Why sending kindness to strangers is possible and the science behind it

Some time ago, I read about a practice called “Stealth Metta” by Tara Brach, who’s a meditation teacher I’ve followed for some time. The idea is that you can send kindness (metta in sanskrit) to people with your thoughts who you pass on the street or who wait in line with you at the coffeeshop and they will receive it in some way. The terminology I’ve often heard in this context is that you can “send energy”, which always sounded so promising and and beautiful and yet also a bit too elusive to me, where I needed more trust that kindness is really possible.

Then, over the last couple of years, I’ve had the chance to deep dive more into the latest findings of neuroscience in relation to healing, kindness and our emotional well-being. And surprisingly, I found some very strong evidence from multiple things I’ve read, that we can in fact send our thoughts of loving kindness to others who will inevitably notice them and contribute to their well-being. 

The 3 states to help us cope with life

The most striking evidence for more tangible kindness I’ve found comes from a guy named Stephen Porges, who spent the last 50 years or so trying to understand our brains and bodies from a neurobiological and evolutionary perspective. He describes that we have, on a spectrum that is, access to 3 states at large that helped us to survive over the last 600 millions of years. They are:

• Safety: When we’re in a place of self-connection, in touch with our body sensations, feeling at ease and at peace with the world. Our sense is that the world is friendly. 
• Fight or flight: When we’re in a place of anger, feeling tight and wanting to run away or fight danger that we perceive is in front of us. Our sense is that the world is dangerous, hostile and chaotic. 
• Freeze/Immobilization: When we’re in a place of despair and darkness, because we sense things are hopeless and impossible to cope with. The world at this stage seems cold, dark and empty. 

Throughout our day, we move through these stages as different stimuli trigger us to to cope with this. For example, we may be driving to work, feeling safe and happy about our life, when suddenly a driver cuts right in front of us. We immediately, within the fraction of a second move into rage or anger and leave the place of safety and are now ready to fight for our lives. After we feel the repercussions of the anger and fight sensations move through our body, we gradually move back up to a place of safety within ourselves.  

There are many ways for us to return to a place of feeling grounded in our body again, after feeling either triggered into fight or flight or freeze/shutdown. Some of my favorites are:

• Meditation
• Telling the story to a friend, who is able to understand our anger and frustration without getting caught up in it themselves (i.e. “Yeah, that guy was crazy!”)
• Spending time in nature to help us calm down and ground ourselves. 
• Providing ourselves Self-empathy through journaling or naming what happened to us out loud and thereby processing that this is now in the past and we’re safe again. 

Once we’ve returned to a place of safety, for me, I usually sense this when there’s a warm, open sensation in my chest, and a grounded, solid feeling in my stomach, some magic happens. 

Sending signals of safety and kindness to the world

Porges explains that evolutionarily, it was highly important for us to communicate within our tribe about the current affairs that are happening around us. Since language itself is only about 30,000 years old or so, this means that we needed other ways to communicate about safety and danger around ourselves that didn’t include informational content through language. This means evolutionarily saying “There’s a tiger over there” wasn’t a good strategy since the meaning of these words only became relevant a few tens of thousands of years ago. Porges discovered that instead we adapted to signal to each other in a different way, by doing the following: 

• The intonation of our vocal tones (we can hit hundreds of differently intoned sounds that carry emotional content about our and our surroundings state)
• The expression of the thousands of muscles in our upper face (above the nose)
• The bracing or relaxation of our body posture (raised, tight shoulders, crossed arms, etc.) 

What I find awe-inspiring is that all of the above happens automatically, both in terms of expressing ourselves and receiving these signals. If you walk into a room full of strangers, your eyes and ears literally scan thousands of signals, especially the emotional content of the words being said and the upper parts of the faces in the room, to help determine whether we are safe and can relax, should tense and fight or run away, or shut down completely because the danger is so overwhelming.

Now, whenever you’re walking down a busy street, in the subway or in line at the coffeeshop and you’re able to hold yourself in a centered, grounded place, people around you will automatically notice. And this is where I’m now connecting with what Tara Brach shared about stealth metta, where holding yourself and others with loving thoughts as you walk down the street will likely increase the chance of you staying in a place of safety and openness.

People around you now can’t help not scan your upper facial expressions or hear the emotional content of your voice if you speak nearby them. And they also can’t help but notice that what you’re expressing are signals of safety, which they will automatically include into their own processing of the world around them and maybe be able to relax a little if they conclude that there are enough signals of safety so that they don’t have to stay as tense anymore. 

Impacting hundreds of people in minutes

What I love about this is how easy it really is for us to have a large, likely measurable impact on the people around us. We might walk past 300 or 400 people in the morning on our way to work if we live in a busy city like New York. And if we’ve spent some time beforehand to cultivate our internal sense of safety through a meditation or an intimate conversation with a friend or partner, we’re able to spread that out to lots of other people, completely effortlessly. I find this research inspiring and also so tangible, that it motivates me easily to be the first recipient of those signals of safety from myself so I can pass it on to others. 

I’d love to hear how this lands with you and whether any of Porges’ ideas of sending signals of safety or Tara Brach’s stealth metta also resonate with you.