How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflections on Service

Chances are, if you can’t accept help, you can’t really give it.

But affluence has bought us privacy, and the apparent power to guard it against the encroachments of other people’s adversity. As individuals and as a society, we set up lines of defense. We isolate poverty, old age, and death so that we need not confront them in our daily lives. The poor are off in ghettos, the elderly in retirement homes, the dyi

We’re here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.

~ The most familiar models of who we are—father and daughter, doctor and patient, “helper” and “helped”—often turn out to be major obstacles to the expression of our caring instincts; they limit the full measure of what we have to offer one another.

Unity, not separateness, is our starting point. And while our ego doesn’t disappear, its importance is certainly put in perspective as a result of having experienced a higher Self.

For one receiving help, it can be immensely useful to become more conscious of the habitual ways in which we react to our suffering and the help offered to alleviate it. Just seeing these patterns clearly may allow us to discard reactions that cut us off from others at a time when we need them the most.

So often we deny ourselves and others the full resources of our being simply because we’re in the habit of defining ourselves narrowly and defensively to begin with.

We can, of course, help through all that we do. But at the deepest level we help through who we are. We help, that is, by appreciating the connection between service and our own progress on the journey of awakening into a fuller sense of unity. We work on ourselves, then, in order to help others. And we help others as a vehicle for working on ourse

“The greatest sin of the age,” wrote the Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, “is to make the concrete abstract.”

As we become less identified with any single aspect of the separate self against another, we’re freer to know which among them all is most appropriate for a given situation. It’s as if we can be anyone to anyone. Resting behind all roles, we can also be, as it were, no one to no one—that is, we can create a space where whoever we’re with has the be