Serve? Fix? Help?

In being of service, burnout is a real thing. One of the ways we get exhausted is by being attached to the outcome. When I first began working as a social worker I was ambitiously excited to go out into the world, help others, and expect to see results. A + B = C right? Part of this naivety came from not realizing the importance of my intention, and how my intention would affect the nature and quality of my work. In the helping profession, there are 3 ways we can identify the intention of our actions. They are as follows:

Helping, Fixing, & Serving

Helping:

When we go into the world and try to help, we tend to see the world as weak. When we try to help others, it might feel and look like we have something we can do to help this “weak” person and there is a flavour of pity in the interaction. And maybe even a spice of unconscious paternalism going on too. Moreover, it becomes our job, and feels like it’s our responsibility to take away their suffering. If we are getting paid, then there’s even more weight on our shoulders to “help” them. Not only is this disempowering for the receiver, but it will inevitably lead to burnout. Sounds like a lose-lose situation right?

Fixing:

When we try to fix the world, we experience and perceive the world as broken. There’s this unconscious drive or lens that sees much of the flaws, it’s kind of like looking at things with the glass half empty. This may be hard to hear at first, but when we see the world as broken, quite often it’s because we see ourselves this way too. How we see the world and how we see ourselves are mutually dependent (they aren’t and we can’t separate them). When we experience ourselves as whole the world looks whole…and when we experience ourselves as broken, we only recognize the brokenness in others.

Serving:

When we make our life into a practice of making peace with ourselves and become committed to making peace with our internal landscape, then how we live in the world and how we see our external environment will also shift. Why? Because they are interdependent. To be of service is to make peace with our bodies and how we relate to them, to make peace with our family, to make peace with our siblings, our lovers, our friends, and all creatures. We aren’t helping, we aren’t fixing, we are serving. When we are serving we are happy. Selfish happiness is an oxymoron. There’s no such thing as selfish happiness.

Too often we get caught up in the ideas and stories that if we just had “the right kind of partner and my family just looked this right kind of way, then I’ll be happy”. Unfortunately, when we’re motivated to find happiness for ourselves, what we’re left with is anxiety, and at a deeper level separation. Because what that kind of happiness creates psychologically is separation. Separation from ourselves and separation from others, and then we can’t be fully happy because our practice does not include others.

So if we want to be of service we need to start with ourselves, through the practice of acceptance, of self-acceptance, self-compassion, and through the practice of making peace with what is. In this way, we can show up in our work as embodied beings, recognizing our wholeness, and our interdependence. In turn, we’ll start feeling energized and nourished by our work because when we serve others with an open-hearted presence it feels really good!

This reflection was inspired by my teachers Michael Stone, and Myra Lewin. May it serve you on your path.