The Ultimate Gift
Give Love Generously for an Easy Life, Health, and Happiness
Giving generously of your love is not only altruistic, it's good for your health and state of happiness.
The Ultimate Gift
The ultimate gift you give to another won't cost you a cent. Put away your credit cards; you won't need them when shopping for the ideal gift. You already have it, it's a unique gift, and it's waiting to be given. The ultimate gift is your unconditional love.
The Ideal Gift
Unconditional love is an ideal gift because it also benefits the gift giver. Giving unconditional love can help you be happier, healthier, and live longer.
What is Love?
Everyone has love to give. It's an inexhaustible resource, the equivalent of being independently wealthy. The more love you give, the more you have. It never runs out. Love tends to defy specific description, yet is well understood when experienced.
Most of the world's religions espouse love, forgiveness, and generosity. Followers are urged to give with the promise of future heavenly rewards. Now scientific research studies support what religion has been urging. Scientists find that generous loving behaviors bring us benefits in this lifetime, too. Those who give generously with a sincere intention of helpfulness are happier, healthier, and live longer.
Stephen Post's Research Findings
A Christian Science Monitor web article of July 25, 2007 reports some 500 studies have shown the power of unselfish love. "It's abundantly clear from a number of studies that people who live generous lives also live happier lives," says Stephen Post, bioethicist, Case Western Reserve University.
The study findings include:
- Generous behavior reduces depression and risk of suicide in adolescents.
- Actively helping others during the teenage years promotes good physical and mental health all the way into late adulthood.
- Volunteerism on the part of older adults significantly reduces mortality.
- Giving to others enables people to forgive themselves for mistakes, a key element in well-being.
- Praying for others reduces health difficulties among older adults.
Love is Free and Abundant
The fascinating aspect of love and giving is that it is within the power and ability of each of us. We each have an inexhaustible storehouse of love. We're born with a never-dwindling supply of love, like an inexhaustible bag of gold in a fairy tale. And the storehouse doors are easily opened wide with an action available to all of us--the decision to love unconditionally.
Giving your unconditional love is a freeing experience because it requires giving up your judgement of others. It involves loving others just because you've decided to love, rather than because of what another person does or doesn't do.
"To win at the game of love don't keep score," anonymous
Begin Giving the Ultimate Gift
Start your journey on the path of unconditional love with your closest relationship. It doesn't matter if this is a romantic relationship or a parental, sibling, community, or professional relationship. Decide right now to feel love for the person you've picked, regardless of their behavior. Focus on the characteristics of this person that you most admire. And keep those in mind even as you observe their idiosyncrasies.
Expand your decision to love unconditionally once you recognize the way it eases your life and boosts your feeling of well being. Then extend your gift of love to all living beings, human, animal, plant, and beyond.
Love of Self
One cautionary note, giving unconditional love does not mean that you submit to abusive behavior, verbal or physical. Loving yourself, too, means that you separate yourself from those whose behavior is hurtful, loving, but from a distance.
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