From a young age many of us are taught to do nice things for others: to bestow a kindness, a helpful hand, a listening ear, some useful advice, food for the sick, or cookies for a friend's birthday. Through these experiences, we learn the joy of serving others. Even if we are not taught to serve others, and we accidentally stumble into service, we remember the character it built in us some times alongside a memory of our expectation that it would be hard, boring or time-consuming.

From a young age most of us are taught that it is it better to give then to receive and that this life is all about giving. When we give to others, we weave deep life giving connections with others; and we learn rich lessons that can only be achieved through doing hard things. When focused on our selves, life seems a bit easier right now but this short-term gain is a long-term loss. A focus on others often involves a better trade off, one between short-term emotional and physical stretching and a long term lasting joy brought about by the fruits of service.

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Learning how to give is actually more complicated than we think. So many of us today have become comfortable with not giving because it never gets us anything, or we believe that we are giving selflessly when we are not. True, selfless giving requires understanding how to align intention with action. When we give, the intention behind what we give to others matters. We can't hide our intentions. As Wayne Dyer discusses in The Power of Intention, our intentions manifest themselves in reality whether we want them to or not. If our intentions and actions are misaligned our gifts some times can be more harmful than helpful.

For example, sometimes we believe we are being kind in how we give something, when in reality we are hurting another and ourselves because we are hiding negative thoughts and feelings and pretending otherwise. If I pretend I am being kind to Sally by being friendly to her, when I am continually thinking she is critical and controlling, I may actually be contributing to her critical and controlling behavior towards me. I may withhold encouragement from her and give her the feeling that I am not open to what she is saying. She may not feel relaxed around me, she may feel judged and consequently, she may respond to my misalignment between my kind actions and my negative intentions by being critical and controlling.

While I cannot control or create Sally's response to my misaligned actions and intentions, I can understand how my intentions influence the interaction between us. For example, I could try relaxing and being open to the possibility that Sally is not controlling and critical thus observing how my judgments may be affecting her. I could explore the ways I might be controlling and critical myself. I could also talk to Sally about my negative thoughts and feelings from a loving place with openness to hearing her perspective.  I might ask myself, are my intentions toward Sally self or other focused?

Other focused intentions, time and time again, seem to bring us more happiness, than self-focused intentions. A true principle, as defined as a pattern of living that gives joy over the long-term, is discovered. When we direct our intentions behind thought and action towards living by true principles, we grow, our knowledge grows, our inner light and radiance grows and we feel joy and peace in life.  When we are not directing our intention toward life giving patterns or true principles, we get stuck, become bored, lose energy, ruminate, feel sad, lose hope and may even get sick.

In the example of giving, when we are not living by this true pattern and engage in self-focused thoughts and behaviors, we reap what we sow. We tend to become increasingly isolated, focused on what we are not getting which is a recipe for sorrow, and frustrated with our inability to find happiness. Our intention, or the direction in which we point our thoughts and thus our actions, is towards our self. When we direct our thoughts, toward others and their needs, our lives shift, we learn, we connect, we grow, and we find richness in our lives. True giving requires pure intention, which is thought and action aligned and focused on serving others. Such intention brings about positive feeling and emotion because our intentions are aligned with a true principle.

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As we direct our intention towards others, rather than ourselves, and our lives start to shift, we are challenged with purifying our intention. It is not enough to put our intentions in a giving direction, we must refine our ability to stay focused in this direction and to become better at hitting the mark without overshooting. Some difficulties that arise once we are committed to serving others and not just ourselves, is that we develop expectations about how our service should be received, we sometimes give what we would want to receive without taking the time to find out what another wants and needs, we may not be able to accept another's gratitude for our service, we may have difficulty receiving the abundance of blessings in our lives that accompanies our service, or we may find ourselves trying to keep score, wanting our service to be equal to what is returned to us thus unhappily linking service with receiving. All of these examples are potential pitfalls on the pathway towards refining and developing pure giving.

Staying committed to living by a true principle that one knows can bring lasting joy, requires emotional strength and endurance. With commitment comes knowledge that makes staying the course worthwhile.  We begin to learn how to truly give, without expectation of receiving in all different aspects of our lives. As we begin to separate giving from receiving, and develop our fullest capacity to engage in each, we learn how giving and receiving are both less about ourselves and more about how we are linked together. Like a thickly woven fabric, selfless giving connects us all tightly together by stitches. No area worn thin by threads stitched only in one spot. The giver and receivers cups are running over. Discovering and then staying committed to true principles brings a new excitement, exploration and challenge to life.

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Kristin Hansen is married and lives with her husband in Utah. Her favorite hobbies are hiking, reading and writing. She has a doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Loyola University Chicago. She completed an Internship and post-doc at Harvard Medical School in Boston, following which she had a private therapy practice for several years in the Boston metropolitan area. She has given several professional psychological presentations on relationships, emotion, meditation, values in mental health practice and agency based approaches to therapy. Currently a clinical professor at Brigham Young University, she continues to counsel, teach and research.

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So as to lead by example, Pretty Sisters sponsored Tiffany Peters, a Hurricane Katrina evacuee, for the PS “Dare to Dream” cruise on January 27-30, 2006. Tiffany won this (nearly) all-expenses paid trip after submitting an essay on the topic of: “How has my life changed because of Hurricane Katrina?” What will I do differently going forward?

At each of our major PS events, we will sponsor at least one Pretty Sister. Know of someone you'd like us to sponsor for our upcoming events? Let us know.