Guided Journaling Examples

What does being generous mean to you? What jumps out at you when you think about being a generous person?

I think being generous, truly generous, centers on awareness of the other person more than yourself. There's fake generosity that makes you look good or feel good. I think true generosity is giving or receiving something that is not about the giver. It's about the receiver. That can happen anonymously. That can happen in big ways or small ways. The venue is not important, it's the need that's important. And it's hard to do. I think it's hard sometimes to be generous without it being about you. We've all received those generous gifts that come with so many strings that you're just like, “I want to just hang myself with this.” I needed to show you how grateful I am and how superior you are and write you a note and it's like, “Please just don't use me to stroke your ego.” So I think true generosity, it doesn't have to be a big thing. It doesn't even have to cost the giver a lot, but when it is a perfectly suited, carved out thing for that person that needs it, it just feels amazing. I think it makes the receiver feel known and seen? Of course, we're back to ‘seen’ again. But it's like, “You knew exactly what I needed. I felt seen, I felt known.” I think that's what generosity does.

In the last five years, what new belief, behavior or habit has most improved your life?

I would have to say trust in the divine. And I really had have had to get into a habit of that. However, I think it's only happened to me more recently of it being like an actual habit. And I think that that has happened. Because I meditate almost every day now and I'm doing things like yoga. So those things helped so much with just my habit of trusting that I'm at where I am, where I'm supposed to be. So yeah, just basically trusting. Trusting that has been the one thing for me that especially within the last five years that I really had to pay attention to and just realize that it's not gonna always be like this. But here is - you are on a path that is hard to settle into because you think the path should be different or possibly be on someone else's path. But I have just really tried to focus on this within the past five years. I think I've been working to understand this, so it's taken me this long to get there. But you know, I feel like I'm a lot more clearheaded than I have been.