When you walk by a beggar and ignore his outstretched hand-you are making a personal statement about yourself, how you feel about the beggar or what he is doing.

Giving is the greatest opportunity for you to express who you are and how you see yourself in relationship to others and your environment in the moment.    We make judgments about the situation based on our own perceptions about the one asking for the handout. There are very few of us who could not give him something, if only a few words of encouragement.
   My own personal view is I would much rather teach a man to fish, than to feed him. In other words if there is the beggar, a volunteer who would go out and fish and give his catch to the beggar, and the one who would teach the man to fish — I’d rather give to the one who would teach.
   The beggar doesn’t give a damn about being taught how to fish, if his immediate need is to satisfy his hunger. So giving to the one who would teach is the least desirable course of action in the moment. Giving to the volunteer who would go out and fish and give away his catch does little for the immediate needs of the beggar who is hungry — now.
   Now giving money to the beggar may not resolve the hunger issue if the money is really needed to buy drugs or something else. Can you trust a beggar who has learned to lie and come up with unique stories to get your money-can he be trusted?
   Giving to the one who would go out and fish and give away his catch would seem to be a better solution. However, if there are beggars on the street starving, where is his catch going? How much of the donations going to him are being spent on his overhead and personal expenses-can he be trusted to use the money to return fish to the hungry?
   So maybe it is wiser to use your money to support the one who would do the most good in the first place. Give it to the one who would teach the beggars to fish, so they would no longer have to beg for food and be self sustaining.
   We all have heard about programs to help the hungry. Money donated to these groups or individuals is funnelled into their own pockets and the needy do not receive benefit from your donation. None of these people seem to be responsible.
   There is only one person who can be responsible, and it is you. If you see yourself as a giving or caring person in the moment, then it would be incumbent upon yourself to give when the opportunity comes up-not for the sake of the one who is in need, but because it is an opportunity for you to express yourself as caring or giving. All life declares itself as “this” or “that” in any particular moment. Guilt should never be part of the equation of giving. It is a lie to give when you do not feel liking giving. It is the worst blasphemy-you are denying who you really are and your feelings.
   In the true spirit of giving, you give to yourself-not to the other. You receive the greatest benefit from giving, if it is done from the heart and in the moment. You receive an immediate benefit in the act itself. It is only when your mind starts to contemplate your action do you feel anything else. If you give for yourself first, then it doesn’t matter that your donation is going to be used to buy drugs or cigarettes, alcohol or anything else. Your giving was a true expression of how you felt in the moment-it is life expressing itself in all its glory.
   Over the last six years my web site has cost me thousands to operate and maintain. Three years ago I added a link for those who felt the desire to donate. When I started this site I was aware of the expense of maintaining it and the site survives. I added a link as a gift to those who could see value in the material and purpose of the site. I added it for their benefit, because they have realised the value and wanted to donate something of value in return. It was an opportunity to declare their value and appreciation.
   It was the greatest gift I could give to my visitors. If one appreciates value then one gives value back because they are aware of their own value. If one does not see value, they do not give value back-they see themselves as valueless in the moment. If you do not see yourself as having value, then you cannot give value. Value can only be experienced when it is given. The next time you are given the opportunity to give, respond to your intuition first and act on it immediately. Simply give or do not. But the most interesting thing, is to listen to your internal dialogue if you do not give. It will be a reminder of how connected or disconnected from spirit you really are.
   Who gives the greater gift, the one who is in need or the one who needs to give-the one in need of course? When you stop to think before giving, what you are doing is questioning your own value. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing-it is a simple recognition of how you see yourself in the moment.
   When you give because it is your true nature to do so, you will always receive an immediate reward-recognition of self. It is the greatest gift anyone can receive-it is a gift of life. Life always seeks to declare itself as “I am”. The donations themselves become meaningless to you-once given, it is no longer yours-neither are any expectations. Donations are not donations if there is an expectationthey become payment in advance for something you seek later.
   Never miss the opportunity to give-you will always receive an immediate reward. If you want to feel good now, go out and look for someone to give to. Give to yourself first and others will benefit.

by :Roy E Klienwachter

source : sunday time

Are you the happiest person you know? Not necessarily the luckiest, richest, or most successful, just the happiest?
   If not, why not? Most people will reel off their current worries — the job, the kids, the car, the price of fish. I don’t mean to sweep these aside: problems need to be solved, if you can, or waited out until they disappear. But as far as living happily is concerned you have to face a crucial fact. If you can only live happily after all your problems are solved, you are never going to live happily, because when today’s problems are gone and forgotten, others will take their place. So either living happily is just impossible, or you have to do it in spite of your problems.
   Being happy depends not so much on external circumstances as on your inner life. This means all your thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, emotions, desires, dreams — your entire mental and emotional scene. Happiness is about how you react inwardly to events, what you think and believe, how you feel, how problems affect you. It may sound obvious, but like many obvious things it’s something that is often forgotten when it matters most. We focus almost exclusively on our external lives, on getting and spending and having fun, and then wonder why we are not happy. But it’s when our inner lives are tranquil that we are happiest and we call this inner peace.
   So how is inner peace to be achieved? Is it a question of religion, perhaps, or yoga? These can certainly help but only if they have a positive effect on your inner life. The difficulty is that inner life is based on patterns and habits — some you were born with, most you have acquired. You don’t choose, occasion by occasion, how you respond inside when something happens. This happens and you feel angry; that happens you feel sad; you pass the patisserie and you feel hungry; you hear a tune or smell a certain scent and it reminds you of a particular time or person? Things produce a response without you thinking about it or choosing how you feel, and they don’t necessarily leave you with inner peace. So the trick is to break the pattern. You can’t completely avoid problems, but you can change how you react to them by acquiring new habits that provoke peaceful inner responses. Training your inner life into different habits requires learning skills of thinking, feeling, and managing your beliefs and desires. These are very like the virtues many religions and philosophies advocate, but if you think of them as skills rather than virtues, you benefit from an important and liberating shift. Instead of “I must become a better person” you can think “I would live more happily if i worked on my skills”, so the change in attitude becomes a choice, not a duty. And to these remedial skills i’ve added an extra set of enjoyment skills, otherwise getting happier could turn out a very depressing affair.
   This process is not something you can do overnight, it’s a whole new way of life, but the reward is what we all want most — happiness. There are five main skills you need to cultivate.

Mindfulness:Borrowed from Buddhism, this involves developing your ability to focus your thoughts in the present. The problem most of us have with thought is having too much of it — the worrying and nonstop mental chattering our minds are prone to. Mindfulness is a key inner skill because, as it gets stronger, it lets you focus on your own inner life and catch your habits in the act. Once you can see how you are ruled by them, the change you are seeking often happens of its own accord.
   
Compassion:Most religions rightly stress compassion. As well as

being a virtue in its own right it is a practical skill that counteracts negative emotions like anger and hatred, which are terrible wreckers of happiness. Try it the next time someone annoys you: put yourself in their place and ask yourself what they might they be thinking or feeling to behave like that. Even bad people, let alone people who just mildly annoy you, often have a warped or mistaken view of the world which makes them do what they do. Wars are started and atrocities committed, for example, because someone decides that this is what their God wants. It doesn’t mean they should get away with their actions, in fact it may be necessary to take strong action to defend yourself.
   
Story skills:These are very useful for problems with your inner belief system, as they let you stand back and explore alternative versions of reality. Beliefs have great power over your life because a belief is something you take as fact. Start to think of your beliefs as stories, and it is easier to accept that other things might be true as well, or even instead. Even true stories only select the little bit of reality we are focusing on at the moment: no one story is the whole truth about any situation. From a different point of view we would see a different story, sometimes a whole different world. This is not about make believe, it’s about reframing situations to look at them from a different perspective.
   
Letting-go techniques:These are particularly helpful when we are unhappy not getting what we want. Generally, we are encouraged to keep wanting and to think that more will make us happier, whether it’s clothes or cars or even love. But wanting is a treadmill: as long as you have unsatisfied wants and desires you won’t be at peace, so to be happy you either have to satisfy all your desires, or let go of some of them. Letting-go skills also include forgiveness, which helps hugely if one of the things you think you want is revenge.

   
Enjoyment skills:This last group includes skills such as patience, humour and, especially, gratitude. You don’t have to be grateful to someone, it’s enough to cultivate gratitude for things. Our minds naturally scan the environment for dangers and resources, a useful mechanism when we were hunter-gatherers. But it can make us unnecessarily pessimistic — focusing on the 10% we lack rather than the 90% we have. Cultivating enjoyment skills will help redress the balance.
   Acquiring all these skills takes time and effort. The important thing is to practise them until they operate without you thinking about them. Your practice routine will be very individual, because everyone needs to prioritise different skills depending on the specific issues that are holding them back from being happy, but keep the skills in mind and you will constantly find new ways to try them out.

 by : Tony Wilkinson

source : times life