How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflections on Service

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.

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.

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 philosopher Gurdjieff pointed out that if we wish to escape from prison, the first thing we must acknowledge is that we are in prison. Without that acknowledgment, no escape is possible.

Having surrendered into helplessness we can now get on with help.

The ability to avoid being entrapped by one another’s mind is one of the great gifts we can offer each other. With this compassionate and spacious awareness, and the listening it makes possible, we can offer those we are with a standing invitation to come out from wherever they are caught, if they are ready and wish to do so.

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

What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated?

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