How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflections on Service

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.

Service, from this perspective, is part of that journey. It is no longer an end in itself. It is a vehicle through which we reach a deeper understanding of life. Each step we take, each moment in which we grow toward a greater understanding of unity, steadily transforms us into instruments of that help which truly heals.

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

But perhaps there will be nothing we can do. Then we can only be, and be with the person in his or her pain, attending to the quality of our own consciousness.

Nothing may be more important, in all this, than being gentle with ourselves.

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

To study the Way is to study the Self. To study the Self is to forget the Self To forget the Self is to he enlightened by all things. To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barrier between Self and Other. DOGEN ZENJI

If we accept that the ends of our actions often prove unknowable, we’re also freer to be focused on the process of our work as it’s happening.

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

The reward, the real grace, of conscious service, then, is the opportunity not only to help relieve suffering but to grow in wisdom, experience greater unity, and have a good time while we’re doing it.