Practice Generosity

Practice Generosity

One Life Tutorial
February 2022

Generosity is often mentioned in Buddhist teachings as a practice that helps to clear the mind of attachments and fears. What matters most is the intention with which you are generous. You need to have a pure motivation to simply give without any craving for personal benefit as a result of your giving.  Generosity can be a spontaneous and natural act emanating from a loving and open mind or heart. There is no effort, it just flows as a result of feeling connected to the One Life, All That Is. Generosity can also be a practice undertaken as a means of cultivating a natural flow of generosity. This practice, coupled with meditation, can amplify feelings of connection and improve relationships. As a practice, generosity can also point out to you where you hold back or are aloof, and where you have fear and resistance to connectedness or to the understanding of interdependency. There is only One Life, and All That Is truly arises from an interdependent state of being.

There are generally two ways of practicing generosity: Giving material things, and giving loving kindness. Giving away money and possessions, usually comes to mind immediately when thinking about generosity, but being kind and gentle to others—giving loving kindness--shows generosity of spirit. Being a generous person is ultimately more important than any particular act of giving. Acts purely coming from compassion and good will contribute to being a generous person. Allowing others to be recognized by putting them before yourself can be an act of generosity. Understanding and being empathetic can be an act of generosity. Just smiling at someone can be generous, too. Generosity is a practice of unselfish kindness.

​Kindness is one of humanity’s greatest assets. To be kind is to consider the feelings of others and to avoid actions that do harm to others. If kindness is as the root of all your actions, you can have confidence that your actions are in service to humanity. We suggest that you look at your motivation for actions of kindness. If you are motivated to help, it means you have evaluated the situation and see it to be in need, or lacking in some manner. If you are motivated to fix something, it means that you are seeing the situation as currently broken. If you have a sense of service arise within you, it means you will enhance with generosity what is already as it should be.

Now that does not mean that you cannot help or fix things, but that if helping and fixing underlie most of your believed altruistic actions, you may not have pure intentions, you may unconsciously be looking to benefit yourself or your ego in some way. If you desire reward or recognition, or even hope for a favor in return, you are not driven by pure intention. Being aware of why you are acting is necessary if you want your actions to really serve others. True generosity stems from unselfish motivations and will express in affection, empathy, gentleness and giving to others—all qualities of kindness.

There are personal benefits to giving generously with pure intention. Practicing generosity helps to eliminate unconscious greed and judgment, while extinguishing ill-will. You reduce your attachment to possessions by letting go of them, and if you can give your time and energy to benefit another, you will find many obstructions and obscurations lifting in your life—though they may not necessarily be connected in a logical way to your giving. Practice generosity, allow it to become a natural emanation from the who and what you truly are and all One Life will benefit.

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