M.J. Ryan is an inspirational speaker and human development expoert, and author of several bestselling books including This Year I Will…, The Happiness Makeover: How to Teach Yourself to Be Happy and Enjoy Every Day and Attitudes of Gratitude. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her family.

CHAPTER 1

Opening Our Heartsand Hands

It's not the earthquakeThat controls the advent of a different lifeBut storms of generosity....

—Boris Pasternak

I was sitting in a café one day, waiting for a friend, when I noticed a middle-agedwoman walking toward a nearby table, juggling three cups of coffee and theparaphernalia that goes along with them. She handed two of the cups over to twogentlemen who were sitting there. "Thank you," one of them said. "My pleasure,"she replied and flashed such a radiant smile that I knew down to my bones thather simple act had brought her pleasure, and even happiness.

If you are like me, you want to be happy. Like me, you've probably spent a lotof time trying to be happy. Are you? A large study in England and the UnitedStates recently found that the number of Americans who consider themselves happyhas been steadily declining over the past thirty years. I think it's becausewe're looking for happiness in all the wrong places.

The United States is currently undergoing the biggest sustained economicexpansion in history, and the Internet and the stock market are creatingmultimillionaires left and right. It's all about making money these days. Evenmy peers, ex-lefties and hippies, talk about nothing but IPOs. Several youngfriends are regularly ridiculed by their peers for following their careerpassions instead of jumping into the dot-com craze. The clincher about where ourcontemporary values are came while I was watching the television show Greed: TheSeries. It's a game show in which contestants "climb the tower of greed," andgive in to their "need for greed" when "The Terminator" allows one of them toget an automatic $10,000 if they challenge a teammate. I couldn't get over thefact that greed—a vice, a poison, something that spiritual traditionshistorically caution against—was now elevated so openly into something good,something to be joyously indulged in.

What is wrong with this picture?

I don't profess to have all the answers. All I know is that in my twenties andthirties, I was your average unhappy and fearful person. Then, about twelveyears ago, through a series of circumstances, I began to refocus my life on whattruly mattered and stopped being miserable. And that has made all thedifference.

It started when I, along with several others, published the book Random Actsof Kindness.™ It seemed like a good idea at the time—let's all do nice littlethings for strangers—but once I began to see and hear about its effects, Isensed I had stumbled upon something very important. Suddenly I was inundatedwith letters from people telling me about the joy they had experienced as eitherdoers or receivers of these acts. I will never forget the letter from a highschool student who said he was going to kill himself until he read our book anddecided that life was worth living. I became fascinated with the power ofkindness, and went on to help write a series of books on the topic. I tried toenact what I was writing about and became more kind both to strangers and tothose I am close to. Like the boy who didn't kill himself, I got happier.

I began to wonder about the other qualities that could produce the samepositive effect as kindness, and turned my attention to gratitude. The more Icultivated a sense of appreciation for all that I had instead of focusing onwhat I lacked, the happier and less fearful I was. I wrote about my experiences,this time in Attitudes of Gratitude, and once again, I received many lettersabout the power gratitude has in bringing peace of mind and a sense ofcontentment.

My study of gratitude led me to generosity, the spontaneous giving ofourselves and our resources to someone else. In a sense, I have now come fullcircle. Generosity is the mother of kindness. Our desire to give help, comfort,support, or appreciation is often the reason we do kind things.

In reading, talking, and thinking about generosity, I realized just howimportant it is. Boris Pasternak alludes to the power of generosity in the quoteat the beginning of this chapter. We tend to think about generosity asvolunteering or giving money or time, but generosity is actually much broader.It comes in all kinds of forms—material, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.We can be generous when we give our knowledge, our awareness, our empathy, orour silence. Generosity is also about letting go of grudges, hurts, and conceptsof ourselves and the world that stand in the way of our connection to others.

True generosity is open-heartedness, the experience and expression of ourboundless, unconditionally loving nature. It is such an important concept thatBuddhists consider its opposite to be delusion. When we are out of touch withour giving hearts, the natural flow of generosity within us, we think we need tohold on to money, possessions, and fixed ideas. We are sure we need these thingsto be happy, when our very grasping and clinging is what makes us miserable. Wehold on so tightly that our hands are unavailable to reach out for the happinesswe could gain by letting go. Our delusion of material happiness prevents us frombeing truly happy.

However, when we are living from true generosity, we feel expansive andabundant. We know that we can find true happiness in loving and being loved tothe core of our being. Our hearts and hands are open, ready to offer what theycan and able to receive what comes back to us in return.

As the woman in the café realized, giving makes us feel great. It's a fabulousfeeling, even when we offer something as small as a cup of coffee. Giving liftsus out of our preoccupation with ourselves and reminds us that there is plentyof kindness to go around.

Like kindness and gratitude, giving—both of ourselves and our unique gifts—isactually very simple. So simple that it's often difficult to believe it canbring us such joy. We think giving should be hard, so we make it complicated. Weguilt-trip ourselves into thinking we should give more or try harder, usuallyturning our guilt into shame, and then trying to avoid the whole issue entirely.

It doesn't have to be that way. The purpose of A Giving Heart is to provideencouragement. Encouragement in noticing that the river of generosity is alreadyflowing in you, and encouragement in opening your heart as much as you feelcomfortable and giving exactly as much as you want. It's about paying attentionand noticing how you feel when you give, when it feels good and when it doesn't.Noticing the effects on your life and then choosing to do more of what makes youfeel good.

I've come to understand that generosity is both a feeling—of fullness, ofexpansion, of joy—and a choice. The more we make the choice, the more weexperience the feeling. This book charts a journey through attitudes andbehaviors...