Kindness is highly regarded throughout the world and is valuable from any perspective, but sometimes we have inner difficulties with letting our kindness shine through. One of the biggest problems is a critical or judgmental mind that is always generating commentary on other people’s behaviour, thoughts and imputing motivations onto them that we are not even sure if they have. This type of mind creates a lot of difficulties for us in the sense of preventing our inner mental peace and preventing us from acting with kindness towards others.

The reflection on impermanence and death is quite helpful for subduing the judgmental mind. When we look at our life from the perspective of death, we will see that this kind of judgment, bias, prejudice and complaining does not serve any purpose at all. If we ask, “Do I want to be thinking about this when I die?” usually the answer will be no. When we look at what we are judging, we will see that the conditions are changing very rapidly, so spending a lot of time forming opinions about things is not a very good use of our time. Thinking along this line will help us subdue the judgmental mind, which in turn helps us to be kinder.

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