A week in generosity...

This past week, our intention for the week was generosity. Generosity was the intention that my four year old daughter, Ava, chose. And so the week began, and I found myself overly correcting her, critiquing her for the ways she was not being generous…. “Not sharing? Well, that’s not being very generous, right?” After a few minutes of this, I quickly realized that if I kept on going about it this way, it wouldn’t be fun for either of us, and the lessons in generosity would be lost. And so I decided to live and breathe and embody generosity as much as I could throughout my week and teach my daughter through example. And so as I started letting generosity flow in and out of my day, naturally it began to flow in and out of conversations I had with my daughter. I began noticing ways in which I was not being generous, ways that I had not noticed before. And the beautiful thing was that with that awareness, opportunities were created to begin to cultivate that quality more deeply. I picked up my sister-in-law from the airport in Long Beach, an hour and half away, and instead of dreading it, complaining about it, I embraced it, took it as a opportunity to practice being more generous with my time, and with my love. And I volunteered to drop her off at the end of her trip as well. I also volunteered to offer my room to my grandfather during his planned visit the following month, something that I may not have offered before. And I noticed that Ava grabbed toys out of her baby sister’s hands much less often. There was less screaming and more sharing, and that was without micro-managing generosity throughout Ava’s week. Simply setting the intention, and having conversations was good enough. And now, for this week’s intention, patience… Stay tuned. :)