Helping vs. Serving

Video of Meeting [8 min intro, 15 min meditation, 1 hr Q&A]

In Week 8, there's an article by Rachel Naomi Remen called In the Service of Life, in which she makes a distinction between serving and helping – that “helping” implies a one-up relationship (you are superior in some way), but “serving” doesn’t imply that we are better or higher than the other person. In her article, she says:

"Helping incurs debt. When you help someone they owe you one. But serving, like healing, is mutual. There is no debt. I am as served as the person I am serving. When I help I have a feeling of satisfaction. When I serve I have a feeling of gratitude. These are very different things.""

Rabindranath Tagore, the poet and writer from the early 1900’s (the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature) writes:

I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold, service was joy.

This module expands on this theme and includes articles and videos of Rachel Naomi Remen and Jack Kornfield not found elsewhere in the eight-week Palouse Mindfulness course.

Videos and Readings for this module

Fixing vs. Helping - Rachel Naomi Remen [3 min]
Helping, Fixing or Serving? - Rachel Naomi Remen
The Paradox of Practice: When to Sit, When to Serve - Jack Kornfield [36 min]

Excerpts related to this topic

While speaking at a public lecture, Karl Menninger, who was known as the "dean of American psychiatry" in the early 1900s, was asked, “What would you advise someone to do if they felt a nervous breakdown coming on?” Instead of recommending therapy or medication, he responded:

“Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks, find someone in need, and do something for that person.”

- from Greater Good Magazine

Serving is different from helping. Helping is based on inequality; it is not a relationship between equals. When you help you use your own strength to help those of lesser strength. If I'm attentive to what's going on inside of me when I'm helping, I find that I'm always helping someone who's not as strong as I am, who is needier than I am. People feel this inequality. When we help we may inadvertently take away from people more than we could ever give them; we may diminish their self-esteem, their sense of worth, integrity and wholeness. 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 of our experiences. Our limitations serve, our wounds serve, even our darkness can serve. The wholeness in us serves the wholeness in others and the wholeness in life. The wholeness in you is the same as the wholeness in me. Service is a relationship between equals.

Helping incurs debt. When you help someone they owe you one. But serving, like healing, is mutual. There is no debt. I am as served as the person I am serving. When I help I have a feeling of satisfaction. When I serve I have a feeling of gratitude. These are very different things...

Our service serves us as well as others. That which uses us strengthens us. Over time, fixing and helping are draining, depleting. Over time we burn out. Service is renewing. When we serve, our work itself will sustain us.

Service rests on the basic premise that the nature of life is sacred, that life is a holy mystery which has an unknown purpose. When we serve, we know that we belong to life and to that purpose. Fundamentally, helping, fixing and service are ways of seeing life. When you help you see life as weak, when you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. From the perspective of service, we are all connected: All suffering is like my suffering and all joy is like my joy. The impulse to serve emerges naturally and inevitably from this way of seeing.

- from In the Service of Life by Rachel Naomi Remen