How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflections on Service

by Ram Dass

the Witness observes how this play of motives and needs produces doubt, yet another component of burnout. We doubt ourselves because the messages of our heart and our mind seem so at odds … or because we’re not really at peace with our reasons for our actions in the first place … or because we seem to need so much in return from what we thought was supposed to be a “selfless” activity. We hear ourselves thinking, “Maybe this isn’t the right place after all” … “Maybe I don’t have anything left to offer” … “Maybe I need to be helping myself.” A thousand maybes, which taint each act and undermine that whole-hearted participation in service which itself would dissolve the doubt.

some of the factors that wear us down we seem to have brought in with us at the outset. Along with our clean shirt, good intentions, and eagerness to serve, we’ve carried to work a number of needs and expectations. Sometimes burnout is simply our motives coming home to roost.

if we can stay grounded in the essential unjudging character of the Witness … if we can just hold on and listen … we can draw some useful conclusions and move further towards a greater sense of perspective.

By dispassionately acknowledging our personal needs, we lessen their grip on our actions. More and more we simply observe rather than identify with our motives. It’s not so much that we’re trying to push them away; denial buys us no peace. Rather, we’re loosening our attachment to our motives by stepping behind them. It’s not that they aren’t at play; we’re simply offstage watching. As this happens, our motives seem to lose some of the mischievous, unpredictable power of their shadowy existence. From this vantage point we’re more able to catch sight of some need or expectation as it strives to move a situation to its own gratification, setting us up for potential frustration. We can simply note it, not get lost in it, and continue about our work with greater freedom. By simply witnessing the character and conflict of our reasons for helping out, then, we are making room for an essential change of perspective. Our actions are less hostage to our needs. We can call upon a deeper, more universal source of action, one that is steady, reliable, less likely to burn out. “We love each other. That’s enough.”

we’ve got to get them to see: “My wife is so depressed. I really have to take her aside after the kids are asleep and show her what she’s doing to herself.”

As we watch ourselves going off to work, then, it becomes a little like reading The Little Engine That Could. Up the mountain: “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” Coming down: “I thought I could, I thought I could, I thought I could.” Model train, maybe … but always climbing mountains … likely to run down sooner or later. But all this can be witnessed. The same observation that made it possible for us to note our reasons for acting can catch us in the process of identifying ourselves as the actor. We recognize how we’re “taking things personally.” We see how our self-esteem is riding on a particular job. It’s clear how invested we are in a project, how each detail must bear our stamp, how we need to check and confirm every step, as if our very sense of identity were at stake. Of course, it can be. But it needn’t be. We’ve performed tasks in other ways than this before. We experience freedom from being the doer in those moments in which we are so at one with our activity (now with this child in the classroom, now with another; now at the bedside of one patient telling jokes, now in the next room hearing someone’s grief) that it simply doesn’t occur to us that we’re “doing” at all. Everything’s just happening. We’re all action.

It’s not always our efforts that burn us out; it’s where the mind is standing in relation to them. The problem is not the work itself but the degree of our identification with it. It’s doers who burn out. But we needn’t always be doers. For as the process of witnessing becomes stronger—as we stay with it despite our reactions to what is being revealed—a subtle shift begins to take place in the direction of perspective and freedom. If we persevere, our identification with the Witness grows while our attachment to being the doer seems to fall away. Quite remarkably, moreover, we also notice that while our identification as the doer is falling away, much is still being accomplished. We’re still setting about our work, perhaps even more productively. It’s just that we’re not so personally identified with it any more. We see that in this state we’re less likely to be frustrated, to feel rejected, to doubt ourselves, to burn out.

We can enjoy the Witness’s revelations about the law and order of action even as we participate in the acting. It is as if we are functioning happily on two planes of consciousness at once. As a result, there can be peace where there was once agitation, confidence where there was doubt, trust where there was defensiveness and guilt, and abundant energy where there was burnout.