Is it safe to be generous?

A little while ago, I began to ask myself these questions around reciprocity.

What is my relationship to exchange itself?

Do I look at life as transactional?

How pervasive is the urge to gain something from every interaction?

Is it safe to be generous?

Let's pause on this last question. Close your eyes and examine your deepest held beliefs around this concept.

Is it safe to be generous?

Here's what it brought up in me:

No. It is not safe to be generous because unless everyone is, then the generous sucker always loses out in some way.

I will be taken advantage of.

I need to be discerning as to when and how to be generous.

Generosity, when given without discernment, is weak.

Unchecked generosity is therefore intrinsically unsafe.

I realised that I viewed generosity as a potentially reckless act.

“With this gesture of goodwill, I hereby accept that I could well end up on the back foot. I can no longer be assured of a successful outcome, whatever that may look like”.

This didn't mean I wasn't able to enjoy engaging in acts of generosity. I love opening my home and my heart to friends and feeling the swell of fulfilment that comes from altruism. But in many areas, specifically within business, commerce, trade or exchange of any kind, I would notice the sensation of a deep, primordial red flag, the cautionary narrative of my lineage and an energetic dissolving into an un-boundaried state. So each act of generosity carried with it a giving away of my personal power (which meant it could never be received in wholeness by the receiver).

Also, quite simply, I had narrowed my definition of altruism to being primarily acts of kindness or generosity. When in actual fact, altruism is so much more fascinating than that! And this is where the transformation has truly taken place.

Altruism is intuitive and draws on the mechanics of collective intelligence. If we look at a pod of dolphins, we are able to see the pod mind in action. The entire pod is joined in an invisible web of group communication with the agenda of collective survival. This means that every decision is made with the health of the pod in mind; an older dolphin will sometimes sacrifice itself to save a younger member. At the heart of the pod mind lies a wisdom that understands the necessity for communal awareness. If one dolphin suffers, the whole pod is at risk. Altruism is therefore the most intelligent option. Selfishness in this case would end up harming both the individual and the rest of the pod.

To translate this into my own life, when I began to notice how programmed I was to prioritise my individual success, I realised that I was cutting off my nose to spite my own face. This went for my personal life, as well as my business.

I will reference my favourite sentence from the The Gene Keys text as it so beautifully illustrates the folly of selfishness!

“Selfishness does not pay well as it makes us imporous rather than porous. In the long run it closes off the possibility of being nourished, whether by food or by love”.

We are not designed to live alone. Each of us is one stitch on a cosmic quilt; sovereign, but united. If you make all of your decisions from a place of unconscious selfishness, you are literally cutting yourself off from the currents of creation itself.

Only you can discern the nuances of selfishness in your own life. And only by giving from the heart (and not the mind) can we truly invoke the majesty of the Universe.