere of our brain brings us to the present, so we do not have to be prisoners of what has happened in the past. We can thank our left brain for working so hard to figure things out, but ask it to be quiet and take a pause, so we can consistently choose an attitude of gratitude, kindness, compassion, and love as our predominant way of interacting with others.

2 comments:

Terri Wagner said...

Just remember choosing this has its downside as well.

Bob's Blog said...

If you care to say more, Terri, I am sure it would be illuminating.

I personally believe it is important to let people know that I am not going to be anyone's doormat. Is that what you are getting at?