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Meditation: Release as a Joyful Gift; Generosity (3/5) The Joy of Generosity

Hello and greetings, dear Sangha. It's lovely to be with you in this moment in time and to practice together, even though we're separated in space, in various time zones, different places in this world. And yet, to feel the generosity of each other's presence, supporting each other, supporting ourselves in this practice.

We've been exploring, or inviting our minds, swimming in this beautiful practice, in this liberative practice of generosity the past couple of days, and today we continue this exploration.

Today we'll be opening up to the dimensions of joy in generosity—delight, gladness—which the Buddha talks about, and I trust and know that each of us have experienced. So we'll open to exploring joy and delight in our meditation, and then I'll speak more about it in the Dharma talk^[1]. With that, let us get started.

Guided Meditation

Let us land ourselves in our seat, on our cushion, wherever we are in the world in this moment in time. Feeling our presence, arriving, landing.

Opening our mind, opening our heart to the sensations of this body first, to get embodied, to land, to arrive on this earth. Inviting our bodies to relax, to soften, to give their weight to the earth. Our heart can be uplifted while our body is connected and deeply rooted. Our heart uplifted as if to the heavens, our spine, the sense of integrity, lifted up, and our muscles relaxed, soft.

Both holding in tension with the uprightness of the spine: the uplift of the heart and the rootedness, groundedness of the body. As if we have wings, our hearts have wings this morning, this afternoon, evening. Our hearts have wings and our body has roots. Well-rooted, connected.

And our breath connects the two. Our aspiration aspires, inspires us, and helps us feel connected, rooted in each cell of the body. Each breath received, each breath received in its entirety. The beginning of the in-breath, middle, end of the in-breath. The out-breath, beginning, middle, and end of the out-breath.

And as if we were tuning, or allowing it to be tuned, turning our antenna to pick up waves that are already here. Tuning into receiving the gifts of being here, sitting in this body with as much comfort as possible. There might be pain present, but there is enough health and cognition, the gift, and we are here.

Practicing together, receiving, sharing Dharma. Can we tune into the good fortune, the joy, the delight of: "Yes, I am here practicing with Sangha in this moment on YouTube"? Wow, how wild is that? How lovely, how delightful. Hundreds of people around the world. I am one part of the Sangha.

Feeling the interconnection, the hearts of so many beings right now. Their smiles, their presence, their wholeheartedness inspiring yours with every breath, with every aspiration. Tuning into the gift, receiving the gift graciously. The joy of being here, practicing, breathing in this container. As if we're sitting in this interconnected, joyous container. Receiving each breath, the entirety of each breath, one at a time.

And know that joy, delight can transform after a while into peace, peacefulness. It's the other side of the coin of joy. So perhaps that becomes more present.

And notice if and when you wake up and realize that the mind is thinking, which does happen, will happen. Whether with the release, with the letting go of the thinking, the story... there can be a recognition of joy. "Ah, ease. Yes, letting go of this, oh yes." Relinquishing with a tinge of delight, gladness. "Yes, for the benefit of myself and others, I return to the body and the breath, the peace and ease, the joy of being here."

Notice if with every letting go, every relinquishment, generously releasing every thought or story, there can be a delight. "Oh yes, thank you. Yes, lovely." And how that might transform your practice.

As if you're putting every thought, as you release it... as if you're putting it on the altar. "Here, dear Buddha, hold it with me, for me." Here, a sense of generosity and giving away. Not needed right now. Here, released. Released, joyfully released. Offering the release, putting the release on the altar as the gift.

The letting go, the release, relinquishment of each thread of thought. The release as the gift, as our offering. Taking delight in each of these offerings.

Every time you release, you relinquish thinking, entanglement, notice the joy, the lightness, the ease that comes from the release. The release offered as if you're putting a flower on the altar as a gift. Here, offering your release, your letting go as a gift of your practice. The heart feeling more joyous and lighter with each gift of letting go.

The last moments of our practice. Offering our practice, the gift of our practice, with generosity. A gift of service, a gift of service to support ourselves, support all beings everywhere in ways we can't fathom. May our practice, may our letting go, may our generosity be of service to ourselves, to others.

May we all wake up together, may we all be free from suffering. May we all cultivate loving and being loved.

Thank you for the gift of your practice.

Dharma Talk

Greetings, greetings, Sangha. Lovely to practice with you.

In this practice today, the invitation was to tune into the joy, the delight of release, letting go, which is one movement of generosity. As an inner dimension, how generosity as an outer dimension of giving supports the inner dimension of practice is to consider every time we let go of entanglement and thinking. There are times when it's useful to let go, there are times that it's helpful to be aware and be present with it, and there are times that it's just skillful to let go.

Consider that letting go, that relinquishment, the ease, the joy, the delight of that. Instead of, "Oh, you were thinking, you were entangled," instead of the judgment, really tuning into the delight, the beauty, the grace of this letting go, and considering this letting go as a gift. As a gift of our practice, as a gift of generosity that we put on the altar of humanity, of the Buddha, of ourselves, of this practice. So in that way, making a gift out of every moment of release in our practice. Making a gift out of that. Really bringing the sense of generosity into our practice in every moment.

Speaking of the joy of generosity, the idea is not, of course—you know this already—to be generous or let go from a moralistic stance of "shoulding," but to gladden and inspire the heart as an inner practice. I love something that the Buddha said, and it really impacted me actually early on in my practice when I saw this from the Anguttara Nikaya 6.37^[2].

The Buddha says, "In this world there are three things of value for one who gives. What are these things? Before giving, the mind of the giver is happy. While giving, the mind of the giver is made peaceful. After having given, the mind of the giver is uplifted."

So, happy before. When we're considering giving a gift of generosity, our mind is happy, and you know this when you're thinking about how delighted someone will be when they receive the gift that you're thoughtfully preparing. And while you're giving it, the delight that it gives you to be doing something for the benefit of someone else. This act of service, giving, can bring up joy and peacefulness, as the Buddha says. And then after having given, the mind of the giver is uplifted, and this can happen for a long, long time. In fact, I appreciate receiving a couple of stories from some of you in email about acts of kindness that still uplift your heart.

For me, one brief story I want to share is... I love persimmons. The fruit of the fall. In California and other places in the world, like Iran where I was raised, the persimmon is endemic to that area, as well as Japan, etc. So I love persimmons; I grew up with them, they make me happy. And the best persimmon I've ever tasted is the one I never ate and the one I gave away. It still makes me happy to this day.

I was at an airport about to board a plane, and I have so many dietary restrictions, so I have to really pack my food. I had bought two persimmons from the farmer's market, and I was eating one of them when I was waiting to board the plane. A lady came up and asked me, "Oh, where did you buy it in the airport?" And I said, "Oh, I got this from the farmer's market." She looked a little disappointed and went and sat down. And I thought, "Wait, I have to... I'm eating one, I have another apple, I can give this away." So I went and gave it to her and said, "Please have it. It's already washed, it's from the farmer's market, it's organic, enjoy." She asked, "Are you sure?" "No, please, yes."

So that was that, and I was happy and she was happy. Then later on the plane, she was sitting a few rows behind me. When I got up at some point, she said, "You know..."—this is of course long before COVID^[3]—she said, "You know, I grew up in Japan, and in our yard there was a persimmon tree from my childhood. I live on the East Coast where there are no persimmons." And the way she was sharing how precious, how important it was for her, that persimmon, to connect her with her parents, grandparents... It moved me so much that to this day, there's this uplift, there is this delight, there is this joy of the persimmon I never ate. I've eaten so many I forget their taste, but that one still tastes delicious with joy and uplift knowing how it supported this person.

And who knows? These acts of generosity that we give, we really don't know the impact they have. This is just a tiny little story, and I trust, I'm sure every single one of us has so many stories that uplift our hearts, our minds when we think of them, and inspire us to be generous as a practice, as an inner practice.

A couple of things I wanted to bring in, as I promised. Not that we need any scientific research or studies to support this important inner practice that we know is happy-making and, as we discussed yesterday, is supportive of release, Nibbāna^[4], awakening—the same movement of the heart as we discussed yesterday. It turns out that a couple of studies, one done in 2008 and repeated actually by others in 2017... The 2008 study was by Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton and colleagues, and the 2017 similar one was by Park et al., which also brought in fMRI.

They found that giving money to someone else lifted participants' level of happiness more than spending the money on themselves. This was true even though, before the study, the participants had predicted that spending the money on themselves would make them happier. But actually spending it on others made them happier when they actually went through the study. So that tells us not only that generosity makes us happier, but also that sometimes we're not a good estimator. We cannot exactly predict what will make us happy, and we should trust that generosity will make us happy.

A similar study by Sonja Lyubomirsky^[5] at the University of California, Riverside, saw similar results when she asked people to perform five acts of kindness each week for six weeks; their level of happiness went up. There's also a study from 2006 by Jorge Moll and colleagues showing that areas of the brain associated with pleasure, social connection, and trust create a "warm glow" effect. Actually, the warm glow effect and what's called the "helper's high," which is associated with the release of endorphins producing positive feelings, happen when we are generous.

So the Buddha was definitely onto something; he was a neuroscientist in his own way. He had studied the mind so clearly, knowing that giving, generosity brings happiness, lights up the heart and the mind. And of course, scientists with their fMRIs and all of their studies are confirming the same: yes, it does make us happy. Generosity makes us happy.

Another thing I wanted to bring in is a couple more things. One is studies about what's called "targeted generosity." Being generous in general is wonderful, and specifically there are some studies about when you know the person you are giving to, the person you are supporting directly. That targeted generosity increases the feeling of social connection, and heaven knows these days in COVID times, we all need, we can all use an increased sense of social connection. To feel socially connected to one another. So targeted generosity, when you directly support someone, increases the sense of social connection. It also turns out it potentially has some health benefits, reducing fear, anxiety, and amygdala activation. So I thought that was interesting about targeted generosity specifically.

One of you had asked about the relationship between gratefulness, gratitude, and generosity in an email that I received. And yes, absolutely. Of course. First, let's tune into our own heart before I talk about the research study. We know when we feel more grateful, when we have gratitude, we feel the abundance of our heart. We feel so abundant. We don't feel miserly, we feel we have so many resources. We're grateful for life, for our bodies, for our clothes, for a roof over our head, for food, for all the good. We turn to the good. We see the abundance of our life and our heart instead of what's lacking.

That sense of gratitude not only makes us happier—and heaven knows there are so many studies on gratitude making you happier and supporting well-being and liberation too, of course—but also that abundant heart becomes more generous, of course. And the last thing I'll say is about studies by Christina Karns^[6], fMRI studies where she suggested that participants engage in writing a gratitude journal for three weeks. Then, in the fMRI machine, they studied the activities of their brains, and they derived more delight, more joy, more pleasure from giving when people had engaged in gratitude. As she puts it, you can proactively choose to retrain your brain so it gets more pleasure out of giving, increasing neurotransmitters. And the way you proactively choose to retrain your brain so it gets more pleasure out of giving is through the practice of gratitude. So these are absolutely connected.

I'd like to invite us, if you wish to, for today... Yesterday the invitation was to look for an opportunity to be generous in some way, your choice, of course. Today, the invitation is looking for an opportunity to be generous and also observing before, during, and after: what is the state of your mind? Noticing what the Buddha talks about, this delight, this joy of generosity before the act of generosity, during generosity, and after. Again, it could be your resources, it could be your time, it could be your affection, your smile, calling a friend, anything. But notice. Notice what happens in your heart and mind.

And we will continue tomorrow. Thank you for the generosity of your practice and your presence. May you be well and free. See you tomorrow, or feel you tomorrow.