Many religions and spiritual practices that I know speak of generosity.
In Sikhism, there is “Seva” where you perform an act of selfless service. Gautam Buddha always encouraged everyone to perform “Dana”, which translates to Donations, and so on.
An act of generosity feels great. There is no better feeling than knowing that you contributed to someone. Generosity makes everything better.
It is important to understand, however, that generosity is not limited to money or resources.
One can be generous through the conversations that they have. One can be generous with their compliments and most importantly by sharing their knowledge and wisdom.
As nice as ‘Generosity’ sounds, it doesn’t come naturally to all of us.
Generosity is the opposite of fear. This means when you decide to be generous to someone, your mind might revolt.
Jealousy might arise. You might feel insecure. You might feel that you would be taken advantage of. You might feel that because of your generosity, the other person might become better than you!
All of this is just the mind’s drama of course. Most of these fears are baseless.
We can choose to not participate in this drama and cultivate the virtue of generosity.