How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflections on Service

Compassion follows lawfully as we open to the experience of suffering.

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.

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

“How can I help?” is a timeless inquiry of the heart.

When we see that service is not a one-way street, we find that those we are helping give us a continuous stream of clues to help us escape the prison of our self-image. More than simply letting us know what might be working or not, they help us when they question our very models of ourselves. They snap us to; they may even see right through us. And

What’s crucial is that this awareness allows us to hear, along with everything else, whatever it is that’s going on inside us. Our own mental reactions are equally objects to be observed as anything else in our field of awareness.

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

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

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