From Selfish to Self-Full: What a Shaman Taught Me

From Dr. Lorne Brown

In my twenties, I studied with a shaman named Lisa in Montreal. One afternoon, I arrived at her home for a lesson. She gestured for me to sit on the floor across from her. She sat cross-legged; I knelt, less flexible even then.

In front of us sat two baskets. Hers overflowed with trinkets—coins, feathers, stones, even bits of candy. Mine was completely empty.

With a smile, Lisa began placing small treasures into my basket, one at a time. Each gift was offered with such generosity. But almost immediately, I felt uncomfortable and awkward to just receive and not reciprocate.  Rather than allowing my basket to fill, I began taking trinkets and coins out and putting them back into hers. She accepted each offering with a gracious nod, but I kept putting into her basket what she had just given me.

This went on until my basket was nearly bare again. That’s when Lisa stopped and asked softly, “What are you doing?”

“I’m filling your basket,” I said.

She looked at me with kind, yet firm eyes. “But your basket is empty. You cannot truly fill mine if yours is empty.”

Her words pierced me. She saw what I hadn’t: that my impulse to give wasn’t truly generosity.

Lisa explained that many of us confuse receiving with selfishness, and so we rush to give—even when it drains us. But selfishness and self-fullness are not the same. Selfishness comes from lack—it is taking because we feel empty inside. Self-fullness comes from wholeness—it is the willingness to receive so we can later give from overflow.

Then she said something that changed the way I understood generosity:

Her teaching landed: giving is not meant to be tick-for-tat. Life is not a ledger of “I give to you, and you give back to me.” Instead, it’s a current that flows. Lisa filled my basket, I could one day fill another’s, and in turn, someone else would fill hers. We are all interconnected in this web of giving and receiving.

That day, I realized that true generosity is never about transaction — it’s about trust in the flow.

──────────────────────────────

Reflection

Where in your life do you confuse being self-full with being selfish?
Where might your “giving” really be avoidance of receiving?
And how would it feel to trust that filling your basket allows the circle of generosity to flow — not always directly back, but always through the interconnectedness we share?