Bringing Kindness to Ourselves, One Another, and the World

We have been exploring together the power of bringing kindness to our conditioned mind so that we can bring kindness to the world. This week, I want to share with you the most powerful story I have ever heard on the power of meeting life with our hearts rather than our reactive minds. In 2001 Rais Bhuiyan was a new immigrant from Bangladesh. Formerly an Air Force officer, he found work as a clerk at a convenience store. He said he loved this job because it allowed him to get to know the American people.

Ten days after 911, Mark Stroman, a white supremacist, went to three different convenience stores carrying a sawed-off shotgun with the intent to get revenge by killing as many Muslims as he could. Two of the clerks he shot died. The third was Rais, and although he didn’t die, he was shot in his face and will be partially blind the rest of his life. When he was caught, Mark was convicted and sentenced to death.

In 2009, after a Pilgrimage to Mecca, Rais remembered the many good things he was taught from his religion, specifically that to save a life is like saving all of mankind. It became clear to him that he was not interested in eye-for-an-eye justice and he began to do everything he could to save Mark’s life.

When Mark found this out, he said that for Rais to forgive a person who has done something unforgiveable speaks volumes for the human race. In a long letter he wrote to Rais, he said that his stepfather had taught him things he never should have learned. He also said he has unlearned many of them, but is continuing that process. Rais’s attempts to save his life failed, but on the day Mark was executed, they talked on the phone, and he said to Rais, “I love you, bro.”

Rais has said, “Here is someone who 10 years before his heart was filled with hate and ignorance, but when he came to know me, he saw me as a human being and he called me brother.”

Rais began a nonprofit called World Without Hate, and he now travels the world as a spokesperson for the healing of hate and ignorance. He has said. “In order to create a world without hate, we must remember, it cannot be achieved unless a world without hate is first achieved in our hearts and minds. I am dedicated to transforming the human heart, one heart at a time.”

Are you willing to dedicate your life to healing your heart and mind so you don’t have to move from the kind of mind that Mark was moving from? You may not be a white supremacist, but you, like all people, have moments of reactions with a slow store clerk or an aggressive driver, or people speaking political beliefs that are the opposite of yours. Are you willing as you move throughout your day to recognize that we may have differences of opinions, beliefs, religions and skin colors, but there is so much more that we have in common. We are the brothers and sisters of humanity. Are you willing to become a person who is dedicated becoming a healing presence in the world, one encounter, one heart at a time?