A Softened Heart in a World That Aches
When everything feels heavy, what if kindness could lead you through?
I’ve been thinking… or rather, feeling a lot, lately.
About how sadness softens the heart.
How sorrow can bring sweetness to the soul.
How loss can actually show you what you really have.
How grief returns your spirit home to kindness.
"Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth." — Naomi Shihab Nye
Could this perhaps be why we are aching as a world?
So many of us are moving through deep, quiet grief—both personal and collective. The world feels heavy, and yet, in that heaviness, I can’t help but notice the way it opens something tender in us. The way sorrow, when we allow it, makes us more gentle, more attuned, more alive.
Has grief ever opened your heart in an unexpected way? Hit reply and share with me—I love connecting with you.
What if this ache isn’t just suffering? What if it’s also an invitation?
An invitation to return to what truly matters. To soften instead of harden. To stay open to love and kindness, even when loss threatens to close us.
"Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend."
I don’t have the answers to my grief or the grief of the world, only the feeling that grief is reshaping us. That it’s asking us to love deeper, to see clearer, to be present in ways we never were before.
Maybe that’s the gift inside the ache.
***If this resonates, let’s keep the conversation going. Drop a comment or reply to me and tell me—how has grief softened or shaped you?”
With loving-kindness,
Christina
p.s. Try my meditation, Feel the Love, Spread the Love, to cultivate loving-kindness.