How to Bless Others

In this article, we’ll discuss how to bless people with words. This article isn’t religious, and it looks at blessing in a general sense. We’ll offer 7 simple steps to formally offer blessings (if, for example, you need to speak at a wedding). Above all, we’ll start to notice where in your writing and communication you’re blessing others already.

Since the topic of “how to bless someone” can carry lots of possible connotations, let’s start by exploring the topic and defining some terms.

How to Bless Others: What a Blessing Is

We’ll begin with a few examples.

Blessing Example 1: “I Will Always Love You”

Here are song lyrics, originally written by Dolly Parton:

The “I hope” and “I wish” in these lyrics—the active wishing for someone’s well-being and happiness—are core to what blessing means.

Blessing others means expressing an active wish for their well-being and happiness.

Blessing Example 2: “Love After Love”

Here’s a famous poem from Derek Walcott, “Love After Love”:

Again, what makes this poem a blessing, rather than just a confident expression of optimism, is the active wishing for—encouraging—the happy self-discovery that Walcott predicts for the reader.

Blessing Example 3: Star Wars

Here’s a third example, Han Solo in the first Star Wars:

This one is in religious language (the religion here being the Force), and speaking in those terms is a big transition point for Han Solo, certified coolguy and Space Atheist. We don’t know what Han personally believes in this moment, and it doesn’t matter: what matters is that he has enough respect for Luke to express his well-wishes in language that connects them.

Blessing Example 4: Māori Wedding Haka

Lastly, here’s a powerful example of a group blessing that originates from Māori culture:

If you’re interested, here are the lyrics of this haka, in the Māori language and translated into English:

So, these are four examples of how to bless people. Let’s explore why we’d want to bless others, and on what occasions it’s most called for.

How to Bless Others: Understanding Why and When

There is honestly no bad time to bless others with words. Someone like the Dalai Lama more or less travels the world blessing others, and he’s received few legitimate complaints for doing it.

But for busy people like us who have Warhammer 40K sets to finish painting, here are a few particular times when we’ll want to know how to bless people:

• When honoring life events (such as at weddings, baby showers, and funerals)
• When loved ones need support or encouragement
• To express gratitude for others’ kindness
• To support others in grief, loss, or sickness
• At the beginning of something new (a friend starting a new business or relationship, moving to a new place, etc.)
• To congratulate others for major accomplishments
• When giving toasts or speeches

Actually, any heading on the Hallmark aisle is an important reason to give blessings—because Hallmark cards are, literally, prewritten blessings.

From that standpoint, the exciting thing is that we can also write and speak our own blessings, ourselves. They don’t have to sound corny or saccharine, and they can be more meaningful and powerful than coming from others.

Hallmark cards are prewritten blessings—but we can also write them ourselves, and they don’t have to be corny or saccharine.

How to Bless Someone: Clearing Up Misconceptions

Lastly, here are a few possible misconceptions about blessing others:

1. Blessing others is religious. Wishing for others’ happiness has, fortunately, never been trademarked. Religious people do often give blessings in religious terms, as that’s how they understand what’s most wonderful in the universe, but it’s not necessary.
2. Blessing others is a waste of time. Please view the four examples above—from Dolly Parton, Derek Walcott, Star Wars, and the Maori wedding—and see if any of them makes you feel anything. If it does, you appreciate the power of a good blessing, and it’s worth offering that power to others.
3. Blessing others is cringe. Well, it doesn’t have to be. Like a good poem on any topic, a good blessing is strongly felt without being maudlin.
4. I’m not qualified to bless others. Yes, you are. Your well-wishes are your own, and that’s all that’s needed. Actually, much of what distinguishes more obvious “blessing-type people” like the Dalai Lama is just how strongly they wish, and how often.

Blessing means sharing your sincere wishes for the good and happiness of others. Everyone is qualified.

Again, blessing simply means sharing your sincere wishes for the good and happiness of others. It’s no big deal in a gross or overserious sense, but it is quite powerful.

How to Bless Others with Words: 7 Steps

Okay, we know what we’re doing and why. Now, here are some suggestions for how to actually bless others.

The following seven steps are for occasions where more formality and power may be needed. They would be great to go through if, for example, you need to give a speech at a wedding, or are on your way to visit a seriously ill relative in the hospital.

1. Bring to mind the person or people you wish to bless. Imagine, remember, and feel them in as much detail as you can. What memories do you have together? What is the best of this person, as you’ve experienced it?
2. Feel your connection to the person in your body. We experience our feelings in our physical bodies (not in our “brains” or “nowhere” or any other option), so as you’re imagining this person, you’ll want to bring your attention into your full body. If your attention often feels mostly up in your head, this will involve letting it settle deeper into the body—especially the torso—as you continue to imagine the person. The goal is to really feel what this person is to you, and what they’re likely feeling right now.
3. Stay in the feeling for a bit. Once you’re feeling your connection to this person, let it settle and strengthen for a little while. Ideally you can really feel it, the way you can really feel a love scene at the movies.
4. Begin to prompt your mind with “I hope…” or “I wish…” Here, those phrases mean what you hope or wish for the other person. Just start by saying one or the other two-word phrase in your mind, then cut off abruptly, and listen: how do your mind and body want to finish the thought? Write what comes up down, and try again. This is a bit like engaging your mind’s autocomplete feature (“I wish___”), and if you are feeling your connection well from steps 1 to 3, you will likely find things filling it in. If not, wait for a bit, as the true wish may be in the process of forming itself.
5. If something catches you, write freely. If you find a strong wish for this person, it will sort of “take hold” of you, like getting a large fish on a line. Let it move you into writing, and don’t worry if what you’re writing is good or too corny or not cool enough or not original or anything else. Just write it, get it fully out. Freewriting (writing uninterrupted, without thought or editing) is a good tool here.
6. Find the truest part of what you wrote, and build from there. You will hopefully have something raw and bloody looking back at you. Don’t feel embarrassed by that—find a way to share it. For example, let’s say you’re the best man at a wedding, and you came up with, “I hope you’ll spend every day as happy as we were when we were in the treehouse when we were twelve.” Uh-oh, what does that have to do with the bride?! That’s where writing and revision comes in. Don’t throw out the treehouse thing: that is your actual blessing, that only you can give. (The world has heard enough best men say strenuously relatable things like “I hope you always pick up your socks.”) Take the core blessing of the treehouse, and find how that wants to be the basis of what you’ll say to your friend on this day. It’s fun!
7. Express appropriately to yourself and your culture. Vulnerability can be scary, depending on culture. Find a way to convey your blessing that feels appropriate to you, and not in dangerously out-there emotional waters. With our best man example, if you are stoic Montana cowboys, then you can just say, “Some of my happiest memories in life are from the treehouse we built together when we were twelve. I hope that same happiness for you two in your life together.” That is very nice! Actually, some of the most powerful blessings are terse, because you can glimpse how much is locked up behind simple words—as SNL has parodied. I wouldn’t recommend being emotionally bottled-up, though, if you can possibly avoid it.

When you wish to bless someone in a fairly formal way, these seven steps will hopefully get you started. Play with them freely: the main point is simply to find and really feel your connection with another person, and to let your well-wishes express themselves from there.

The main point is to feel your connection with another person, and to express yourself from there.

How to Bless People: Notice When You’re Doing It

As a last exploration, it helps to notice when and how we are already blessing others, in ways big and small, throughout our day.

It helps to notice when and how we are already blessing others, in ways big and small, throughout our day.

Here are a few:

• Email valedictions, such as “Best,” or “Warmly,” are truncated blessings. Written out, they’d be something like “Sending my best wishes” or “Sending you warm feelings.” (Of course, their power is quite limited unless they’re connected to actual feeling.)
• The last line of an email, before the valediction, is often a short blessing as well. “I hope you have a great weekend!” would be an example, or even “Thank you for looking into this for me.” (If your emails tend to be terse, you could see what happens if you “waste” a line on this kind of thing. People like it.)
• The beginning or end of any interaction (at work, with friends, etc.) will often contain a blessing of some sort. “Hey, it’s great to see you!” or “Have a good one” would be examples. Again, these can have power, if they’re connected to actual feelings we have.
• When you congratulate someone on social media, it’s a form of lending support. Even a “Like” or “Heart” is a mini-blessing, which partly explains how we can come to crave them.

Noticing these everyday moments of blessing can help us feel natural with the topic. Again, it is quite natural and close to home, not something intimidating or alien or overformal. This noticing might also help us further extend the tendency.

Noticing where we’re naturally sharing well-wishes for others might help us extend the tendency.

In fact, for me personally, noticing the place of blessing in my speech and writing has helped me quite a bit—today, already. I needed to interrupt writing this article for a work meeting, and I was hyper-aware of the parts where the blessings were (at the very beginning and very end), how I awkwardly cut off the beginning part, and how the ending part, which I didn’t awkwardly cut off, was laying fabric for continued trust in the work relationship.

Five minutes after that, I needed to text a contractor about a property I manage. A tenant was rather mean to him in their last interaction (she felt he was too slow to fix a leak), which was a couple of months ago; so I made sure to add “Hope you’re having a great summer!” to the end of the text, to let him know I wasn’t holding the tenant’s negative feelings toward him.

Beginning with noticing, you can lean into blessing others, in ways that are comfortable and authentic to you.

Little things like this add up, so being aware of when you’re blessing others has a lot of power. Then you can lean into it, a little bit, in ways that are comfortable and authentic to you.

How to Bless Others: Enjoy!

I didn’t say this explicitly above, but to me blessing is the ultimate power of speech. We can say anything we want (Your job is making pool noodles? How hilariously sad for you), but we’re also on this actual earth with other people who are, in their fundamental experience of life, just like us.

In light of this, I feel that blessing is what speech is for. That probably isn’t sound evolutionary biology (speech probably evolved for—what, hunting?), but I still find it urgently true in a different way. As an analogy, cheesecake is definitely for eating, however it got here.

So give it a try! Again, none of this has to be a very big deal. If you don’t have any speeches coming up, I would say the best place to start could be just to notice where you are extending good feelings and well wishes in your life already, and then see if the noticing makes that want to expand just a little bit.

A simple start can just be noticing, and extending from there.

I hope this article helped you, and that you enjoyed it. Thank you very much for reading. 🙂