Kindness And Compassion As Pillars Of Learning
ServiceSpace
--Ana Miller
3 minute read
Oct 22, 2013

 

It feels sooooo goooood when we plant little seeds, they stay there dormant and then flourish :-) For a year and a half I tried to do a kindness week at my daughter's school, sent the head teacher endless links to Ted talks ( most of them with family members :-) lol Nipun, Birju, etc...), gave smile cards to pupils and teachers, etc... Unfortunately I had to stop volunteering at the school for personal reasons so I just let things go until this month when I got the following front page school bulletin that made me believe that education is changing in the right direction.

From the Head Teacher Mr. David Nicholson

Dear Parents,
Kindness and Compassion
(“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” - Dalai Lama)
As you may already know from recent bulletins, the school has developed seven ‘core values’ as part of the launch of our new status later this year to become a sponsored academy. One of our values is ‘kindness and compassion’ and this is my reflection on what this could mean for our school community.
I believe compassion to be one of the few things we can practice that will bring immediate and long-term happiness to our lives, but the key to developing compassion is to try and make it a daily practice. How do we do that? I read somewhere about different practices that we can try out and perhaps incorporate into our everyday life. Here are three I can remember:
Morning ritual
Greet each morning with a ritual. Try this one, suggest by the Dalai Lama: “Today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others, I am going to benefit others as much as I can.”
Acts of kindness
Practice doing something small each day to help others, even in a tiny way. Even a smile, or a kind word, or doing an errand or chore, or just talking about a problem with another person. Practice doing something kind to help ease the suffering of others. When you are good at this, find a way to make it a daily practice, and eventually a throughout-the-day practice.
Evening routine
We should all take a few minutes before we go to bed to reflect upon our day. Think about the people we met and talked to, and how we treated each other. Think about our goals from the start of the day, to act with compassion towards others. How well did we do? What could we have done better? What did we learn from our experiences today?
Have a kind and compassionate weekend.
Issue: 63, Friday 4 October 2013
A-STAR Bulletin Bulletin
www.abbeyfieldschool.co.uk

 

Posted by Ana Miller on Oct 22, 2013


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