Читать книгу Giving Heart - M. J. Ryan - Страница 11

We begin by examining the bounty generosity can bring us whenever we open our hearts to another being. Understanding the rewards we will reap may motivate us to cultivate our own gifts and offer them wholeheartedly to the world. As we discover the grace that comes of giving, we begin to experience generosity as a natural upwelling of the heart that exists in each of us, and as a limitless treasure that can bring us immeasurable delight.

Giving Is a Great Mood Elevator

No joy can equal the joy of serving others.

—SAI BABA

It was one of those no-good rotten days in which nothing was going right for me. I had been up half the night with my daughter Ana, my computer kept crashing, and I got ten phone calls that distracted me from my writing. When I picked Ana up from preschool, I was in a less than stellar mood. I popped her into the car, and, still grumbling to myself, we headed for the grocery store.

At the store, the line seemed interminable. Finally I was the next one up, but it was still taking forever. Despite my annoyance, I tuned in to what was happening. The young woman in front of me kept asking the cashier to give her the total after each item. She had a tiny baby in her cart, and it was clear she didn't have enough money to pay for all the food she bought, so she went off to make a phone call, presumably to ask someone for money.

While she was gone, I asked the cashier to total up everything and tell her that she had enough money. I would make up the difference when she left. The cashier asked me if I knew her—I didn't—and then if I were wealthy. “Yes,” I replied, thinking of my beautiful daughter, the roof over my head, and the privilege of doing work that I loved.

When I left the store, I realized I was singing along with the radio and feeling remarkably good. The best part of the situation was that the woman never realized what I had done. A bit puzzled, she had gladly wheeled her cart away. I smiled to myself. Reaching out to her had reset my mood, and I felt like I was in love with the whole world.

Helping others really is like a “feel good” pill. When I was doing the research for my last book, 365 Health and Happiness Boosters, I realized that making someone else happy creates happiness the fastest. Lending a hand, making someone smile, or being of use to someone other than ourselves helps us stop focusing solely on our own difficulties and gives a larger perspective to our days. This is what Karl Marx meant when he said, “Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.”

Giving Can Heal

There is a wonderful, mystical law of nature thatthe three things we crave most in life—happiness, freedom,and peace of mind—are always attainedby giving them to someone else.

—ANONYMOUS

During the break-up of a fourteen-year relationship, I was in terrible pain and leaned heavily on the love and advice of my friends, including author Daphne Rose Kingma, who flew up from Santa Barbara to sit with me for a few days. When she was about to leave, she gave me a tiny piece of paper, her prescription for my healing: (1) Go to therapy; (2) Meditate; (3) Reach out to others in pain.

I'm glad to say I did all three items. At the time, though, I didn't see why helping others would help me. I understood the benefits of therapy—working through the grief, coming to see my part in the break-up, and understanding the relationship dynamics I tend to encounter. I saw how meditation might work—tapping into the sense of peacefulness and wholeness beneath the pain of my situation. But giving to others? Wasn't this a time to focus on myself?

Once I began to volunteer at a “Meals on Wheels” organization for people with AIDS, I learned that giving to others was also a way to help myself. Helping others forced me to notice something other than my own misery, which was a great gift. Rather than wallowing in all the ways I had been mistreated and abused, I could turn my attention to someone else. As months passed, however, I discovered something else. Walking the halls of the welfare hotel where most of my deliveries were, I stopped being so attached to my particular wound and began to see that suffering is part of life. All kinds of terrible things happen to people, often for no reason, and I was not specially singled out for victimization.

While it wasn't true for me in this situation, giving when you are feeling hurt often makes meaning out of your suffering. The person who's paralyzed by a gunshot wound and then becomes an advocate for gun control, the woman who finally escapes from her abusive husband and works to set up a shelter for battered women—these are individuals who reach up out of the particulars of their individual tragedies to ensure that others will not have to suffer the same fate.

You don't have to be suffering from some specific hurt to reap the benefits of giving. Any time we reach out to others—in our hurt or with our love—we feel better.

Giving Is Good for Our Health

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Ihave a friend who has had a terrible case of lupus for nearly twenty years. She has been hospitalized many times and is constantly on medication that has horrible side effects, including cataracts. She had to quit her job as a graphic designer and now is completely supported by her husband. She can get really down about her life. Recently she decided to become a volunteer at a soup kitchen. She goes when she feels up to it, and she's started to discover that the more she goes, the better she feels—emotionally and physically. Her arthritis (a consequence of lupus) isn't as severe and she has more energy.

Helping others can not only make us feel good about ourselves; it can also increase our physical well-being. The mind and body aren't separate. Anything we do to elevate our spirits will also have a beneficial effect on our health. A recent study by Cornell University found that volunteering increases a person's energy, sense of mastery over life, and self-esteem. Other studies have demonstrated that such positive feelings can actually strengthen and enhance the immune system. Positive emotions increase the body's number of T-cells, cells in the immune system that help the body resist disease and recover quickly from illness. Positive emotions also release endorphins into the bloodstream. Endorphins are the body's natural tranquilizers and painkillers; they stimulate dilation of the blood vessels, which leads to a relaxed heart.

While we don't quite understand all the reasons why giving creates good health, many studies have documented generosity's positive effects. Michigan researchers who studied 2,700 people for almost ten years found that men who regularly did volunteer work had death rates two-and-one half times lower than men who didn't. In a separate study, volunteers who worked directly with those who benefited from their services had a greater immune system boost than those whose volunteer work was restricted to pushing papers.

Harvard researchers also conducted a study that showed how giving is such a powerful immune booster that it can be experienced just by watching someone else in the act of giving! In this well-known experiment, students looking at a film of Mother Teresa as she tended the sick in Calcutta—even those who purported to dislike Mother Teresa—got an increase in immune function.

Psychologist Robert Ornstein and physician David Sobel are well known for their examinations of the health effects of altruism. In their book Healthy Pleasures, they describe what they call the “helper's high,” a kind of euphoria volunteers get when helping others—a warm glow in the chest and a sense of vitality that comes from being simultaneously energized and calm. They compare it to a runner's high and claim it is caused by the body's release of endorphins. Because of all these health benefits, as Stella Reznick says in The Pleasure Zone, “the one who ends up getting the most from a good deed may, ultimately, be the good Samaritan.”

Generosity Alleviates Fear

It is expressly at those times when we feel needythat we will benefit the most from giving.

—RUTH ROSS

I've never had the privilege of meeting writer Anne Lamott, but I have loved her books, particularly Operating Instructions. Her emotional honesty leaps off every page—here is a woman who is not afraid to show herself, warts and all. In admitting her vulnerabilities, she makes it okay for us to be just who we are too.

In an interview, she was asked about her relationship to money. As a single mother living off her writing, her financial security has been precarious at best. She spoke of having survived, at times, off the generosity of friends, and then said something that leaped out at me. “I know that if I feel any deprivation or fear [about money], the solution is to give. The solution is to go find some mothers on the streets of San Raphael and give them tens and twenties and mail off another $50 to Doctors Without Borders to use for the refugees in KOSOVO. Because I know that giving is the way we can feel abundant. Giving is the way that we fill ourselves up…. For me the way to fill up is through service and sharing and getting myself to give more than I feel comfortable giving.”

To me, a person who has a great deal of fear when it comes to money, the thought of giving money away precisely when I felt like clinging to it seemed terrifying. Sick of constantly being fearful about money, I decided to give it a try. Amazingly, it really works. I feel less afraid the more I give.

It's a paradox. If we are afraid of not having enough, we think we need to hold on tightly to what we have and work hard to get more. As Anne Lamott and I found out, that perspective only makes us more afraid, because we get caught in a cycle of clinging and hoarding. When is enough enough? Is $5,000 enough? $50,000? $100,000? $1 million? A recent study found that no matter how much money people made, they thought they would be happier if only they had more. Whether they made $20,000 a year or $200,000, everyone thought they needed a bit more.

If we turn around and give instead of hoarding everything, we suddenly experience the abundance we do have. Most of us, particularly those of us living in Western societies, have a great deal, and when we share what we have, we feel our abundance. It becomes real to us, and that diminishes our fears. I read about a woman who was suffering from depression and contemplating suicide because of back pain and poverty. She found a kid foraging in the Dumpster and thought to herself, “I don't have a lot, but at least I can fix this kid a peanut butter sandwich.” Giving away that peanut butter sandwich reminded her of the abundance she still had, even in the projects. If she could still give, her life wasn't so bleak after all. She now runs a volunteer program in Dallas that feeds hundreds of kids a day. It started from that one day when she gave away the sandwich.

Giving Helps Us Experience Our Connection with Others

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself but is evera part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I neverlive my life for itself, but always in the experiencewhich is going on all around me.

—ALBERT SCHWEITZER

My friend Tom recently went to his high school reunion and had a surprising experience. “I always thought reunions were stupid,” he said, “and so I never went. But an old friend called and guilt-tripped me into it, so I went. It was strange, but not in the way I had imagined.

“I'm a very successful financial analyst, a bit on the driven side, but it got me all the things I thought I wanted—a great condo in the city, a country house, fancy car. So I showed up with a bit of a self-satisfied attitude. There were plenty of surprises, both in appearances—people change a lot in twenty years—and in what individuals had done with their lives. The biggest surprise was that the people who seemed the most happy were not those who had ‘made it’ in the sense that I would have understood. There were a number of people in my income bracket—lawyers, computer guys—but for the most part they were the most unhappy and lonely.”

“The interaction that really affected me was with an old girlfriend who was a nursery school teacher. When she talked about ‘her kids,’ her eyes would light up with a kind of excitement and energy I hadn't seen for years.

“It came to me that she had a very deep connection to the people in her work life—kids, parents, and other teachers—that came out of her giving them her time, energy, and enthusiasm, whereas I had all the trimmings of a great life but wasn't connected to anything at all except my wallet. That was the beginning of my midlife crisis, and it hasn't been easy. I decided to take a small step and become a Big Brother to a twelve-year-old kid from the projects. I've been really enjoying myself, taking him to ball games and helping with homework.”

The wonderful thing about giving is that you can't help but experience a good feeling when you do it. Humans are social creatures. We're made to live within the company of others, and initiating that connection—making it concrete—just feels good in and of itself. When we get narrowly focused on just ourselves, we lose track of the sense of connection to others that helping gives us and instead experience isolation and loneliness. Far too many of us are stuck in that state today. Cut off from enough meaningful contact, we drift alone in the universe. No matter our circumstances, we can always experience human connection simply by reaching out to help someone else. When it comes to connecting, what you give is what you'll get.

Giving Allows Us to Look Deeply at Ourselves

Just as we are, we are giving and receiving life.But we miss this because we are caught up with all of theefforts to be right, to be the best, to be the winner, to be first. Allthe evaluations and judgments we make about ourselvesand others separate us from this simple being.

—ROBERT JOSHIN ALTHOUSE SENSEI

for three years, I delivered dinner once a week to people with AIDS. I would go to the distribution point, pick up ten or fifteen packaged meals, get a piece of paper that showed me the addresses of where to go, and set off. For three years I watched my reactions to the very simple act of delivering food, and I learned a lot about myself.

People with chronic illnesses tend to be worse off financially, and it was certainly true of the folks on my route. I was required to drive in the “worst” part of town, and it was usually dark when I made my rounds. My first reaction was fear. After a few weeks, I became somewhat comfortable, and the fear mostly receded into the background. Sometimes if I were walking down the long, dark corridor of a welfare hotel, I would fear the thought of someone grabbing me, raping me, and infecting me with AIDS.

Most of the time, what I felt was pride. Wasn't I a “good” person to be doing such a thing? Wasn't I brave, generous, even saintly? Every time I delivered the meals, I had a story line about my virtuous behavior running in my head. I was so caught up with myself that on more than one occasion, I missed a chance to be truly helpful because I was so caught up in either my fear or my grandiose thoughts.

My goal with this story is to point out that giving triggers all kinds of thoughts and feelings. Examining them can be useful in our personal development—we learn more if we adopt an “Oh, isn't that interesting,” approach to what we discover instead of bludgeoning ourselves with “Aren't I terrible?” My experience with the meals showed me how much I want to look good—especially to myself.

What should you do with what you discover about yourself? Acknowledge it—you really need to think of yourself as a good person. Have compassion for it. Don't try to fix or change it. Just hold the truth in the spaciousness of your being. By accepting it instead of denying it, pushing it away, trying to make it be different, or forcing yourself into some other position, you create the space for it to transform. Even if it never changes, at least you are aware of it and you're being generous regardless of your motivation. In the end, the good we do is much more significant than any mixed motives we might have.

Generosity Helps Us see There Is No Difference Between Giving and Receiving

Each day as we embrace the sun with love and joy,we can come to the realization that giving and receivingare the same. Therefore, we will give equallywithout reservation.

—AEESHA ABABIO-CLOTTEY AND KOKOMON CLOTTEY

In the book Beyond Fear, social worker Aeesha Ababio-Clottey tells this story. Every day, on her way to and from work, she passed the same homeless person begging at the entrance to the subway. Rushing past, she would never even look at him, much less put a penny in his cup. One evening, she was a dime short for the ticket that would get her home. “1 looked around,” she wrote, “and everyone was in a hurry, trying to get home…. And as I looked, people avoided eye contact, with the unspoken message: Don't ask me!”

Finally, in her desperation, she turned to the beggar and asked to borrow a dime. He insisted she take a quarter. Then she inquired if he had a place to live and told him about the treatment center where she worked and how she could help him. “I'm quite happy, thank you,” he replied. “I meet all kinds of people here, and I really enjoy myself and I don't want to change it.”

What a morality play! The professional “giver,” the social worker, has ignored the professional “receiver,” the beggar, for months. Then she ends up having to receive from him, and discovers that while he has no use for what she has to give, he has what she needs.

It's easy in the giving position to assume a sense of superiority—I, in my benevolence, will assist you, you poor thing. This creates all kinds of problems: The receiver can fall into a sense of inferiority and dependence that often creates anger and resentment, while the giver develops an inflated ego and a false sense of independence. When we remember that at any given moment we might be in need of help, though, we can then offer our services on a more equal level.

As we open our hearts, we come to see that there is really no difference between giving and receiving. They are just two sides of the experience because neither can exist without the other. It is like imagining breathing without both the inhaling (receiving) and the exhaling (giving). Perhaps if we had a word for the experience of giving that encompasses both aspects, we would see it for what it truly is—one act with two parts, both honorable, both crucial.

Giving fills Us Like Getting Cannot

For many years, I was a man riding an ox,looking for an ox to ride on.

—MEISTER ECKHART

Ionce was talking about the nature of addiction with an acquaintance who is, by her definition, a food addict. She said that she overate because she felt there was a hole in the center of her being. “The difference between me and you, Mary Jane,” she said, “is that you know the hole can't be filled and I keep thinking it can be filled with food.”

For me, this was one of those remarks that comes with lights around it: Pay attention, this is important. I've thought a lot about that hole over the years, and I am convinced that most of us have this sense of emptiness. We spend our lives trying to fill the hole with money, prestige, power, or even material objects. We think that if we get enough stuff, the hole will be filled and our desire will be satiated.

This approach is not surprising, considering we live in a culture that survives on our consumerism. The economy booms when sales surge because we're throwing our money around; the economy falters when sales drop because we rein ourselves in. Every single day, on the radio, TV, the Internet, billboards, and in magazines and newspapers, we are encouraged and enticed to buy, buy, buy. Brilliant people create very sophisticated ads to convince us that if only we had this car, this computer, this Internet server, this toothpaste, or this brand of soap, we would be happy and fulfilled. It's only natural that we are focused on getting the red Porsche, the 4,000-square foot house, or the Ben & Jerry's ice cream.

Our desire will never disappear, because stuff can't fill the hole, no matter how much we get. Books and magazines are always filled with stories of folks who “had it all” and yet were miserable. Our desires may change—we get the beautiful girl, the horse, or the million dollars in the bank, so now we want more friends, a child, or a vacation home—but they don't go away because desire is a natural part of the human condition. The problem isn't with our desire but, like the reasoning of my friend the overeater, in thinking that the things we desire will fill the hole.

The answer is found in giving, not getting. If we tap into the natural sense of abundance that exists in each of us instead of focusing on filling the hole, we will be filled. It's a paradox—by focusing on getting, we remain forever empty; by focusing on giving, we become full. This idea is hard to accept because it goes against our cultural upbringing. I know that part of me is still convinced that the hole is not filled because I just haven't gotten the right things. If I did, this part says, then I would be happy.

As I have both gotten more and given more, I've realized that generosity is the true creator of happiness and peace of mind. As the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield once said, “Do you know any really generous people who aren't happy?” The real way to discover this truth, however, is to try it yourself. Try opening your heart and giving, particularly when you feel the hole in the center of your being. Magically it disappears, at least for a little while, as the love from your heart pours into it, and into the world.

Giving Allows Us to Offer Our Unique Gifts

Every person born in this world representssomething new, something that never existed before,something original and unique.

—MARTIN BUBER

The ancient Greeks and Romans believed each human was born with a tutelary, or guardian, spirit inside of us, a being that embodied our true essence. It was our task in life to set this spirit free so that our unique gifts could become manifest. The Greeks called this being a person's daemon, the Romans called it the genius (from the same Latin root as generosity—genere, which means to beget or produce.) Socrates, for example, was believed to have a daemon who would speak up if he was about to do something that went counter to his essence. In Rome, it was customary to offer a sacrifice to your genius on your birthday, not to only receive gifts for yourself on that day but to give something to your guiding spirit. According to their beliefs, this being comes to us when we are born and it carries the fullness of our undeveloped potential. If you cultivate your gifts, the genius will become a household god when you die. If you ignore your potential, it will turn into a larva upon your death, a ghost that preys on the living.

These ancient beliefs match my own—we each are born with unique gifts to offer the world (genius is a synonym for gift), and our task in life is to discover our gifts and actualize them. This task is like a hero's journey more than any kind of small feat. As Marianne Williamson once said, “It takes more courage sometimes to face our greatness than it does to face our weakness.”