True hospitality comes from a heart that is soaked with unconditional love and compassion. It’s a spiritual and energetic experience that exerts a healing effect on you and instils a feeling of peace. It’s truly beautiful!
As you develop the spiritual capacity of the employees, they become more and more soft-hearted and tender-hearted, and their desire to show metta loving-kindness and heart-warming care grows increasingly and potentially without limit. They become more loving, kind, and compassionate and their body language softens as they are transformed.
What does such hospitality feel like? Perhaps the following meditation will help you to experience the kind of feelings:
Step 1: Focus your attention on the area around your heart, the area in the centre of your chest. If you like, place your hand over the centre of your chest to help to keep your attention in the heart area.
Step 2: Breathe in and out deeply and slowly to the count of five each time you breathe in and the same when you breathe out. If you wish, do this while you listen to gentle music, such as this music. Breathe deeply but normally and feel as if your breath is coming in and going out through your heart area.
As you inhale, feel as if your breath is flowing in through your heart, and as you exhale, feel it leaving through this area. Breathe slowly and casually, a little deeper than normal. Continue breathing with ease until you find a natural inner rhythm that feels good to you.
Step 3: As you maintain your heart breathing, activate a positive feeling. Recall a time when you have felt a feeling of love or appreciation. One of the easiest ways to generate a positive heart-based feeling is to remember a special place you’ve been to or the love you feel for a close friend or family member or treasured pet or focus on a feeling of calm or ease. This is the most important step.
Perhaps it will take some practice, but eventually, you’ll start to feel warm and fuzzy in your heart centre, and this feeling will stay with you during the day. As the process of spiritual capacity development progresses you will start to feel differently and like the Dalai Lama describes:
The Dalai Lama says that compassion is the “wish that others be free of suffering. . . cherishing the well-being of others. … True compassion has the intensity and spontaneity of a loving mother caring for her suffering baby. Throughout the day, such a mother’s concern for her child affects all her thoughts and actions. (An Open Heart, p. 91-2 and 105.) These are the feelings that characterise heart-based hospitality, and which will eventually be the focus of employee development and of the hospitality industry as a whole.
As the employees are deepened with spiritual quotations and meditations, for example, they will become not just more soft-hearted, caring, and loving towards others, but also more tender-hearted. Tenderness of the heart opens you to giving and receiving love. A hardened heart must melt to transform into a tender one that is gentler and sensitive to people’s feelings. A tender heart is delicate, soft, and gentle. As your heart becomes more tender, you are easily moved to sympathy or compassion and you are increasingly more kind, caring, and affectionate.
A tender heart is a warm, caring, and honest heart. A tender heart is a heart that understands that life is hard but longs to offer a helping hand, a heartfelt hug, and unconditional love in spite of differing opinions. A tender heart listens and never demands.
Developing a tender heart can only be done by developing spiritual capacity, and this is a problem in the hotel industry because spiritual methods are not acceptable or politically correct. You never hear a hotel chain CEO say, “Hotel employees should develop their spiritual heart through spiritual quotations, meditations, and prayer; by showing ever-increasing levels of unconditional love, compassion, metta loving-kindness, and heart-warming care; and by reading and listening to heart-touching stories about how people have exemplified these core values. Hospitality should reflect softness and tenderness of heart.” If a CEO said this, the shareholders would panic because they would think that the CEO has lost his mind when in fact he has actually finally discovered the essence of hospitality.
For me, hotel group CEOs and VPs are embarrassing themselves when they say that the future of the guest experience is technology because they haven’t yet even discovered the spiritual essence of hospitality, let alone started to create it throughout their hotels. They may scream at me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but they only need to look at their corporate mission and vision statement because it screams that they don’t. I can’t find a hotel chain mission and vision statement that includes any of the essential core values of hospitality. The nearest you will get is “empathy” and corporate-style, SOP manual “care”.
Finally, in my opinion, cats are among the best developers of soft- and tender-heartedness. My wife and I have 17 rescued cats and kittens. Hotels should take advantage of their ability to often the hearts of their employees and guests. Rescued cats can be extremely loving, like this one below:
