Being Generous with Moments

Being generous, I think, requires total trust and faith. It's not easy to do. The problem is about the self and what it believes to be its own "capacities" and "sufficiency". Any time my sense of self and boundaries are challenged, my sense of generosity contracts, and I go to a place of trying to protect what I believe feels safe and "self-sufficient". But all these boundaries are illusory. The only suffering is the suffering of putting up boundaries and walls.

  What it takes to be generous is to challenge the inner "should", like "this should be this way", or "I should not feel this way". I think it requires sacrifice: not the grudging sacrifice of resentment, but more like a genuine sacrifice that comes from "nothing to lose". Sounds a bit contradictory, I admit, because quite often the connotation around sacrifice is that it is a real giving of something that we feel loathe to part with. But I don't think this is the true meaning of sacrifice. More to the point, sacrifice has to come from a truly free offering that, again, comes from a genuine sense of "nothing to lose". The real heart of sacrifice is this nothing to lose part, because without it, sacrifice becomes little more than a token gesture.

   Another way I am thinking about it is to see generosity as a venturing or perhaps "an adventure" in letting go---trying to see what it would be like to give time and resources to others that I would otherwise wish to have for myself. This is the heart of serving and a real contemplative practice that doesn't take place on the cushion.