Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
— LEO BUSCAGLIA
All spiritual traditions encourage engaging in selfless service to help improve the lives of others. One inspiring example of this is Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne’s work in the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka. His work has brought to life the Sanskrit meaning of sarvodaya — “the welfare of all” — and redefined the term to reflect another ideal important in that country: “the awakening of all.”
This grassroots movement has helped uplift tens of thousands of villages in rural Sri Lanka and improved the lives of over ten million people by providing comprehensive development and conflict resolution programs. This began simply by Dr. Ariyaratne helping an outcast village improve its own living standards.
Dr. Ariyaratne regards this selfless service to others as a way for people to turn their consciousness into a more awakened and compassionate state. He posits that selflessness is brought about through the service that is done through Sarvodaya Shramadana, which results in both personal and societal transformation. This is a beautiful example of how the shift from a self-centered focus to a selfless orientation benefits one and all.
Movements like this stand in stark contrast to the consumerism that drives much of modern society. For example, in the United States, the baby boomers were first dubbed the “me generation,” but a case could be made that in each decade since, people have only become more self-absorbed. Social media and materialist consumer culture seem to perpetuate this myopic self-centered focus. The underlying premise or expectation is that pleasure-seeking consumption will make us happier. But is this true? Depression, anxiety, and suicide rates are sadly skyrocketing among all age groups. A genuine contented life seems ever-elusive despite billions spent in the self-help, cosmetics, and consumer industries.
On the other hand, for millennia, spiritual traditions have taught that a life devoted to the welfare of others is the secret ingredient to genuine happiness. Putting other people’s well-being before our own brings a genuine satisfaction and lasting joy that a life of pleasure-seeking just cannot yield.
Martin Seligman, often referred to as the father of positive psychology, corroborates these ancient perspectives. He researched what helps people create a meaningful life and discovered three basic avenues for happiness: pursuing a life of pleasure, of engagement, and of purpose. Seligman found that a life dedicated to pleasure fails to deliver on the promise of satisfaction for the simple reason that pleasure habituates. One bite of cake may be delicious, but the fifth or tenth bite fails to maintain the same punch.
The life of engagement refers to using our skills, talents, and strengths to learn, work, and overcome challenges. This does provide some satisfaction, but not to the same degree as a life of purpose, which means putting your strength and skills to work in service of something greater than yourself. The life of purpose turns out to be the most impactful as a support for well-being, since the shift from “me” to “we” provides the basis for a truly fulfilled and genuinely happier life.
Sadly, consumer culture encourages people to fixate on and maximize pleasure. America has come to epitomize this orientation, and yet it often has some of the highest rates of mental health disorders. Despite being the wealthiest country, it sadly ranks eighteenth on the UN World Happiness Report, an index initiated by the United Nations to measure real happiness of people across the world. Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Switzerland rank highest on all the main factors found to support genuine happiness: caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income, and good governance.
On a personal level, how does one shift from this self to other orientation? The simplest avenue is to find a way to serve, to prioritize the needs of others. This is not done out of self-negation; service benefits the giver and the receiver and is to flow naturally from the heart. Neem Karoli Baba, an esteemed Indian saint, told his devotees: “Love people and feed them.” That encouragement is found across religions, and feeding the hungry and needy is often the most obvious first step in service. Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco serves over sixty thousand meals a month to the homeless and hungry on the streets. The joy and delight that pervades those who show up to offer their time and energy to help prepare and cook all that food is a potent testament to the well-being that service brings.
But service goes beyond that. At a deeper level, it is about seeing through the illusion that we are separate. As soon as we orient to something larger than our small selves, we tap into a greater sense of purpose that brings its own well-being. Some of the great leaders we admire, both past and present, in public service, business, and government, exemplify this level of functioning.
When leaders let go of their own self-interest and genuinely act for the greater good of others, something transformative can happen both for the individual and for the organization or state. When we cease to act from a small separate self, when we get out of our own way, then energy, dynamism, and flow happen. Service becomes effortless effort. As the Tao Te Ching says: “A leader is best when people barely know he exists. A good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, people will say, ‘We did this ourselves.’”
Nelson Mandela symbolized this kind of leadership and the power of a wise, generous heart. Despite imprisonment for twenty-seven years in cramped, confined conditions in Robben Island prison, Mandela emerged from the dismantling of the apartheid regime without bitterness, hatred, or desire for vengeance. Further, Mandela’s loving magnanimity and visionary guidance allowed the country not to be torn apart by violent retribution; instead, he helped usher a peaceful transition to a democracy none thought possible. His living example of being kind, caring, and generous, even with people, like his prison guards, who saw him as an enemy, transformed the hearts and minds of so many.
What helps with this transformation is being aware of when we get caught up in ourselves or lost in self-interest, which ultimately serves neither ourselves nor others. The paradox of mindfulness is that one initially turns attention inward to become more self-aware and self-conscious, but as Dogen, one of the most significant teachers in Zen and founder of the Soto Zen lineage, taught: “To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened by all things.”
Through mindfulness practice, we cultivate an intimate awareness of inner experience. Yet as Dogen suggests, that introspection allows us to understand and untangle ourselves from our mental processes, which keep us bound in self-referential loops. It helps us find freedom from the reactive patterns of our thoughts and feelings. As that occurs, we become less wrapped up in our inner processes. Our heart and mind become quieter, more at ease, and so require less attention and management. This frees up attention and energy to be more aware of life around us and liberates energy to help others.
Another way to shift self-centeredness is to cultivate generosity. Being generous shifts us from thoughts about ourselves to how we can serve and help. I remember well when I first encountered the teaching of generosity as a support for awakening. What struck me was the understanding that to give, by necessity, entails we let go and release attachment to things like money, possessions, and one’s time and energy. We relax the tendency to grasp and hold on, which is one of the causes of painful constriction in the first place. Being generous is like exhaling; it is both a release and a letting go.
Research shows that when we are generous, the areas in the brain associated with happiness light up; dopamine fires in our brain’s reward center. We naturally feel good when we give, when we share and care for others. Perhaps it is because we are both physically vulnerable and social creatures, and mutual generosity was originally necessary for our survival. Whatever the cause, the fact that being generous brings about well-being both for ourselves and others is good enough reason to practice it. This shift from self-centered preoccupation to being generous and caring for others is one of the hallmarks of the freedom that comes with practice.
One of the first techniques I undertook with generosity was to follow through on the first impulse to give. The feeling of generosity can arise in many moments, such as when we hear of a natural disaster like a tsunami affecting thousands, when a friend talks to us about the hard times they are in, or when we see a cold, hungry homeless person in the street. Our hearts often respond immediately with natural generosity or a desire to help even in small ways, such as giving money, food, or at least the warm comfort of our attention. I have learned it is helpful to trust that first impulse.
All too often, however, that altruistic impulse is quickly followed by the scarcity mind, which offers all sorts of reasons and rationales for not acting on that generosity. I might worry that I’m too busy to call my friend who is having a hard time. I may believe the fear thought that I don’t have enough money to give to a disaster relief effort, that I shouldn’t donate my old winter jacket since I might need it again, or more cynically, that the homeless person will use my money to buy drugs and not food or shelter.
Whether or not there is any truth to these fears, they are expressions of the small self, which is conditioned to conserve and preserve its own narrow interests. Thus, if we act on our first generous impulse, we can avoid and overcome the fearful thoughts that undermine our expressions of caring. This is a great practice if you wish to stretch beyond just giving only to those closest to you. It is a way of expanding our ambit of concern to include a wider swathe of life. Putting others first, we soften the painful hold of self-centeredness.
There are innumerable ways to serve. One obvious path is parenting. This is perhaps the most universal way that humans stretch beyond themselves to serve another. This beautiful, challenging practice requires us to constantly attend to and prioritize our children’s needs often ahead of our own. Sometimes this is experienced as a burden, but when approached wholeheartedly, it illuminates the profound effect generosity has on our heart and well-being. Of course, this is easier to feel when we are not suffering from days of sleepless nights when our children are infants! However, even people without children can experience this when their parents age or become sick. Then the situation reverses, and children may be asked to provide a similar form of selfless service.
Joining a service organization is another way to practice generosity. In Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken and his team chronicle a global movement oriented to serving others; he found that more than 1.7 million organizations worldwide — including nonprofits, for-profits, and NGOs — are dedicated to improving the lives of others and benefiting communities, creatures, and the environment. Uncounted millions of people are helping perhaps billions of people, not to mention other species and the planet. Service within and as part of a community offers benefits that go beyond the actions we take.
A sign of a mature mindfulness practitioner is taking one’s practice from the safe confines of the meditation cushion out into the world and putting into practice the integration of love and awareness. Now more than ever, this is essential for the welfare of ourselves, for underserved and vulnerable communities, and for the planet itself. The way to start, and the place to look, is within your own life, with whatever is in front of you.
The close relationship between spiritual practice and service is beautifully illustrated in a story about Hafiz, a wise Sufi master. A spiritual seeker experienced visions of God, and he sought confirmation of his mystical awakening with Hafiz, his teacher. Hafiz listened to the student’s excited report and then asked him a range of questions: “Do you take care of your parents? How do you look after your servants? Do you tend with care to your animals? Do you feed the birds in winter?” The spiritual seeker was incredulous. He wanted to discuss his mystical revelation, but all Hafiz cared about was how he was conducting himself with others in his life. Hafiz responded: “You ask me if your visions of God are true. I say they are if they make you more kind and more caring to every person and creature that you meet.”
Hafiz could not have made his case more clear. Helping others is both the grit and the fruit of spiritual practice.
• PRACTICE •
Generosity is a beautiful expression of a loving and caring heart, and you can cultivate generosity through intention. This practice is very simple: take a few minutes to reflect on one way you would like to express generosity, then do it.
Try to follow through on this intention immediately if you can or as soon as it’s appropriate. There are endless ways to give, but listen to your heart and trust the first impulse of generosity that arises. Then be aware that fear can arise in the mind that may cause you to second-guess or doubt that impulse. For this time at least, try to put that doubt aside and follow the original urge.
As the chapter describes, you might focus your generous act on a friend or family member who needs help, even if that help is simply emotional support and being a kind listener. You might help a stranger on the street, or you might support or join a service organization. You might offer money, time, or particular skills.
After completing your act of generosity, reflect on how you felt while helping and how you feel once it’s done. Observe if you experienced any gladness in the moment or if your spirit feels uplifted. Generosity is a mutually beneficial process, and sometimes it can be hard to know who is the giver and who is the receiver. Be curious: Did the act of giving soften a sense of separation or isolation you may have had?
To extend this practice, try to do it daily. Then notice how small, everyday acts of service not only cultivate your own well-being but bring happiness and joy into the world.
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