Reading Archive (How To Be Helpful)
Serving Is Different From Helping And Fixing
Rachel Naomi Remen
In recent years the question how can I help? has become meaningful to many people. But perhaps there is a deeper question we might consider. Perhaps the real question is not how can I help? but how ca...
The Dalai Lama: Why I Laugh
The Dalai Lama
I have been confronted with many difficulties throughout the course of my life, and my country is going through a critical period. But I laugh often, and my laughter is contagious. When people ask me ...
Cultivating An Eagle Mind
Matthieu Ricard
Human qualities often come in clusters. Altruism, inner peace, strength, freedom, and genuine happiness thrive together like the parts of a nourishing fruit. Likewise, selfishness, animosity, and fear...
In Giving I Connect With Others
Isabel Allende
I have lived with passion and in a hurry, trying to accomplish too many things. I never had time to think about my beliefs until my 28-year-old daughter Paula fell ill. She was in a coma for a year an...
Emptiness And Compassion Go Hand In Hand
Norman Fischer
The word “emptiness” is a fair translation of shunyata, but it has the drawback of sounding negative, even despairing. The Chinese, searching for a word that might translate shunyata...
Only Service Heals
Rachel Naomi Remen
If helping is an experience of strength, fixing is an experience of mastery and expertise. Service, on the other hand, is an experience of mystery, surrender and awe. A fixer has the illusion of being...
Spiritual Activism
Michael Singer
I'm an environmentalist and I'm very much into cars that get high mileage and don't pollute, and I see that somebody's driving a Hummer. It's a classic example, somebody's driv...
A Heart Of Warmth Is Not Something Impossible
Tenzin Palmo
What does love mean? In the West, we mistake the meaning of love; we bandy the word around all the time, from “I love ice-cream” to “I love God”. But we mistake love for desire...
Sense Of Self Is An Essential Skill Of Mind
Paul Fleischman
Many articles in the Western press have confused the Buddha’s idea of “anatta,” the absence of an eternal soul, with the idea that meditation should rid you of your ordinary sense of...
The Hardest Lesson
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
The sole purpose of life is to grow. The ultimate lesson is learning how to love and be loved unconditionally. There are millions of people on Earth who are starving. There are millions who are ho...
Mushin
Vernon Kitabu Turner
The idea of marital arts was that a person who is working for the good of humanity does not develop an aggressive nature but a peaceful center, and his purpose is to defend, not to attack -- to defend...
Magic of Service
Bo Lozoff
When we live in harmony with the dharma, or the great natural law, everything we do is an act of service. Wherever we are, whatever we do with our time, were lightening the load of the whole planet ju...
Everyday Heroes
Reader Digest
Nancy Rivard lost her 54-year-old father suddenly to bladder cancer on Christmas Eve 1983. "I wondered what life was about that it could be taken from us like that," she recalls. "I began to evalua...
Service
Paul Gorman & Ram Dass
Separateness and unity. How interesting that these root causes, revealed in the expereience of helping, turn out to be what most spiritual traditions define as the fundamental issue of life itself. ...
Well-Knotted Rope
John Templeton
There is a scene in the marvelous movie Lost Horizons, in which a group of travelers become stranded in the Himalayas. They are met miraculously by a guide who provides them with warm clothing. The...