How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflections on Service

Ultimately, this kind of listening to the intuitive mind is a kind of surrender based on trust. It’s playing it by ear, listening for the voice within.

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

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

Will we look within? Can we see that to be of most service to others we must face our own doubts, needs, and resistances? We’ve never grown without having done so. This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve fought the inertia of conditioning.

But there is another dilemma of the diploma: help becomes know-how. Obviously training is valuable. We want our lawyers, counselors, and teachers to know what they’re doing. Yet to identify them only with their know-how is to shortchange all and turn our relationship into a transaction between one who knows and one who doesn’t. Patterns of behavior

Caring for one another, we sometimes glimpse an essential quality of our being.

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

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.

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.