How May I Be of Service?

I was fortunate to have spent the last five weeks in Panama visiting and helping my friend, Lindsey Parry, with her non-profit, Sowing Seeds of Love.  As I reflect on the trip, I cannot help but think about the role service plays in our spiritual journey.  The degree to which I have grown in my spiritual journey directly coincides with my attitude towards service.  For me, much has changed in this regard.  In college, I was motivated to volunteer as a reading mentor at a local school because I wanted to show community involvement on future job applications.  My motivations were selfish.  It was about what the experience could do for me, not what I could do for the child I was mentoring.  I was operating from a checklist instead of my heart.  The same can be said for motivations of guilt.  If we are doing our part as a duty, we are still being moved by ego as opposed to spirit.  To be truly drawn to service, selfishness must be tempered.

It has been well over ten years since I was in college, and in the time that has passed, I’ve experienced a deepened awareness regarding the role that service plays in our reason for being here.  I have gone from living my life without an anchor connecting me to something greater than myself to being grounded by that anchor.  My earlier choices were motivated by the fears that were being perpetuated by society and what I could do to mitigate those fears from becoming a reality in my life.  The mantra of society was to get a safe, secure career.  Believing salvation lie there, that’s what I did.  Once I secured a job, I figured my community service had served its intended purpose, so I was no longer motivated to continue.  I was too busy trying to help myself beat the fear of not having a safe, secure life that there was no room to ask how I could be of service to others.  It wasn’t even on my radar to ask that question.

It was in re-examining my life through a lens of purpose and fulfillment that I begin to be drawn to service from a place of compassion.  The safe, secure life that I had created failed to lead to the sense of satisfaction that I believed it promised.  I was comfortable and safe, but I felt bored and empty inside.  Fortunately, my discontent sent me scrambling in search of contentment.  It served as the necessary catalyst to initiate my spiritual journey — the search for purpose and fulfillment.  With time, I began to experience how leading with compassion resulted in feeling fulfilled — quite a paradox from my initial line of thinking!  As I began to experience purpose through service, it began to take a greater role in my life.  This shift allowed me to begin aligning with motivations of spirit (versus ego).

My trip to Panama was with an attitude that asked how I could be of service.  I asked for guidance in seeing what He would have me see and blinding me to what He would not have me see, so that I could tune my awareness to love and compassion (versus seeing through ego).  In general, I asked to be guided through love and compassion.  In this way, I believe I was positioned to help in whatever capacity I could be of service.  The “obvious” service opportunities are easy to see; it’s the little ones that often go overlooked, and without proper framing, ego can easily use them to create resentment.  For instance, it’s easy to see how helping to teach kids is an obvious service opportunity, but it may not be as easy to note how helping with paperwork or running errands are still service opportunities.  I was of the mindset that any opportunity to help further the project would be of service.  I was happy to help wherever I could, whether it was helping to teach a class with the kids while Lindsey hosted a sewing class for a group of women at her apartment, picking up or driving people home, helping to develop web and marketing content, or picking up food for lunch.  I entered each situation with the attitude that I could be of service in this moment.  This left no room for ego to build its case against me seeing value in the activity.

This has not always been my perspective.  In the past, instead of seeing the less obvious opportunities to be of service, my ego was put off by them.  Ego has a way of painting each story with different (negative) strokes.  We have to be careful of this, if we want to move beyond ego.  In framing our perspective through service, we are able to fully appreciate how a given moment offers us the opportunity to be of service to someone else.  This framing does not have to be limited to helping with activities that are associated with non-profits.  It can be used to frame everyday experiences that occur with the people in our lives.  If we choose to frame washing the dishes for our family through a perspective of service, we remove ego’s chance to use the moment to create resentment towards family members who may not wash them as often.  Ego is always on the lookout for reasons to be offended — take a quick inventory of your experiences and you’ll see how often ego chooses to respond this way — the way we mitigate this is to control how we choose to paint the story of our experiences.

My trip to Panama was an incredible experience and I attribute it to a focused effort on aligning myself with spirit, such that ego was limited in its ability to root itself in situations.  Lindsey and I spent five weeks together, day in and day out.  We shared the same living space and we also shared the same daily routine.  That’s asking a lot of any two people, but we managed to do this without issue.  In the past, I know I could not have been put in a similar situation without a buildup of “issues”.  These conditions would have been a breeding ground for ego to build its case against peace.  The biggest difference between where I was and where I am today is the degree to which I have been able to align with spirit.

In aligning with spirit, our entire perspective shifts.  We see from peace, love, compassion, generosity, kindness, tolerance, acceptance, allowance, and forgiveness (if necessary).  An attitude of service is one of the best ways that we can use to bring about the qualities of spirit.  Asking how we can be of service in a given moment changes how we value our experiences.  It shifts our perspective from valuing the experience through its potential to be all about us (ego/selfishness) to valuing it based on our ability to use it to help others.

Shifting out of ego and into spirit, changes the root of our motivations.  We are no longer motivated to perform acts of service through selfish desires or a sense of duty through guilt.  Instead, we are genuinely moved by spirit to base our actions in love, kindness, and compassion.  As we shift deeper into spirit, these qualities become the predominant focus in our lives.  We become organically drawn to express these qualities through attitudes and actions of service.  This shift in perspective is available to us through this simple question:  How may I be of service in this moment?

Lindsey & I with the kids at our hike’s destination.

As always the journey continues….

Much love to all,

Shanna

To find out more about all that Lindsey is doing through her non-profit, Sowing Seeds of Love, please visit her website at www.sowingseedsoflove.org and her Facebook page at www.facebook.com/sowingseedsoflove.  Also, if you are looking for adventurous service opportunities, she welcomes week long volunteer teams to come down to Boquete, Panama to perform work projects at the local orphanage.  For those who are open to longer-term commitments, consider serving as a teacher at her educational projects.  Check her website for more details. =)