Affirmations:
Loving Reminders are loving reminders for me.
Each time I share with others, I remember myself.
What I am teaching, I am learning.
When I am truly helpful, I am recognizing the One We Are together.
Truly Helpful
Helpfulness works when someone wants to be helped.
Helpfulness doesn’t work when the other doesn’t want to be helped.
How can we mind our own business and help only when asked?
How do we wait until we are requested to be helpful?
When we are living on purpose, we are available to be helpful.
When we live purposefully, we are being helpful as role models.
When we are happy with our lives, we are content and not looking outside for validation.
When we are living in integrity with our own values and life path, we are content.
Sometimes we make it our mission and purpose to help others.
Sometimes we get caught up in everyone else’s lives.
Sometimes we lose sight of being helpful to ourselves.
Sometimes we are waiting for someone else to help us.
Being truly helpful is not fixing, correcting or convincing others.
Being truly helpful is being of service to those who seek our help.
Being truly helpful is not needing to change or correct another.
Being truly helpful may include education, inspiration and demonstration.
First help yourself.
When your own life is in order, there is time, energy and resources to be truly helpful to others.
When you are being truly helpful, apply what you are giving, sharing and offering to your own life.
When you are ready, willing and able to be of service to others, recognize you are serving all humanity.
Life is a gift to be received and then shared or given to others.
Life offers the help we need, when we are open and willing to receive.
Notice how often we may resist what is given, because it is not what we want.
Likewise recognize that the receiver often will not be receptive to the help you want to give.
The attitude with which we give affects what is perceived and received .
If the helper is judging the recipient feels judged.
If the helper feels better than, the receiver may feel less than.
If the helper knows that they too benefit in the help. the receiver may feel blessed.
All of us are learning and teaching, helping and healing, giving and receiving together.
No gift given is not received by both giver and receiver.
No help being offered is only helpful to the recipient.
All that is shared is received by all, whether recognized or not.
Give to others what you would want given to you.
Do with others what you want done for and with you.
Love and trust others as you want to be loved and trusted.
Recognize that all we give is given to ourselves.
Loving us all as one with each loving reminder,
Betty Lue
Helping, Fixing, Serving
--by Rachel Remen (May 29, 2000)
Service is not the same as helping.
Helping is based on inequality, it's not a relationship between equals. When you help, you use your own strength to help someone with less strength. It's a one up, one down relationship, and people feel this inequality. When we help, we may inadvertently take away more than we give, diminishing the person's sense of self-worth and self-esteem.
Now, when I help I am very aware of my own strength, but we don't serve with our strength, we serve with ourselves. We draw from all our experiences: our wounds serve, our limitations serve, even our darkness serves. The wholeness in us serves the wholeness in the other, and the wholeness in life. Helping incurs debt: when you help someone, they owe you. But service is mutual. When I help I have a feeling of satisfaction, but when I serve I have a feeling of gratitude.
Serving is also different from fixing. We fix broken pipes, we don't fix people. When I set about fixing another person, it's because I see them as broken. Fixing is a form of judgment that separates us from one another; it creates a distance.
So, fundamentally, helping, fixing and serving are ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak; when you fix, you see life as broken; and when you serve, you see life as whole.
When we serve in this way, we understand that this person's suffering is also my suffering, that their joy is also my joy and then the impulse to serve arises naturally - our natural wisdom and compassion presents itself quite simply. A server knows that they're being used and has the willingness to be used in the service of something greater.
We may help or fix many things in our lives, but when we serve, we are always in the service of wholeness.
--Rachel Remen, from Zen Hospice