Helping vs Serving

For a while now I’ve felt a calling to help people, initially through yoga, but now through hypnotherapy. But what I’ve come to realise is ‘helping’ is the wrong framing, because my desire to help someone means I enter an exchange wanting something from them - I want them to change in some way. This is more selfish than it is selfless. It also intrinsically frames the individual as someone who is in need of help, creating a sense of hierarchy - that they are in some way a victim in the scenario.

But by reframing it as simply being of service to others I’m no longer implicitly victimising them, and I’m no longer wanting them to change - I’m simply offering myself to them in a way that they feel is of use to them, should they choose to accept my invitation. ‘How can I serve you?’

So now I choose to serve, rather than to help.

Failure

“You have to be willing to engage in erroneous experimentation” - Jordan B. Peterson

I’ve been thinking a lot about failure since having to press pause on my cycle, and, like all things in this paradoxical life, I think it’s really about how you choose to frame it.

On the one hand I did fail, because I didn’t achieve what I set out to do. On the other hand, I didn’t fail, because I committed myself to moving away from the position I knew in which I didn’t want to remain.

Every step, even an erroneous one, is movement away from where you started, and helps you recalibrate towards where you should be heading, even if you don’t yet know where that is.

Failure is a necessary step in learning, and as such shouldn’t be feared, but welcomed. Arguably failure is still success, unless you choose not to learn from it.

I’m choosing to embrace this experience and learn from it, and to remember that if I’m always/easily achieving my goals then I’m not challenging myself enough.

Change

Change comes from within…but also it doesn’t. It’s said you don’t need anything to heal yourself - it already exists within you. This is true, but also it’s not. If you already knew how to fix yourself you would be able to do it. The reason we seek external help is because everything we already have available to us from within us isn’t doing the job. The solution then needs to be outside of what is already known. The resolution, however, doesn’t come by adding things, but by revelation. It’s true that everything we need already exists within us (we’re the infinite power of God given form), but sometimes we need someone with a perspective other than our own to help reveal the parts of ourselves we’ve been completely oblivious to. Newton’s first law states a body will remain still or in a constant state of motion unless acted upon by an external force - we will remain stuck in the pattern that’s not serving us unless influenced by something other than the us who created the pattern. So, paradoxically, sometimes the change that comes from within, and has always been within, requires something from without to help reveal it to us.