Having an attitude of service is both practical and grounding. It is an expression of our contact with the abundance within us and the circulation of the energy that is our everyday experience.
In serving, we are cultivating a skill: to look at people and see them as they are, to listen to them, and then to support them. We endeavor to understand what they actually need and how that is different than what they want, because all people usually want the same thing–more. Everybody wants more, but we don’t need more. So we have to distinguish between what people want and what they really need, and try to respond mostly to what they need, while adding enough of what they want into the mix that they don’t get hostile.
CC photo courtesy of familymwr on Flickr
In supporting the people around us, we become richer in all the things that are important. There is a greater flow in our life, a greater range of emotional, intellectual and creative self-expression going on around us as our capacity to genuinely and skillfully share increases.
Service is the integration of our realization into our everyday life. It transforms the office in which we work. It transforms the family in which we live. It transforms our neighborhoods, it transforms our country, and it transforms the world. It seems to me that if we can bring our attention to our breath every day, and feel the flow of life moving in us a little bit, and start to feel the power that is present in that flow, what starts to happen around us is a wonderful personal experience of sweetness that not only makes our life meaningful but also changes the world in a real way. As that sweetness grows, our boundaries, our tensions and the distinctions between ours and anybody else’s dissolve. Life flows in us, and we flow in it. That’s service.