Let’s start with what we can do to formally practice Radical Generosity. Then we can talk about why this is beneficial. I say formally because doing these things actually and regularly has the biggest impact. It’s one thing to think about generosity and do these every so often—and every bit helps—but let’s see if we can put a little more oomph behind this by formally practicing Radical Generosity in these ways.
Meditating: Use these three mediations regularly and see just how much this practice can make you feel full and happy, for the moment and over time.
Suggested schedule
Gratitude
Monday-Wednesday-Friday, for 4 weeks, whether first thing in the morning or at night, try to pick a regular time (alone or with Love and Kindness)
Love and Kindness
Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday, for 4 weeks, whether first thing in the morning or at night, try to pick a regular time (alone or with Gratitude)
Joy For Others
Saturday, make this your regular morning or Evening meditation for the long haul!
Giving:
There are some easy ways to be generous and some not so easy ones. Maybe start with these regular donations:
A note on giving: Only give what you know you can. You have a moral imperative to take care of yourself before you can take care of others, so make sure you can afford to give and are healthy and well before taking on these acts of generosity.
Encouraging:
Always be generous with encouragement to yourself and others. Such a small act, either timely or generally, can make a huge difference in someone’s situation. Whenever you can, encourage someone who is down and out, who is starting a new project or endeavor, who is suffering, or who could just use it.
I have a list of folks to whom I send out a general encouragement every Monday. They tell me all the time that these Monday messages mean the world to them and have helped them sometimes when they really needed it. And it cost me nothing more than the few minutes it took to compose the text and send it out.
I’d encourage you to do the same. Start by creating your own list of 3 or 4 people you send general encouragements to and schedule a day where that’s what you do. No need to explain what you’re doing—just go and do it.
Also, if you want to be on my Monday Encourage list, just let me know!
Suggested schedule
Gratitude
Monday-Wednesday-Friday, for 4 weeks, whether first thing in the morning or at night, try to pick a regular time (alone or with Love and Kindness)
Love and Kindness
Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday, for 4 weeks, whether first thing in the morning or at night, try to pick a regular time (alone or with Gratitude)
Joy For Others
Saturday, make this your regular morning or Evening meditation for the long haul!
Giving:
There are some easy ways to be generous and some not so easy ones. Maybe start with these regular donations:
- donate money—give to a charity or group that affirms your views of the world. Don't forget we have a Patreon
- donate blood—you recover it quickly and it literally saves lives
- donate time—volunteer whatever time you can to a local or national organization that
A note on giving: Only give what you know you can. You have a moral imperative to take care of yourself before you can take care of others, so make sure you can afford to give and are healthy and well before taking on these acts of generosity.
Encouraging:
Always be generous with encouragement to yourself and others. Such a small act, either timely or generally, can make a huge difference in someone’s situation. Whenever you can, encourage someone who is down and out, who is starting a new project or endeavor, who is suffering, or who could just use it.
I have a list of folks to whom I send out a general encouragement every Monday. They tell me all the time that these Monday messages mean the world to them and have helped them sometimes when they really needed it. And it cost me nothing more than the few minutes it took to compose the text and send it out.
I’d encourage you to do the same. Start by creating your own list of 3 or 4 people you send general encouragements to and schedule a day where that’s what you do. No need to explain what you’re doing—just go and do it.
Also, if you want to be on my Monday Encourage list, just let me know!
How it helps others (and us!):
Fighting resentment
Resentment seems to me the number one issue facing Western culture right now, especially in America. Even in a country this rich, with all the benefits our very birth bestows upon us--of any class, race, gender, or other characteristic--we still very often feel resentment towards those who have what we don't, or those who don't appreciate what we do, or those who don't think the way we think. It's a personal problem that multiplies itself by hundreds of millions all the time.
That's not to say there isn't real suffering in our lives or in our country, and there aren’t real gripes and injustices. But we often lose clarity on what matters and what rises to the level of injustice because of some missing piece of ourselves. Our normal and useful desires to succeed, to emulate, even to want, get skewed and blown up when the ego and the idea of self get too strong. That's when we start resenting others, even when we might have three mansions, and two degrees, and one novel forthcoming. It's never enough because the ego only knows "me" and "more."
Practicing and cultivating generosity in general, and gratitude in particular, presents our best cure for resentments of all kinds and our best hedge against the ego dominating our lives.
Parasympathetic happiness
The actions of generosity are wired into our brains and neurology. They have everything to do with dopamine chemically and reinforcement behaviorally. Out brains have evolved because of and alongside these actions, to keep us alive and make us successful.
We experience fundamental joy in ourselves when we see happiness in others, so the more generous we are creating happiness or relieving suffering, the more we get the chemical, electrical, and reinforcement benefits for ourselves. And we don't have to physically see or experience the reception of our generosity. We can assume it or imagine it and derive as much pleasure from it as we might if experiencing it in the real world. This is important to remember since gratitude from the recipients of our generosity isn't always assured or available to us.
Vital goodness
So it's great that being generous makes us feel awesome and reinforces itself that way. But there's a larger element that goes beyond our own satisfaction. It has to do with our moral and actual obligations to each other and to the Absolute universe. The universe through evolution has made us primates wired to fear death, to seek patterns, and to crave experiences outside of ourselves. We HAVE TO do these things. And that is how we survive as individuals and as a group. The more generous we are toward our fellow humans and everything around us, the more vital our lives and our experiences are.
Your Vital self, along with the Body and Mind, has to be tended to for you to survive and succeed, and for you to be truly happy. This is true of every morally and psychologically normal human on the planet to one degree or another. Use the formal practice of Radical Generosity to answer to this call from your DNA.