Yesterday I wrote “Kindness as Leadership” showing the power of kindness and how Fred Rogers brought the chairman of a congressional committee to tears through his calm grace, single-handedly saving funding for public television.
This reminded me of the phrase that the Dalai Lama uses often:
My religion is kindness
Tara Brach is a renowned writer and thinker around mindfulness and awareness.
#OpenLeadership depends, at source, on self-leadership, which involves both self-awareness (in each present moment) and self-knowledge (deeper understanding of self).
With that context, I recommend this article on that phrase from the Dalai Lama by Tara Brach, and give you this excerpt:
“One of the wonderful teachings of the Dalai Lama, something he says quite regularly, is “My religion is kindness.” When we hear that, it resonates, because it points to something at the core of all spiritual and humanistic paths. If we just dedicated our lives to kindness, to the qualities of friendliness and care, we would be directly serving peace on earth. We’d be serving social justice and the healing of our environment. Imagine it—the world that would emerge if we all commited ourselves to cultivating kind hearts.”
Two days after this post goes out Alan Moore and I will be leading a group in the Cambridgeshire countryside for a two day “Beautiful Gathering”, exploring beauty and what it does and can mean for “Beautiful Leadership”.
A term Alan uses is “Restorative Business”. As Tara notes, that Dalai Lama phrase resonates for us. I also find that Restorative resonates for me when associated with the word Business in that it goes beyond a word like Sustainable, as it also touches us as humans in who we choose to be and then how we do leadership.
As Alan would also say “better human, better leader, better maker”.