How Can You Serve?

Mother Theresa with Dr. S. Brah­mochary (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“We get tested along the path, and we are asked, ‘Are you in this for the ride, or are you in this to go as deeply as you can into the path of ser­vice and into the expres­sion of who you could be?’” — James O’Dea, For­mer Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, Seva Foundation

In Jan­u­ary, we began a series of arti­cles explor­ing the prin­ci­ples of trans­for­ma­tion and how to apply them in every­day life to facil­i­tate the awak­en­ing of con­scious­ness. You’ll find those ear­lier arti­cles listed in my author’s archive here.

Today’s offer­ing is a con­tin­u­a­tion of this dis­cus­sion and cen­ters around the prin­ci­ple of ser­vice as a path to the awak­en­ing and expan­sion of one’s indi­vid­ual and our col­lec­tive con­scious­ness, and thus, trans­for­ma­tion of the human experience.

There are many ways to approach this con­ver­sa­tion, for indeed we are immersed in the con­cept of ser­vice nearly every moment of our lives. But not all ser­vice is offered with the inten­tion to cause transformation.

Today we live in a ser­vice econ­omy , where fully 85 per­cent of non-farm work­ers in the U.S. are employed in the ser­vice sec­tor, accord­ing to the U.S. Com­merce Depart­ment. This likely includes you and your job. You are either pro­vid­ing a direct ser­vice to the end user, aka cus­tomers, or indi­rectly through business-to-business rela­tion­ships. Either way, chances are good that on a daily basis, you engage in the deliv­ery, the sup­port or the acqui­si­tion of services.

What deter­mines whether the kind of ser­vice in which you engage the great­est part of your wak­ing life is trans­for­ma­tive or sim­ply a means to an end? Is it pos­si­ble to be doing an every­day, rou­tine kind of job and cre­ate a trans­for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence, or does one have to become a Mother Theresa in order to be a true servant?

Recall the last time you ate in a restau­rant. What do you remem­ber about the per­son who took your order? What was their name? Did they engage you beyond the per­func­tory greet­ing and ask for the order? Did you engage them beyond giv­ing your order or ask­ing ques­tions about the menu? Did you learn any­thing about your­self or them through the exchange? Were they just a worker doing their job and were you just a cus­tomer being fed? What kind of human beings were you with one another in the exchange?

This is the kind of rou­tine inter­ac­tion we expe­ri­ence often, whether or not we’re eat­ing in a restau­rant. It could be a straight-forward expe­ri­ence in which goods and ser­vices are pro­vided in exchange for money and that’s it. Or the expe­ri­ence could be a “moment in time” when the veil between strangers is lifted and some­thing more occurs; a human con­nec­tion takes place beyond the busi­ness at hand.

Take Anika, for exam­ple, who works at one of my favorite place: The Sun­ny­side Café in Berke­ley, Calif. She is a mas­ter server, but more impor­tantly she is a mas­ter ser­vant. Anika is infi­nitely patient with her cus­tomers, namely me and the group of 6–8 peo­ple I usu­ally go to brunch with on Sun­days after church. But Anika’s warmth is not lim­ited to us. That’s how she is with every­one: present, con­nected, patient, under­stand­ing, help­ful and human. Anika goes out of her way to make sure her cus­tomers are being served in a way that leaves them not only full and fed but nur­tured from the inside out.

What Anika serves is not listed on the menu but is greater than any dish that is. Con­sider that every inter­ac­tion with every sin­gle per­son you encounter has seeded within it the pos­si­bil­ity of con­nec­tion at this level.

You know peo­ple like this, I’m sure. You’ve had expe­ri­ences with some­one who came to your home to pro­vide a ser­vice and in the process you encoun­tered a human being so spe­cial you would have paid them twice their fee. This is what I’m call­ing “trans­for­ma­tive ser­vice” or Seva, which is a San­skrit word mean­ing “self­less service.”

Con­sider what James O’Dea, for­mer exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Seva Foun­da­tion, has to say about the subject:

“Ser­vice is not a form of moral oblig­a­tion. It’s more about feel­ing the poten­tial of the uni­verse, the latent energy within the uni­verse that is wait­ing to be released and expressed through you and your own unique qual­i­ties. There is no sin­gle par­a­digm of ser­vice. How do we truly release our­selves into the field of action?”

How Can You Serve Humanity?

You don’t need to go to India or to a third world coun­try to make a dif­fer­ence. An aspect of seva is “com­pas­sion in action” — to bring a con­scious aware­ness of com­pas­sion to your every action. A good ques­tion to ask your­self in the midst of what you’re doing is:

Who’s Doing the Doing?

You know when you’re being served in a way that leaves you with more than you paid for, in a good way. But how do you know if you’re offer­ing the same thing in return?

If you want to know if your actions result in a dif­fer­ence being made for oth­ers, a good ques­tion to ask is, “What is my moti­va­tion for doing what I do?” Who are you being in this very moment?

With the peo­ple at work, with your fam­ily, your friends, with the gro­cery store checker or the per­son in front of you in the line at ATM, who are you being?

Are you going through the motions, AWOL from the expe­ri­ence, dis­con­nected, cut off, caught up in your pri­vate world of wor­ries and con­cerns? Or are you focused out? Are you focused on the per­son right there next to you or in front of you?

How’s it going for them? What do they need and how can you serve them right now?

Inten­tion is Everything

Com­pas­sion in action or self­less ser­vice doesn’t require hero­ics. You don’t have to save some­one from a burn­ing build­ing or snatch them out of the way of a speed­ing truck in order to serve.

A true ser­vant is one who has answered an inner call to show up and be present to what is right before them, and who asks the ques­tion, “What can I contribute?”

Some­times, the best way to serve is not always to say “yes.” It takes a great deal of dis­cern­ment to know when say­ing “no” will serve a higher good. Some­times what’s being asked is to serve another’s addic­tion to unwor­thi­ness or fear, and a true ser­vant will have the courage to decline, rather than enable another’s smallness.

But inten­tion is every­thing. It’s from our inten­tion to make a dif­fer­ence that we engage in actions that for­ward the whole of human­ity. Imag­ine if every sin­gle per­son engaged in just one act of com­pas­sion every day, mul­ti­plied by 7 bil­lion — what would we be creating?

We’re all serv­ing some­thing all the time. The ques­tion is: What are you serving?

You’re either serv­ing a belief based on the ego’s dis­torted con­ver­sa­tion about what is true, or you’re in ser­vice to a greater truth about who you are and the nature of the uni­verse and your place in it. What will it be?

Tagged as: James O'Dea, Mother Theresa, sacred, sacred service, service, seva, Seva Foundation