Giving What (You Believe) You Lack.... Changes Everything

"If, by giving up a lesser happiness, one could experience greater happiness, a wise person would renounce the lesser to behold the greater."

—The Buddha, Dhammapada

A professional I work with one-on-one shared a profound experience with me recently. He’s a high-powered lawyer, a defense attorney, in and out of court, making highly consequential decisions every day that deeply affect people’s lives.

His already high-stress life became even more so when judicial processes were scrambled by COVID. Sometimes he was holding on two lines simultaneously — one a phone call, the other Zoom — waiting for whichever court session began first.

His time is highly circumscribed, and he constantly feels he is running behind, late, and not serving as fully as he would like to.

What happened: he found himself in conversation with a colleague and they had hit the end time for their meeting. His every mental instinct was wrap up the conversation immediately and get to his next appointment.

Instead, he took a breath, leaned into the moment, and asked the colleague how they were doing. The colleague took a few moments to respond, after which they wrapped up the conversation in a relaxed way.

In the few moments while his colleague responded, not only did my client deeply hear his colleague’s words, but his whole energy system shifted. The base level frantic feeling dropped away and he realized that he did not need to hurry. The rest of his day was infused with this sense at a deep level.

This person struggles with making time in the morning for even 15 minutes of sitting meditation. As a result he decided to practice a momentary pause like this, and he immediately reaped the results.

I shared with him that what he did was actually a highly-regarded Buddhist meditation: it is to give to others that which you perceive you lack. He was feeling time-constrained, so he gave more time to his colleague. That entirely shifted his relationship with time.

In the words of Buddha, by giving up the “lesser happiness” of being on time, or sticking to his schedule, he reaped the far greater happiness of connecting more deeply with another AND releasing his own obsession with his time resource.

This also works with money, energy and attention. If you feel you do not have enough, then give what you DO have to someone else who needs it.

You will discover you have way more than you believed.

- Paul Agostinelli, co-Founder

Tend