One person’s happiness and generosity
might be another person’s undoing. We are all in differing spheres of sharing.
Although we live in a money-centric culture, we can also be generous with our time, our energy, our ideas or our good wishes.
What causes us to lose our open heart of happiness and generosity is resistance to life’s events. If you are not pushing life away nor pulling it towards you there is no resistance to life and a natural state of happiness along with generosity ensues.
However, when we resist what is happening, the spaciousness around our heart starts to close. What we are resisting, in fact, is not the event that has taken place; its already happened, like spilled milk. We are resisting our thoughts and reactions to the event. We are using our will to resist what has already happened. This resistance closes down our energy and we lose happiness.
One of the ways to rebuild happiness is by doing generous actions. They do not have to be big life changing events. Remember a bucket of rain water gets filled one drop at a time.
Lets look at a few routine actions that we do each day.
1. Holding a door for someone we may not know.
2. Saying thank you for a routine service in a restaurant.
3. Greeting a person you work with each day.
Each of these actions can be done in a repetitive routine socially cordial manner or they can be done with the intention of generosity. Changing and becoming aware of our actions and adding intention to them can transform both their effectiveness on others as well as ourselves.
Practicing generosity drop by drop builds happiness and when the core of happiness is sufficient, like a fire, it starts to maintain itself and continue burning giving off its natural generosity or heat respectively.
It certainly is difficult to just drop all resistance. Fortunately if you can find one repetitive life event and drop resistance to that one there is an automatic dropping of resistance to many similar events. If you drop a fear of dogs or flying and just sit with their uncomfortable feelings for a short time the fear will pass through you.
An additional benefit is that when fear comes up from other events you have already become able to allow it to be there with little or no resistance. With less resistance your level of happiness will stay high and your natural generosity will increase.