Helping Yourself Or Helping Others

Should we try in our spiritual development to focus on ourself and develop ourself, or should we aim at helping others. This talk aims at bringing to light how this does not need to be such a black and white question and how helping ourselves and others can merge in a natural and expanding way.

Transcript

Reflections I want to talk about the question whether we should help ourselves or help others. And it's a very black and white question. But if we start to look into it more and start to practice with either one of them or both. You can see that they are much more connected than we might have thought before. So if we decide to focus more on ourselves, We might be analyzing our own mind and trying to consider how we can develop. We might be focused on meditating a certain amount of time or a certain quality. And in many ways there is legitimacy to this. Also, Even from the point of helping others, We need to help ourselves first to a degree. If we have not developed at all our own mind, Our own spiritual practice, It is very difficult to help others from that. So then, Should we focus on helping others? When we look around in the world and we see other people need help, Sometimes it's just very simple things. Holding open a door, Helping somebody carry something. But it might also go deeper. We see deeper things in society or in the people around us that are sometimes missing or lacking. We can consider if we can develop those things and also share them with others too, Qualities that we might be missing. And sometimes it really feels like a black and white choice. And there is something to it that in the mind we can focus more on one or the other. But my experience has been that spending time in both modes is very helpful. And somehow when we do that, They also come together more closely. Especially when the way that we want to help others and are able to help others is connected to the way we help ourselves. We identify in ourselves things that we appreciate, That we want to develop. We want to develop the mind to be more calm, Stable, More free, More wise. And actually we can see other people are intent on the same thing or might benefit from the same thing too. So then they all of a sudden are not so far in the sense that they are two different things, But they can start to support each other. Because when we focus on ourselves and we are doing our practice, It can sometimes become very dry, The heart is missing. Every day we're grinding and working on ourselves, But it feels dry and can become painful. And then it can be very skillful to connect it back to helping others, So to a degree that's also just a mental movement. So even just sometimes when we meditate or we practice we work on our own mind, Just to really bring others to mind and do it for their benefit, Knowing that if we have ourselves a more stable, More calm mind, If we are able to develop a degree of wisdom and discernment and even if we don't try, That will benefit others too, The people that are around us and are affected by us. But of course we can take steps beyond that, So really reaching out and making ourselves available, Offering support if people wish for it. Maybe sharing our reflections or sharing our experiences in meditation and motivating others to work on the same, If they are interested already. And then they become two things that really support and strengthen each other. So on the one hand we have our own development that we are working on, The things that we are trying to put in place in our own mind, And then they are really connected to the things that we want to contribute and offer to other people too. And they just really become strengthening of each other. And then it becomes clear that there is not so much the focus on either being completely independent or completely dependent, But that there is something like interdependency as well. So we need help of a lot of different people in our lives and in the same way we do really need to be independent at the same time too. So we also need to learn to depend as much as we can on ourselves as well. But it's never in a way that it will be just one or the other. They can really strengthen each other and it can really bring a lot of benefit if we can help others. But if we just focus only on helping others it might be that we forget to really develop ourselves, Our own mind in a way that can really benefit others. In a deeper and deeper way. So it's an interplay between the two. I think that's what I wanted to share, Especially for myself. It has been the insight after a time of really focusing on myself and trying to develop myself, Just becoming more aware of how often I need others. But also that insight that the practice can become very dry and even just the mental movement to try to help others. And we might not always have the opportunity. Of course, When we have the opportunity, When we are in a situation where other people wish for our help in the things that we also care about in our own development, That's a very big deal. Big plus, Very good synergy. But for me it has helped also the inside to see that even if maybe those things are not there, So those very specific opportunities to help and give back from the things we care about, If we develop those things anyway, Then people will be impacted, Even if they don't ask for it or we don't have a specific moment or time that we try to share it with them, Just by our own being, The way we are, The way we are operating and acting. If we do the right things, It will always benefit others too. So I wanted to share that for your reflection. And then hereby we come to the end of this recording.