THE NONLINEAR PATH 20: Being Of Service
The Yin and Yang of Self-Care and Selfless Service
In this era of self-focus and self-care we often ask “does this serve me?”. This is an important question to put to ourselves in order to make the right choices of where to spend our time and energy.
What we have lost in the process is asking “how might I serve others?”.
In martial arts training we use the concept of selfless service, where we use our energy to serve something larger than ourselves. Cleaning the dojo, doing repairs, making tea, teaching, helping new students to feel welcome, helping others simply because they need help are all ways we serve without regard to how it furthers our own personal goals. We do it simply because it needs to be done and makes life for our community better for everyone. In that act alone we receive far more gifts than we realize.
It embodies perfectly another saying we follow:
What you put out into the world comes back to you ten-fold.
In my early years in corporate design I was surprised to hear my director and mentor talk about serving others. Business seemed to me to be competitive and cutthroat and fashion design was especially riddled with primadonna attitudes. Instead, she would talk about being of service. How can we be good business partners, creative partners, human partners? Just asking that question shifts the energy within each of us. It creates a lightness, a feeling of joy, and a sense of hope.
From What’s in it for me? to How may I help you?
This doesn’t mean that we give ourselves up, become doormats or martyrs. I discovered this right away in learning to fight. If you don’t take care of yourself, defend yourself, keep yourself healthy and safe, you cannot help others very well. Selfless service is much harder to do when you are not caring first for yourself.
This is where ritual comes into play, and where self-care and selfless service merge to become one. They become almost indistinguishable from each other.
In reality, you cannot have one without the other.
beautiful 🙏🏼✨
Love. Great reminder, thank you, Michelle!