Helping Others

One of the best gifts you can give to another person is to work on yourself.  So often I hear, "I have no time for this meditation stuff.  I have work to do."  Or, "I need to be helping others and not sitting around meditating."  What I have found is that people who do not work on themselves, ferret out their shortcomings, their needs for success, power, control, esteem, and self-centered fears, are really less help to others because their motives for "helping" are so dysfunctional.  If we work on ourselves then I believe that we bring a better self to the service of others.  So in this Covid time of social distancing, staying at home, it need not be "useless" in terms of being out there to fix the world.  We can have more time to work on spiritual viruses that denude us of being our better self.  When we do a service for another, we don't just do the service, the task, we bring ourselves into the encounter.  If you were looking for a job interview you would clean up the outsides.  Well, cleaning up the insides is a job too.  I am not in this monastery being of zero service to the hurting world out there.  I am working on me and then practicing it with the monastic community.  I have a lot of work to do...on me.  How about you?