At one time or another, I believe it is important to care for another soul. You see, at the very heart of service we understand that the act of caring is always mutually beneficial. We understand that in nurturing others we are always caring for ourselves, and this understanding fundamentally shifts the way we provide care...
"Compassion," when literally translated means "suffering with others" and "with'" is the most important word, because it implies belonging.
"Companion” is "one who travels with another."
So in this relationship there is no guide, there is no healer and no one healed; we simply accompany one another. We are simply walking through birth and death holding hands. If we are paying attention as we walk into the room of someone dying, we immediately understand, in a visceral way, just how precarious this life is. As we understand that, we also come to see how precious it is.
When we keep death close at hand, we become less compulsive about our desires, we take ourselves and our ideas a little less seriously, and we let go more easily. We become more open to generosity and to love. Working with the dying will make us kinder to one another.
In the face of death everything we normally identify with ourselves will either be stripped away by illness or given up gracefully – but it all goes. "I'm a father, I'm a mother, I'm a hospice worker" – whatever our notion about our identity, it will go.
Helping incurs debt. When you help someone, they owe you. But service is mutual. When I help I have a feeling of satisfaction, but when I serve I have a feeling of gratitude. Serving is also different to fixing. We fix broken pipes, we don't fix people. When I set about fixing another person, it's because I see them as broken. Fixing is a form of judgment that separates us from one another; it creates a distance. So fundamentally, helping, fixing and serving are ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak; when you fix, you see life as broken; and when you serve, you see life as whole.
When we serve in this way, we understand that this person's suffering is also my suffering that their joy is also my joy and then the impulse to serve arises naturally -- our natural wisdom and compassion presents itself quite simply. A server knows that they're being used and has the willingness to be. When we serve, we are always in the service of wholeness. Caring for those who are suffering, whether or not they are dying, wakes us up. It opens up our hearts and our minds. It opens us up to the experience of this wholeness that I speak of.
More often than not, though, we are caught in the habitual roles and ideas that keep us separate from each other. Lost in some reactive mind state, busy trying to protect our self-image, we cut ourselves off and isolate ourselves from that which would really serve and inform our work.
To be people who heal, we have to be willing to bring our passion to the bedside; our own wounds, our fear, our full selves. Yes, it is the exploration of our own suffering that forms a bridge to the person we're serving.
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