The Heart of Service

Tags

awareness, duty, privilege, service

As best as I can surmise, today’s twenty minute stint was perhaps my shortest weekly walk on the trail in quite a while. The weather front was turning rain to sleet, which meant that it was cold, blustery, pellets were coming at me sideways from all directions and it was as grey and foreboding feeling as winter can be imagined.

And yet I wasn’t deterred because it is these weekly walks that have become my inspiration for the ideas that turn into the weekly blog post which I often write after the walk. The clarity, lightness and simplicity that flow from walking in solitude and observing the dynamics of flora and fauna creates a portal through which the thoughts flow into words on the page.

At the start of today’s walk, I set the intention to invite feelings and memories related to ‘service’ into the heart. Swami Vivekananda talked about the notion of ‘service as duty’ and how we often engage in service as a means to fulfill our sense of duty. In 12th grade, we actually had a ‘subject’ called SUPW — socially useful productive work — which was on the schedule for one hour a week. As a teenager, I used to often scoff at the idea that one could do any meaningful ‘service’ in one hour a week. As is often the case, I was wrong. It was during SUPW that I discovered the work of organizations like UNICEF, and gained some awareness of how privileged my life was as compared to millions of children around the world.

As I walked the trail around the pond on the soggy grass, skirting temporary lakelets created by yesterday’s heavy rains, I remembered my ‘service’ projects in engineering school. The Saturday morning hours set aside to meet the requirements of volunteer hours for the National Service Scheme (NSS) brought familiarity with the Red Cross, learning about blood donations and such. However, the sense of ‘service as duty’ remained.

It wasn’t until my visit to a ‘nursing home for disabled children’ on an NSS Saturday that my heart towards service finally shifted. The hands-on and heart-filling experiences of seeing, listening, simply sitting and walking with those with life-long impairments, mostly children of my age and below, was transformational. The heart-shift meant that I couldn’t wait for Saturday mornings to arrive so that I could go visit the home and spend time with those that I had formed mini-friendships with. Service transformed from a sense of ‘duty’ to a sense of ‘doing good’ — over time, the one benefiting most from the ‘goodness’ was actually me.

At the halfway mark on the trail, where the wind had died down because the path was flanked by thickets of trees, I took a pause and reflected on my experiences with service through SUPW and the NSS. It is said that there are no small acts of kindness, and I am convinced that it was those small acts of giving that opened my heart and mind to the power of small acts of service. To paraphrase Swami Vivekananda, the world doesn’t need our help — we need the world in order to exercise our ability to serve. Our heart needs the world, so that it can feel the joy of serving and eventually arrive at a state where we feel that service becomes a privilege, not mere duty.

It is said that in the midst of our serving, when our heart is fully immersed, we become observers of the One who is truly serving and the One who is truly being served. Service thus becomes the unifier of people.

We realize that the day’s walk is over, the storm has becalmed us and it is time to return home to warm up with a cup of green tea and share our heart of service with the world.

Thank you for serving. Namaste.

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly twitter chat with the #SpiritChat community on Sunday, Jan 15 at 9amET / 2pmGMT. We will pause to remember Martin Luther King, Jr and discuss the topic of ‘heart of service’. Namaste – @AjmaniK

The heart of the rose has a unique aptitude for service…

On Duty and Service

Tags

action, duty, service

In the first post of 2018, I had talked about the XYZ of spiritual actions. During the weekly Sunday conversation, the question asked by some of the community members was – “in some way, aren’t all actions spiritual in nature?”. Some posed the question a different way – “are there any actions that are not of a spiritual nature?”.

These beautiful questions led me to consider the ideas of service and duty, as related to our actions. I went back to re-read some portions of my dog-eared “Karma Yoga” book that contains several essays by Swami Vivekananda, describing “The Yoga of Action”. Some of the essays therein are titled “Each is great in his own place”, “The Secret of Work”, “What is Duty”, and more. You get the idea – it is my go-to companion when I have a question about “action” that needs some clarity.

The essay titled “what is duty” delves into how the definition of “duty” can vary, based upon our upbringing, the values we are imbued with, the role(s) that we may be playing in the society that we may currently live in, and so on. The nature of duty is that it is flexible, and that it varies in time and space, as we live our lives. Among all the varying hues of “what is our duty”, there seems to be universal agreement on one idea of duty:

“Do not injure any being – not injuring any being is virtue”. – Vivekananda

The notion of “duty” can also create internal friction. What is my duty as a brother? As a father? As a husband? As a son? As a volunteer? As a spiritual seeker? The answer that I give to each of these questions often determines the nature and the attitude with which I perform my daily actions. Some mornings, particularly when it is oh-so-cold outside, I would rather sleep in than face my duties of the day. So how do I overcome this internal friction? One answer is to remember the gift of pure love and joy for the work that a sense of duty has brought to me. When I learn to act with unselfishness, without motive, the coarse friction of duty can quickly dissolve into love – like the grains of brown sugar in a cup of warm tea…

Yet it is work done through the sense of duty that leads us to work without any idea of duty; when work will become worship – nay, something higher – then work will be done for its own sake” – Vivekananda

And so it is that a sense of duty can subtly transform into a sense of service. Heaviness (duty) transforms into lightness (service) when viewed through the lens of selflessness. A sense of service elevates us from a lower plane (of existence) to a higher plane, where the Self can shine through. How do we transform, rise? It is by doing the duty next to us, in whatever role that we find ourselves. We gain strength by doing so. And we go from strength to strength, to higher states, by doing our actions with as much love, joy and selflessness as we can imbue into them.

Our attitude of service (before self), even as we keep doing whatever happens to be our duty, can thus becomes the secret of work.

What are your thoughts on duty and service? What has been your experience with the two? Are they different or are they the same for you? When we develop an attitude of service (towards others), do we really help them or do we actually help our own selves?

Kumud @AjmaniK

P.S. We continue our ‘action-based’ theme for this New Year of 2018 with a conversation about ‘Duty and Service’ – Sunday, January 14th 2018 at 9amET/2pmUTC on twitter. Please join us! If you have ideas, questions or suggestions for the #SpiritChat community in 2018, please share in the comments. Namaste, and thank you! -Kumud.

In the middle of a heavy winter, a light spring broke through… as duty seemed to transform to service…