I was a college student in Boston during the 1965 blackout that plunged the whole eastern seaboard into darkness. No one knew what was happening, and everyone was frightened. Standing at the bus stop in the pitch dark, I got on a dimly lit trolley to go home. It was still running because Boston had a stand-alone electrical system that powered its trolleys. As the driver took my money, he said, “They’re here.”
I asked him what he meant.
“The power is out from the Canadian border to Washington, D.C. Who could do that? It’s the flying-saucer people. It has to be. Yep, they’re here.” He was calm as he kept driving.
All over Boston, citizens grabbed flashlights and ran into the street to direct traffic. Bars and restaurants handed outcandles. The population of the entire city joined hands and became one. This is what human beings always do in a crisis or common threat. It is built into our nature. During Hurricane Katrina, the tsunamis in Southeast Asia and Japan, the earthquakes in Haiti, New Zealand, and Japan—just to name a few crises that happened during the writing of this book—the story was the same. Individuals set aside their differences and joined together to help.
In other words, we are programmed to help each other, and when the need is great, that quality emerges strongly and overrides individual needs and concern. This principle probably unites religions around the world more than any other.
To help others when they are in need is so natural that we rarely stop to think about the full scope of its benefits. Helping others brings out the best in us at any age, but as we grow older, helping takes on an additional coloration and value. We begin to experience it more not just as helping, but as “giving back.” As life progresses into middle and old age, we come to feel that this life is a gift that we yearn to repay.
Aging research has shown that this giving back is not just beneficial to others; it is good for us, too. A 2003 study17 concluded, “Programs designed to help [older] people feel supported may need to be redesigned so that the emphasis is on what people do to help others.”
While the research tells us that helping others helps us in various ways, it doesn’t say exactly how. What specifically happens psychologically, physically, and emotionally when acts of generosity are performed? How does each party benefit? And what are the qualities that make it so positive for healthy aging?
To find out, I talked to several people in middle age who were deeply engaged in giving back. One was volunteering to teach meditation in a women’s prison, another was part of a medical team volunteering in India and Burma, and a third had been a clinical psychologist who volunteered to help the homeless.
Among the questions I asked each of them were: Why are you doing the work you do? How has it changed you? What has inspired you? And finally, What are you doing to take care of yourself?
Susan had been teaching meditation in a women’s prison for many years. When I asked her why she was doing this work, she first reflected on her status as a privileged person in society. She felt the need to “plow back” the gifts she had received to those less fortunate, and meditation was something she could offer. When I pointed out that she was also an older woman and that most of the women she worked with in the prison were in their twenties and thirties, she nodded. “They’re my own daughter’s age,” she said. “In some ways for these young women in prison, I’m like their mom.”
How had the experienced changed her? She replied that it made her feel more connected with the world as it really is. “It’s connection,” she said. “That’s what sustains me. That’s my food.” She went on to tell me about one young woman, new to the prison, who had come to the meditation group for the first time, and all during the meditation did nothing but cry. When it came her turn to share what the experience had been for her, this woman said through tears how much she missed her young daughter. Susan asked her if there was anything she or the women there could do to help. “You already have,” the woman said. “You are all here with me. I don’t feel so alone anymore.”
Mark, having stepped down as the director of an international nonprofit, was now devoting himself to the plight of poor people in Bangladesh and Burma. Although he had just turned sixty and had various health problems, he still traveled to Asia several times a year.
Given such a taxing schedule for someone his age, I asked what he did to take care of himself.
“I don’t really worry about it,” he replied. “I feel this is what I have to do, and I figure one way or another, things will work out. Nevertheless, I watch what I eat and drink when I travel, and I schedule a week or two of rest and relaxation when I get back.”
Mark explained that, like Susan, he had a sense of wanting to “balance the scales” between the affluence of his own country and the grinding poverty and oppression of the countries he worked in. He also felt that his charitable work helped sustain and deepen meditation practice and spiritual vows. “Gary Snyder once wrote an essay about engagement in the world,” Mark said. “In it he wrote that the mercy of the West is social justice, and the mercy of the East is insight into the nature of the self. We need both, I think, and I see my work as a way to bridge those two aspects. Besides, it keeps me young. I’m like a kid in school, learning something new every day. Physically I may be slowing down, but mentally I’m still on the way up. That’s how I feel.”
Mark then told me this story: Once, while on a visit to rural Bangladesh, he stood in the fields at sunset watching the men come back to the village from work. “As they walked back, they were all holding hands,” Mark said. “They owned virtually nothing, they were the poorest of the poor, but they had each other, and they were holding hands as they walked through the fields. I can’t tell you how deeply that moved me. Just seeing them made my work worthwhile. Now that I’m getting old, I can’t do what I used to, but I’m connected to all these struggling people and they’re connected to each other. I hear people say that I’m giving back. But when I saw those men, I felt them giving back to me.”
Dr. Russell, a psychiatrist who treats primarily older patients, confirmed the value of giving back. He says that the people who do best with aging are those who actively seek a helping role, as Susan and Mark have done. It is common, Dr. Russell said, for such people take up helping activities related to their earlier work or career. A retired doctor might volunteer at a local health clinic. A historian, politician, or economist might volunteer as a teacher. An accountant might volunteer to do bookkeeping for the local chapter of the Red Cross.
But Dr. Russell also included a caveat: It’s not healthy for older people to give back in a one-sided way. They also have to take care of themselves. “The people I see who really do well with their aging are the ones who divide their time between actively helping others and doing things that are just for them,” Dr. Russell said, “things that give them enjoyment and pleasure. You’ve got to put something in both baskets—giving to others and giving to yourself. You have to find that balance.”
After a long career as a clinical psychologist in private practice, Eric—the third person I consulted on the effects of giving back—cut back his billable hours and volunteered as a case worker in a clinic for homeless people. “Private practice was all right, and it paid well, but after doing it for so long I thought to myself, I want to work with real problems. Of course my clients’ problems were real enough. But my work just didn’t inspire me the way it used to when I was young.”
From day one, Eric got what he wished for. The problems of his new clients were utterly basic. If someone was hungry, Eric got them food. If they needed a place to sleep, he found them a place. It was extremely tough, Eric told me, seeing people day after day who were desperate, with absolutely nothing. But over time he found that whenever he could restore some small piece of their human dignity, it was truly inspiring. “Here’s a true story,” Eric said.
I was walking down the street one day and this well-dressed young man on a bicycle with a briefcase pulled up next to me and said, “Eric! Remember me? I’m Bruce. You pulled me out of the gutter when I was drop-dead drunk, and you said to me, ‘You can beat this; I know you can.’ And I heard you, and I got myself into rehab, and I did beat it. Look at me now. I’ve got a job and an apartment and a girlfriend. I’ve even got stock options! All because of you. Thanks, man.”
There’s nothing like that feeling. The work in the clinic was incredibly difficult, and sometimes I’d come home at night and wonder what I’d gotten myself into. But then you run into somebody like Bruce and you realize why you do it. In private practice, I knew that I was helping. But on the street, I wasn’t just helping; I was literally saving lives. I had my life, but those street people didn’t. It was like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
When I asked Eric what was the deepest lesson he learned serving the homeless, he said, “Human beings have incredible courage. You can’t believe how much they have. People get up in the morning wherever they are—behind a Dumpster or in a doorway—and keep on hoping. I was in awe of these people.”
Giving back and sharing what we have, especially when we are older and have so much to give, is transformative as well as inspiring. The scientific research that says giving back is good for our health is true enough, but it isn’t the whole story. The human spirit, so full of heart, is unquenchable. To whatever extent we can engage with it, it nourishes us at every level: physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
In the Buddhist tradition, the “perfection of giving” is one of the primary virtues of an enlightened person. For Buddhists, giving back is outwardly expressed as service to others, and inwardly expressed in training the mind to cultivate a generous spirit. This principle is central to the Buddhist vision of the spiritual life, and it is expressed in various ways.
Long ago, Buddhist meditation teachers developed a method for strengthening the mind’s capacity for generosity. Once this practice was the exclusive preserve of yogis, yoginis, monks, and nuns, but more recently it has been widely taught and practiced in the West.
The practice of “Sending and Receiving compassion,” often just called “Sending and Receiving,” builds on the mind’s natural capacity to visualize or imagine, together with our innate desire to connect and give back. This visualization can be turned to ourselves as well as to others—a useful feature in accepting our own aging. Sending and Receiving helps us keep a positive attitude and gives us something useful we can actually do when we are visiting the sick, tending to the dying, or reaching out to anyone we know, near or far, who needs our support.
Sending and Receiving is not a practice taught in my own Zen tradition. I learned it and now teach it in collaboration with a Western lama of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. The version I describe here is an adaptation that conveys the essential spirit of the practice so that non-Buddhists and non-meditators can benefit from it. Although it may seem a bit elaborate, the practice, once learned, can in fact be done in as little as five or ten minutes.
Sending and Receiving is best practiced in meditation posture, either in a chair or on a cushion. But once you have mastered it, you can practice it anywhere. Because the practice involves the imagination, most people find it easier to do it with eyes closed, although this is not necessary.
Practices of this type are often referred to as “visualization,” but this is probably not the best word. “Imagination” is better. We all have a natural capacity to imagine, and we do it all the time. If I say, “Imagine the Statue of Liberty,” you will immediately see it in your mind’s eye. In fact, if you were hooked up to a brain scanner your visual cortex would light up in almost the same way as if you were actually looking at the real Statue of Liberty. In the same way, imagining generosity produces a feeling of real generosity.
The most important aspect of preparing for this practice is to recognize that everything we think and imagine emerges from and returns to what Buddhism calls “the great space of awareness.” Before you imagine something, it was not there. After you finish imagining it, it is gone. Its reality is tentative: In the end, it is much like a dream. That said, dreams can be vitally important, and convey to us things we need to know.
Sending and Receiving is like this: a consciously guided waking dream for the benefit of another person as well as yourself. At the conclusion of the practice, you will return this dream to the same source of spacious awareness from which it came.
The next step in the preparation is to be conscious that you won’t be producing generosity alone, which might be experienced by the ego as a burden and extra responsibility. Imagine instead that the generosity comes from your higher or awake self, which is true: Generosity is woven into the fabric of all existence. All living things give and receive all the time. The very act of breathing is a kind of giving and receiving. The circulation of energy is the real source of generosity. It’s not something you need to kick-start, like a lawn mower engine.
Imagine that the ordinary you is being supported in this practice by a spiritual mentor, someone greater than yourself. It could be God or Buddha; it could be a spiritual person for whom you have great respect, like the Dalai Lama, Gandhi, or Mother Teresa. Since I knew Shunryu Suzuki so well, and experienced his own generosity to me, I often think of him helping me send and receive.
Imagine the generous energy of this higher being resting in your heart. The generous feeling of your spiritual mentor is probably already resting in your heart. Let go of the notion that you have to be generous. Even though you may not feel particularly generous, you can borrow the generosity from your spiritual mentor to help you do this practice.
The “heart center” is the place where Sending and Receiving happens. The heart center is a little below the physical heart. It is the place where you feel the living sensations of giving and receiving. These sensations are normal and everyone has them; our language reflects that. We say “my heart went out to her,” our sympathies are “heartfelt,” we do things “wholeheartedly”; we are occasionally “heartbroken.” These words and phrases refer to the sensations we feel in the heart center when the emotions of generosity—or its lack—touch us.
Touch your heart center with your hand to help awaken these sensations. Sending and Receiving invokes these sensations to create a flow of energy that you can actually feel. It is a good feeling.
Next, imagine a small sphere of brilliant white light in your heart center. This white light is a visual representation of the awakened mind. The white light need not be precise; think of it as a sense of energy or illumination in the center of your chest.
Sending and Receiving follows the path of the breath. So now feel the circulation of breathing in and breathing out flowing through the sphere of light in your heart center. On each in-breath, feel the breath coming in from the world and refreshing the sphere of light. On each out-breath, feel the breath going back out into the world with that light’s generous energy.
Do this for a while until you can feel some sensation of flow or movement in your heart center. Even if all you feel is a subtle quality of awareness or energy, that is fine. Generosity is not a thought; it is a feeling. Remember the word “heartfelt.” That is the feeling.
According to Buddhist thinking, it is difficult to be truly generous to another until you can first be generous to yourself. People in the helping professions such as doctors, nurses, therapists, and counselors sometimes forget this, and expend so much energy helping others that they forget to take care of themselves. Burnout is the result. To prevent it, this aspect of the practice asks you to try to picture an image of yourself, just as you are, sitting facing yourself from a few feet away, as though you were looking in a mirror. Some people actually use a mirror to get used to this idea.
It may seem at first like one too many things to imagine: first the spiritual mentor, then the sphere of white light, and now a mirror image of yourself! Don’t worry; relax and let the various elements of the exercise find their way. It’s not like juggling; you don’t have to keep every element in view all the time. For now, concentrate on the mirror image of yourself sitting in front of you.
Once you’ve stabilized an image of yourself, begin to let your breath circulate generosity to and from the image of yourself. Breathing in, welcome all the difficulties and worries you may have into your heart center. The white light is a kind of furnace that incinerates those negative worries and impulses and turns them into generosity. As you breathe out, return that generosity back to yourself.
As you do the practice, maintain a light, spontaneous attitude. Remember, the point of the practice is to be generous! Don’t worry if the practice seems complicated or awkward at first. Everything in it is natural. It is natural to think of a spiritual mentor, or to feel loving sensations in your heart. It may seem a little less natural to picture a mirror image of yourself in front of you, but you undoubtedly do it every morning in front of the bathroom mirror!
Once you have become comfortable with receiving difficulty as you breathe in, and sending generosity as you breathe out, try changing the mirror image of yourself. Try imagining yourself five or ten years older. How will you look and feel? What worries and difficulties might you have then?
Fill in the details of this “older you” and continue the practice of Sending and Receiving. Concentrate particularly on sending the white light of generosity from your heart center to the “older you.” Feel whatever feelings you might have about the “older you”: regret, sadness, curiosity, excitement, confusion.
Now imagine the “older you” ten more years older. Continue the practice. How is it now? What has changed? Keep sending generosity; keep receiving whatever worries this older “older you” may have.
Go as far as you want to. Can you go as far as ninety? When I went to my financial adviser recently, I was taken aback to hear him casually refer to our financial situation at age ninety. With all my illnesses, I realized I never had pictured myself living that long. It may be that I won’t. But I have tried practicing Sending and Receiving for myself at ninety. It was a strange feeling.
Try it.
You can be creative with this exercise and go backward in time too. Picture yourself as ten, fifteen, or twenty years younger, and send generous thoughts to that “younger you.” A logician might say, “That ‘younger you’ no longer exists!” but in memory he or she certainly does. That “younger you” may need kindness and generosity every bit as much as some “older you.”
It should be clear by now that Sending and Receiving can be practiced with an image of anyone: your parents, your children, a friend who is ill, collective victims of a near or distant disaster. Although the practice is easiest for people you care about, it is possible to work up to doing this practice even for people you dislike. In fact, it can have great benefit when performed with such people in mind.
I have often made it a practice to do Sending and Receiving as a kind of generosity “slideshow.” I picture all the people I am thinking about, care about, or am concerned about one after another. I bring each of them to mind one at a time and practice Sending and Receiving for five or ten breaths. Then I go on to the next person. I don’t necessarily sit in meditation posture. I do this sometimes when I first wake up. Another good time to do this exercise is just before you go to bed.
One of the inevitable consequences of growing older is that each of us has an ever-expanding list of people who need our prayerful thoughts. After I have imagined the individuals who need my attention, I often add groups of people near and far—victims of a recent disaster, for example. In this way I turn the sense of helplessness I sometimes feel when reading the day’s headlines into something positive.
A skeptic might ask, “Will any of this really help? Is it really valuable and worth doing?” I answer as the Buddha did in response to the many questions his followers and critics frequently asked him: “Try it and see.”
Don’t believe it just because I say it, the Buddha would explain. Try it and see.
As the final step in the practice of Sending and Receiving, it is important to dissolve all the creations of your imagination and let them dissipate into the vast space of awareness.
Begin with the objects of your generosity. Open your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and as you breathe out, imagine all the various people—including yourself—that you have imagined sitting before you slowly dissolve and vanish, like a slow fade on a movie screen. When their dissolution is complete, take one or two more “clear” breaths to make sure there is no residual imagination clinging to them.
Next, let the white light in your heart center fade away until it is nothing but empty space. In the same way, let the heart sensations and emotions that Sending and Receiving may have engendered flow out and disperse with each out-breath.
Finally, let any thoughts of your spiritual mentor fade away too. Let everything dissolve until there is nothing left but the ordinary sensations, the ordinary sights and sounds of you sitting in a room, relaxed and at rest.
This last step of letting everything dissolve is perhaps the most important of all. There is real power in bringing to mind all the people we care about and have strong feelings about, including ourselves. You created that power out of nothing, through your own imagination, and you can now release that power by letting it return to whence it came.