My 29Days Breakthrough

Over the 29 days of giving, I would reflect at the end of each day as to what I had given. It was not always easy because many days I wouldn’t even leave the house, but I found that I could always find something I gave – even the smallest thing from spending time brushing our cat, Tucker, to making sure the birds in our backyard always had food and water.

I started to realize the gift of giving was as much a gift to me as it was to whomever I gave to. I began to experience a feeling of expansion and awareness - an awareness of the people around me and life in general. I also found myself being more present in the moment. When I looked the grocery store clerk right in the eye and asked how her day was going, I genuinely wanted to know. On a very simple and fundamental level, I had made a connection with a fellow human being. It’s amazing how we walk through life taking so many things for granted, how we disconnect and stop ‘seeing’ the world, just blindly plowing through our day.

I think the giving challenge reminded me of my own humanity and that we are all interconnected both on a human and on a spiritual level. We live in a culture of commerce and materialism and we sometimes forget that life is not even about that. It’s about helping one another, about community, about friends and family, and about love.

But the most powerful experience was this:

For several years, now, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make a living at my passion – creating mandalas for meditation and transformation. But a few weeks ago, I went in to have a procedure done at a women’s health clinic. While lying on my back for 30 minutes, I had no place to put my attention during the procedure except on the ceiling tiles. I kept thinking how great it would be to have a mandala to focus on because I knew it would take my attention off of the procedure and help me relax. At the end of the procedure, I told my doctor my idea. She thought it was great, but she said the clinic had very little money for art. In that moment, I told her that didn’t matter – in fact, had nothing to do with it. I would donate the mandala if they were interested. I can’t tell you the exhilaration I experienced with the idea of just giving it to the clinic – no strings attached. A door opened up here and I could see mandalas in all sorts of situations; in rooms where women are going through labor, getting mammograms, going through the kind of procedures I went through, and countless other medical applications. It has got me thinking in a completely different way about my art. To me, this is huge. And for this experience alone, not to mention all the other insights I had (and maybe some people I helped along the way), the 29 day giving challenge turned out to be a most wonderful thing.