Generosity
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006Recently, I found myself spontaneously praying to my Guru.
How can I hear your teachings more clearly?
How can I communicate with you more directly?
How can I more directly express what you are?
The answer arrived loud and clear:
Generosity.
Generosity is an expression of relaxation. When we relax our defensiveness against life, generosity is expressed without restraint in every moment. Both the expression of generosity and the expression of the tensions that cut off our participation in generosity are natural processes, and they can both be felt in a concrete way.
When we contemplate generosity, it is important to not immediately leap into a guilty conceptual thought process consisting of anxiously enumerating how we have not been generous, or of listing ways we might “improve” in the future.
Instead, try to simply sit with the idea of generosity. Quietly meditating on generosity, we can feel its possibility, like the possibility of a rose coming into full bloom, or the possibility of a wave swelling and beginning to break the surface of the ocean.
At the same time, we can feel the tensions that cut us off from the expression of generosity. We call these tensions fear, neediness, greed, anger, competitiveness, jealousy, low-self esteem, and so on. We can feel these in our physical body, our subtle body, and our mind.
Generosity is discovered in the process of the relaxation of defensive tension. It cannot be manufactured. Manufacturing generosity is only another expression of tension.
The first generosity is generosity toward oneself. As Sri Anandamayi Ma said: Have mercy on yourself.
How can you have mercy on yourself? You can take care of your body, conserve your energy, and relax your mind. You can make choices in life that return you to more natural rhythms of eating, working, and sleeping. This is fundamental sadhana, fundamental mercy.
This mercy toward oneself is also fundamental self-recognition. You recognize that you are not just a knot of need and greed. You are an expression of Shiva-Shakti. You are infinite potential.
Contemplating generosity can give you a taste of this self-recognition. How would it feel to truly desire the well-being of everyone, including yourself, without exception? How would it feel to relax all of your paranoia, anger, obsessive organizing, and compulsive seeking based on limited “I”?
Tasting this, even for a moment, you can also taste the contrasting tension. You can feel how much energy it takes to defend your boundaries, to try to suck love out of other people, or prove you are the top dog. You can feel how exhausting it is to keep up this effort.
The first expression of generosity is the cessation of self-judgement. Even in a small moment of relaxation, generosity comes rushing in. You can sense that generosity is your birthright. Even just a moment of this recognition is useful. You know your real situation, and you can follow that.
We often think of generosity as something we do only for others. But this attitude reinforces feelings of deprivation. If we are not fulfilled in service to others, if we are not established in the embodied understanding that in serving others, we are also serving ourselves, we become angry and manipulative.
True generosity swells out to overflow all boundaries. Generosity is
overflowingness. It is Self moving joyously to embrace Self. Generosity begins and ends with the world Self, but until we are more established in the everyday feeling of interbeing, we must work with our sense of separateness to eventually relax it. We must begin with ourselves, with taking care of our body, energy, and mind.
Through these activities of self care, we slowly begin to relax and overflow. You cannot skip over self care and “practice” taking care of others hoping that this will save you.
You don’t need to be saved. You need to discover a little bit of mercy toward yourself through caring for yourself and then cultivate this caring until the natural rhythm of generosity takes over your life. This is the only way.
Having mercy on yourself, you begin to rediscover the joy of our shared life and the joy of unanxiously desiring the well-being of all.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna explains that for the accomplished yogi, every aspect of life is an offering, a yajña.
Self offers Self to Self at every moment. A total world ritual.
This ritual begins with you and with practices such as dinacharya, or daily conduct. We begin to create a ritual out of our every moment, waking, eating, working, relating, and sleeping. In this way, we begin to participate in the world yajña with more awareness. Our rituals of appropriate daily conduct are an offering to Self.
Relaxing our own body, speech, and mind, we overflow and begin to serve others. At some point, there is no difference. All is one offering.
To discover generosity means to realize oneself as an offering of Self to Self.
In this beautiful human life, every activity, no matter how humble, is an opportunity to begin.
OM Shanti,
Shambhavi
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