Your Gift to the World

What gifts do you and could bestow upon the world? In week two we identified our talents, our skills, we named our assets, that which we have that we can rightfully own. It was important and necesary to claim certain things for ourselves, to claim our own value, our own worth, as we often tend to get wrapped up with the values of others and deny our own worth, our own talents, our own skills. This week offers us the opportunity to make a shift in our perspective toward our talents and assets. This we week we are claiming them as our gifts.

We often speak of a person's gifts in the same breath as we speak about their talents, so let us be clear about and make an important distinction. The very nature of a gift is that it is not for us alone. A gift is something that we give away. A gift is something that we have that is of value that we give to someone else, that we give to the world. When we give authentically there is immense joy in our giving, and in giving we simultanously receive. The problem is that our cultural experience teaches us to attach conditions to our giving and we have learned to give strategically. We say to ourselves, if I give in this situation, what am I going to get back in return? We quite understandably want to know that when we give something, we are going get something of appropriate value back in return. Whether we give our money, our love or our time and attention, it doesn't matter. We expect something back that is tangibly connected to what we have given. I'll give you this if you give me that. The idea that a quantifiably measurable receipt is a requirement directly subsequent to our giving, and is a condition of it, is surely one of the most taken-for-granted, and yet misleading, assumptions that we have integrated in our thought process. It is misleading because it comes entirely from a place of limitation and separation.

If we are really going to embrace the idea that we are all interconnected beings on an interconnected planet, each of us interconnected with God, (the universe, the divine or whatever label you wish to place on the unlimited source of being) then we need a new paradigm that can embrace the act of authentic giving. When we give freely from our hearts, from that place of abundant love, trust and well-being, we automatically invite a response in kind. When we give unconditionally, we receive unconditionally. So the challenge of this week is to really get that by giving our gifts, our money, our joy in that free spirit of wealth and abundance, we raise our vibration to a level of unconditional reception - we literally open ourselves to receive. I know this is hard to get. It's still hard for me to get, even though I know it is true deep in my heart. The lie that we have learned to believe is that we are existentially separate, individual beings.

Anyone who has ever travelled in a so-called 'third-world' country cannot help but be touched by the unconditional generosity that is shown to them. People who we in the west might consider have nothing in comparison to us will often give what little they do have as a natural act of hospitality and welcome and they seem to do it without a second thought. On the occasions where I have been the fortunate recipient of such acts of spontaneous generosity, it has seemed to be as natural as breathing in and out.

I have been sharing a story this week with the course participants about a person I met a few years ago who runs storytelling workshops. At the end of a weekend workshop that I attended, this person, the facilitator of the course, asked us to write the name of someone we knew on a piece of paper. We all duly obliged and then he put the names into a hat. He told us that after we had departed and gone home, he would draw one of the names out of the hat and he would send them 10% of what he had made from the weekend through the post in cash with a card simply simply saying 'with love and gratitude'. No name, no explanation, just the gift. He told us that he had been doing it for years at the end of every workshop he ran and that his life had been filled with inexplicable miracles ever since he had been doing it. I will never forget the experience of love and joy that came over me being in the presence of that man as he told us his story and shared with us generous heart. It makes my heart sing to think of it. And it inspires me to follow his example.

A gift, however large or small, given with unconditional joy to another is a gift to oursleves and it is a gift to the whole world, for it clears a channel for the natural abundance of life to flow.

Love John x