1) It helps someone else, and this alone is enough. Any other good reasons are just gravy. Each day there are many appropriate ways to open your heart as well as many that are unsafe. Use discretion, but find a way!
2) When you act from that place inside that says “yes” and naturally reaches out, you join something larger than yourself, which is as close to the essence of religion as we might ever come.
3) When someone is generous to us it makes us feel good. Something inside us, in our heart of hearts, wants to give back, which also feels good. Most of us (save for psychopaths) are hard-wired for it. To hold it back makes us feel bad. So, give it and enjoy!
4) To risk giving what you (think you) don’t have enough of puts you in the arms of trust, leaving you open to receive from others, all of which is crucial spiritual practice and Loving it Forward.
5) Life is short. We never know when, or if, we will see each other, or what we love, again. Share your heart today, now, any way you can. It’s all we really got.
6) Climate change and other disgraces are out of control, and we nor the beautiful world we inhabit stands to be as beautiful as we are today and yesterday. So, expose yourself to what’s beautiful and care deeply for what has no voice of its own.
7) We often think having things means that we automatically can enjoy them. Not true. We enjoy what we have and what we give based on how much we are also able to receive. Let yourself receive love from your self and others. Working through our emotional blocks to receiving and giving makes life more worth living. This practice helps!
8) When you give from your heart, you receive in the very act of giving. The more you notice and embody your joy of giving, the more joy you receive it because you are being it!
9) When we say “thank you” and mean it, we honor what has been given to us, and the person who gave it. We also increase gratitude and appreciation in the one who gifted us. In addition to teaching children to say thank you, we can help them learn to appreciate what’s been given and awaken their realization of where it came from and what went into it, which fosters true love rather than guilt and obligation.
10) None of us walks out the end of life with any of our stuff. But the love we gave away keeps on giving long after we are gone. How we touch others affects how they touch the world, which keeps loving it forward, round and round.
11) Some forms of love come in the way of wake-up calls. Speaking our truth, letting others know our limits, fighting for what’s right, true, and beautiful are all love in action that help foster goodness and mitigate senseless waste and suffering.
12) Loving is a risk, a passionate surrender, because we open our hearts and thereby stand to feel more intensely and deeply. This means we might have to feel difficult things more intensely too, which might be scary. But feeling the bad with the good leads to more love, more capacity to give and receive, when we stay open through our biggest challenges and hurts.
13) We need each other. Helping each other makes the world go ‘round. It’s what the heart does naturally, so join the flow and let it go.
14) At the end of the day, at the end of life, what matters more?
15) Even if we couldn’t name 14 good reasons to give our love away, we need no reasons. So have at it…
“Eventually we will abandon our bunker mentality and understand that the only security comes through giving, opening, and being at the center of a flux of relationships, not taking more and more for self; security comes not from independence but from interdependence.” ~ Charles Eisenstein
Author: Jack Adam Weber – Wake Up World