A Quote by Pema Chodron
Generosity is an activity that loosens us up. By offering whatever we can - a dollar, a flower, a word of encouragement - we are training in letting go.
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The cultivation of generosity is the beginning of spiritual awakening. Generosity has tremendous force because it arises from an inner quality of letting go. Being able to let go, to give up, to renounce, and to give generously all spring from the same source, and when we practice generosity ... we open up these qualities within ourselves.
A word of encouragement from a teacher to a child can change a life. A word of encouragement from a spouse can save a marriage. A word of encouragement from a leader can inspire a person to reach her potential.
The offering up or cleaning up ego stuff is called purification. Purification is the act of letting go. This is done out of discriminative awareness. That is, you understand that you are an entity passing through a life in which the entire drama is an offering for your awakening.
One of the essential tasks for living a wise life is letting go. Letting go is the path to freedom. It is only by letting go of the hopes, the fears, the pain, the past, the stories that have a hold on us that we can quiet our mind and open our heart.
I spend a lot of time thinking about this business of letting go - letting go of the children God gives to us for such a brief time before they go off on their own; letting go of old homes, old friends, old places and old dreams.
Giving material goods is one form of generosity, but one can extend an attitude of generosity into all one's behavior. Being kind, attentive, and honest in dealing with others, offering praise where it is due, giving comfort and advice where they are needed, and simply sharing one's time with someone - all these are forms of generosity, and they do not require any particular level of material wealth.
Letting go is not the same as aversion, struggling to get rid of something. We cannot genuinely let go of what we resist. What we resist and fear secretly follows us even as we push it away. To let go of fear or trauma, we need to acknowledge just how it is. We need to feel it fully and accept that it is so. It is as it is. Letting go begins with letting be.
The reason we grow up to be healthy adults is because our parents played this game of giving us responsibility, disciplining us when necessary, letting us try, letting us fail. No matter what we know they are there to support us and see us do well. Leaders are exactly the same.
Times change. God doesn’t, but times do. We learn and grow, and the world around us shifts, and the Christian faith is alive only when it is listening, morphing, innovating, letting go of whatever has gotten in the way of Jesus and embracing whatever will help us be more and more the people God wants us to be.
Being and having in our society teaches us how to take possession of things, when it should rather initiate us in the art of letting go. For there is neither freedom nor real life without an apprenticeship in letting go.
There is no such thing as a "self-made" man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success.
Pure generosity emerges when we give without the need for our offering to be received in a certain way. That’s why the best kind of generosity comes from inner abundance, rather than from feeling deficient and hollow, starved for validation.
Everybody has that thing about them that makes them special, and sometimes we try to dull it down or we don't always want to expose it, and maybe we've been taught that way or whatever. It's just a matter of letting it out and letting it go and letting people in on it.
I played a million different sports when I was growing up. I started when I was probably five or six, and we'd just go from activity to activity to activity. I think, finally, my parents just realized that we were missing something in our lives. They realized that it was time for us as a family to start going to church.
The essence of generosity is letting go. Pain is always a sign that we are holding on to something - usually ourselves.
A grower of chrysanthemums awaited a visit from the emperor, who was coming to enjoy his blossoms, of which there were hundreds in bloom. The grower selected one magnificent specimen, then cut down all the others, leaving this one perfect flower. The emperor arrived and sat for several hours quietly gazing at this beautiful flower, letting its beauty have its way with him. Can you imagine being so caught up in appreciation of one flower that everything else fades into the background?
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