Why should acts of Kindness be coupled with Meditation daily?

30 Nov Why should acts of Kindness be coupled with Meditation daily?

Congratulations ! You have begun your journey of correct meditation with the Black Lotus App, which will help you build focus, reduce stress and increase your emotional quotient. While you must have picked a Goal and started your daily practice, one question must have crossed your mind – why does the practice give emphasis to non-meditative activities and techniques, such as random acts of kindness or RAKs. Shouldn’t the focus be on spending more time just doing corrective meditation for faster progress?

Well the answer is, ‘not quite!’

This is how the Black Lotus app stands apart from other meditation apps. It follows the philosophy that meditation alone is not enough to master the art. Virtuous living has to be inculcated along with the practice to see lasting and irreversible benefits. The practice works on your holistic wellbeing and works on both your mind and heart (aka soul).

Our heart operates in two states – open and closed. An open heart is kind, compassionate and joyous, while the closed heart blocks all positive emotions. A person with a closed heart is oblivious to the bliss and peace that an open heart can experience. To truly reap the benefits of meditation, one has to work on opening one’s heart; otherwise the practice will not show significant improvements. 

Thus, while the practice of meditation works on training your mind, RAKs work on opening your heart. Om Swami, a monk, meditator and author of several books, mentions in one of his writings, “Unless a meditator inculcated certain virtues in life and developed the power of contemplation, the restive tendencies of the mind will keep coming back to haunt.”

Kindness is a state where you feel for the other person, followed by doing a gesture or an action to help the person. Performing regular RAKs will help you inculcate the virtues of kindness and compassion. It may be hard to believe, but kindness impacts the giver more, than the receiver. When you see how your kind acts impact another person, your mind releases happy hormones inside you. This leads to improved mental, emotional and physical wellbeing. Lastly, a bigger and more powerful benefit of kindness is the ripple effect it causes. A person who has been impacted by kindness will be more likely to go ahead and do acts of kindness for someone else – thus creating a chain of kindness and making the world a better place. This, in general parlance, is also known as ‘pay it forward’.

The Black Lotus App is a holistic meditation app that helps you amplify the benefits of meditation by adding kindness and mindful activities in your daily practice.  The RARE framework in the Black Lotus App is designed to inculcate kindness as a habit in your daily life. Each pack that you select will encourage you to do at least ‘one’ daily act of kindness. You would be surprised to know that an act of kindness can be as small as “holding the elevator for someone” or just “Smiling at a stranger”.

By consciously doing small or big daily RAKs, kindness will become second nature to you. You will become more compassionate and mindful of other people’s sufferings and try to help them whenever possible. You will start living a more virtuous life, which, when coupled with your daily meditation practice, will unlock lasting and irreversible bliss and peace from meditation.

~Vivekraj Shah