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July 27 - September 2, 2023
What if, in addition to rewarding those who can identify problems, we also began to train and incentivize our children to develop constructive and compassionate solutions?
When our activism is without creativity, and when our outrage is not grounded in true love and connection with those in need, our actions will inevitably be short-lived.
The primary outcome of seva as a way of life is perhaps the most valuable one for the modern age: the ability to stay engaged with the world—even when confronted with injustice—without self-defeating rage and without sacrificing one’s inner peace and happiness.
A way of life that prioritizes love, sincere caring, and seva—as a practice—gives us agency. Freeing ourselves from the chains of empty performance makes it harder to point to the systems and people around us and shrug our shoulders;
Like Jaswant Singh Khalra’s parable of the lantern, seva sets us free to call on ourselves to do the right thing based on what is actually within our control, to accept what we cannot change with fortitude, and...
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Seva as Mindfulness
One of,if not, THE SINGLE MOST SIGNIFICANT chapter to 29year old Dev and requires a reread and personal reflection.
Claiming to love our neighbor is different from actually loving our neighbors. Whereas sincere caring builds relationships and cultivates connection, our empty claims damage us in ways we don’t realize.
We damage relationships. When we announce to people that we care about them but do not show up in their time of need, we breach their trust.
When we come to believe that empty words and actions are the limits of sincere caring, it becomes difficult to push beyond these boundaries. We reduce our capacity to experience a more expansive kind of love, a love that is fulfilling and enriching rather than desolate and transactional.
Seva is an antidote for our malaise, because when we ground our lives in love and selflessness, we will be moved away from empty speech and actions and toward authenticity.
The good news is that our incongruous ways of thinking are taught, not inherited. If we have learned to live this way, we can also unlearn it and learn something new.
Embracing seva is an intervention and a tool at the same time. When we can accept its wisdom for improving our lives, we can use it as a daily mindfulness practice to help us live with more authenticity.
power and service go hand in hand: We each have our own forms of power, and we can each deploy that power for the betterment of our world. This is servant-leadership.
Seva is both the natural expression of love and the way to cultivate it. It’s the goal and the practice, the destination and the way to it. More directly, seva is love.
This is the true investment (sacha sauda).
This is how the Sikh idea of seva bridges the realms of spirituality and justice.
There is no heavenly realm set apart from the physical realm. There is no sacred space set apart from polluted space. There are no chosen people set apart from the rest of us. Everything is one, ik oankar—and our lives must be also.
The tradition calls on every Sikh to live as a saint-soldier (sant-sipahi) and to practice service and spiritual cultivation (seva-simran).
What we see here, and what we see all throughout their teachings, is a consistent attempt to destroy our senses of duality. By bringing together these worlds that seem at odds with each other, the Sikh tradition is reminding us of our inextricable oneness. Spiritual cultivation and social contribution are not mutually exclusive or even practically separable; they go hand in hand.
How are you using your gifts—time, talent, and treasure—to help serve those around you? To put it more bluntly: What might you do to become less of a burden on this earth and help bring more light into the world?
that if I could somehow reach a certain level of perfection, then I would start feeling like I belonged.
Belonging comes with connection and sincere caring.
If we embrace our imperfections as part of our collective humanity and can learn to see humility as an asset rather than a liability, then we will no longer be confined by the illusion of perfection.
When we understand seva as a spiritual practice that can serve us as much as it serves others, then we realize that we don’t need to separate the two;
to engage in seva is to refine our inner being and to help others.
If we wait to achieve perfection to contribute, we will sit around working on ourselves forever, no more relevant than those ascetics (siddhas) in...
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although everything in life looks like a give-and-take, there’s a better way to interact with the world; that we expect receiving to bring us happiness, but our hearts don’t work this way; that life is abundance and true fulfillment comes in caring for those we love.
“The Giver keeps on giving, while the takers get tired of taking.”
