Aaron offered a beautiful guided imagination/meditation on generosity in our last class. Let me give you an excerpt:

We are walking in a beautiful park. You have spent the morning walking, walking through Paris, your first time there. Seeing the sights, visiting museums. In your purse, a small lunch—an apple, a croissant, a bit of cheese. Now you are hungry and you sit on a bench. In front of you flows the river; to one side of you, a beautiful cathedral. There is awe and joy at these beautiful sights and this lovely autumn day.
You pull out your cheese and your apple, and almost immediately a very skinny, dirty child appears; big eyes, looking at you, beseeching. Holding her hands out. You don’t speak French, not clear what she’s saying, but your heart knows she’s asking for food.
There may be an immediate easy impulse to offer her the food. You can purchase more; you have money. There may be a subtle contraction, “My food. My meal.” Looking around, “I don’t see a food vendor anywhere in sight.” Maybe then a judgment, “I should give it to her.” Again, another contraction. “I should.”
Take your little paring knife and cut a slice of apple. Invite her to sit on the bench beside you and give her the slice of apple, and a slice for you. Allow yourself to feel her joy as she eats this very juicy slice of apple, finding there the self that is innately generous and openhearted. If a stingy or self-centered thought arises, don’t get caught up in it, just note it as thought, “self-centered thought, fear-based thought,” and let it be. Return immediately to this loving, open heart, to the joy of giving. Mudita; joy for others.  Return to the part of you that can give so spontaneously. In this way, keep offering her pieces of your apple and cheese and bread, eating of it yourself also, to whatever degree feels appropriate. You may give her half, or you may give her nine tenths of it, or one tenth. There’s no right or wrong, here.
I want you to find the place in yourself that is openheartedly generous and deeply caring for the welfare of others, and know, “I am that, beyond any conditioned thoughts that may arise, any judging thoughts. I am that generosity and love. I am that.” Can you rest in that, “I am that,” with some degree of comfort and ease?

Aaron gives us an excellent thought experiment, showing how compassion, mudita, and other manifestations of the open heart can naturally flow from the practice of generosity. Importantly, he also shows where this flow can be blocked, by stinginess or self-centeredness. Both openness and contraction can be there at the same time – is it possible to identify with the Big Mind/Big Heart and give freely, while not denying or trying to change that which obstructs?

Let me take a stab at defining generosity. Three main components need to be present. The gift must be something of value that was not earned by the receiver, the gift needs to be given freely, and the giving needs to be done with a wholesome intent. If the thing has no value, than what is the point? If the gift was earned, it was an economic transaction. If you are coerced into giving, then you are not being generous. If you are giving for selfish reasons, or with a hidden agenda, then few benefits from generosity will arise.

I would like to revisit Aaron’s guided meditation. I very rarely encounter dirty, hungry homeless children, and I haven’t been to Paris in 25 years, but my imagination of such an encounter has a slightly different twist:

We are on the park bench, eating lunch. The dirty child appears, obviously hungry. You give her food, and ask her to sit with you. She does, and eats the food. As you are eating, paying attention to her, and mindfully noticing your reactions to the situation, she points behind you and looks agitated. You turn, turn back, and your purse with the food in it is gone. The child is running away, now too far away to catch easily. She stops at the border to a wooded area, and gives you the finger as she disappears. Most of your important documents are back at the hotel, but the purse, the food, and maybe $10 is gone. You realize that the child still was obviously hungry, and by feeding her you were addressing a real need. You would’ve probably given the money to her at the end of the meal anyhow. She was simply not able or willing to give you the warm fuzzy feeling of being grateful for her lunch. You are not truly harmed in any real way by the theft.

How do you react? Can you stay openhearted and generous instead of becoming a victim or a martyr? Can you become mindful of the contraction in your physical body and in your mind and heart? What might an appropriate inward response to this situation be, that allows you to identify with the essence of your being, while not denying the reality of the experience?

Let’s examine some real world examples. The guy with the sign on the corner as you are driving by. If you give money to the guy, you don’t know how it is going to be used. Can you give freely in the face of uncertainty? What conditions would need to be present for you to give?

Here is another. Your children aren’t grateful for the time and effort you are giving them. They aren’t small and cute and cuddly any more, they are teenagers. They want to be fed, and they want to be fed now. How can you give them dinner with an open heart?

One more, this time more personal. When I adopted my son John from the Ukraine, I had the opportunity to visit several orphanages, run by the state. At one, I had a bag of hard candy, and I sat in the middle of the playground, handing out candy to the kids. It was very gratifying at the time. Now that I know more, I realize I was playing into something pathological. The kids were hungry, and I was feeding them not food but edible garbage that would just make them hungrier after the sugar rush and the insulin spike. I also was unknowingly contributing to a nasty little social habit. Children growing up in orphanages often will shun intimate relationships with caregivers that constantly change. Instead, they learn to shower love and affection on complete strangers, because they might get adopted sooner if they do so. After my wife and I became John’s parents, we fully felt the unpleasant effects of that psychological dynamic, which western psychology calls attachment disorder. How do I feel about that memory? The intention in giving the candy at the time was clear and pure, but the results of my actions, combined with the actions of others like me caused pain and suffering. Does my ignorance of the unknowns in that situation make it OK somehow?

Because this is (based on) the real world, there are no easy answers to these questions. I cannot tie up everything into a nice neat bow and make it pretty for you, rhetorically or otherwise. Generosity usually meets with the resistance of the ego, so that the act will have both wholesome and unwholesome motivations inseparably swirling together. Once the act is completed, we cannot control the outcome, but we also cannot ignore the outcome. For better or worse, we always have a responsibility to tend to the consequences of our actions to the best of our limited abilities. In a very human way, we just have to muddle through as best we can.

Generosity, consistently practiced, is a way of broadening our perspective to encompass all affected parties, both self and other, when assessing the consequences of our actions. The broad perspective of the open heart is its own teacher, helping us moment-by-moment, in each situation, to react appropriately and impeccably.

What do you think? How can we be generous in real life? Start the conversation in the comments section below.