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Expressing Yourself through Service

There is much to be said about selfless service. Selfless service requires a number of ingredients including personal strength, intelligence, experience and resources. Personal strength enables us to support others. Intelligence helps us to perceive accurately what needs to be done. Experience brings the wisdom and patience to go the distance required to achieve results.

Most importantly, it takes an open heart to be of selfless service. An open heart helps us to connect with others, to feel their needs. The heart is the storehouse of passion and courage, the elements that empower us to step up to the challenge of how to be of service.

Being of service – a course never studied

While our innate nature is to be of service, early social training rarely fosters this part of us. More commonly, material success is prized above all other successes. Giving is taught as something that is to be measured and balanced with taking, while the concept of selfless service is relegated to religious devotees and healers who are seen to live outside normal social structures. While this concept protects us to some degree in early life, by motivating us toward personal achievement, it doesn’t lead to understanding the true nature of service and it’s many benefits.

It takes a highly developed person to give without calculating the ROI (return on investment) on our actions.

What is not asked of us

Generally, the demands of life diminish us. Many of our social interactions and much of our working life calls upon a small part of us to act. For example, we may work long hours and have a much to do, but how often do the many tasks at hand ask us to invest our whole heart and mind into them? Although the popular thought is that we work too hard and too long, it is useful to consider that perhaps society’s exhaustion is due to that fact that so few people are called to give the best of themselves – their higher intelligence, their deeper feelings, their personal unique expression, and their own life experience.

We are called to do small things, not great things, to ponder minor issues, not major matters, to slot into pre-existing structures, but rarely to contribute to creating new ones. While it is essential for society to have some structure, the shadow side is where structures, especially those that are rigid, limit our creativity. This can have a destructive effect. We suffer all kinds of ailments, physical, emotional and mental, from lack of expression of creativity. We rust and decay from lack of use.

If we allow this mode of being to seep into relationship, where we only engage a small aspect of ourselves, we can become very frustrated and bored. This approach rarely satisfies the deeper self. We need to make an effort for relationship to move out of the mechanical into something real and truly satisfying. 

Opportunities to be of service

If we surrender to society’s conditioning we may miss many golden opportunities to give of our deeper selves, to give selflessly. If we move beyond our conditioning, awakening to our immense potential and diverse talents, we may discover that the greatest treasure of lies within us and that service is a way of exploring and expressing who we are.

Many famous masters of service freed themselves of their social conditioning, woke to their talents and found their own unique way to serve. Many swapped their job for a vocation, many transformed their profession or personal wealth into service, brought awareness to marginalized groups and so on.

You don’t have to be famous to give selfless service. In fact the path can be much easier if you are not.

You don’t have to make sweeping changes that others admire – or even know about. You only have to perceive and appreciate what you have to give, connect with your heart, then begin to experiment.  

Ajapa Japa - the ego modifier

One of the best methods to attain the higher awareness required for authentic, selfless service is Ajapa Japa meditation. Ajapa Japa meditation forges a path between our individual self and our universal self, and allows us to act with an awareness of the universal within our individual life. Ajapa Japa meditation reduces the power of the ego to act by itself without any consideration to the big picture and to the lives of others. The practice develops and hones the intuition.

Ajapa Japa meditation is the foundation practice of many spiritual traditions (in slightly modified forms), including Tantra, Daoism, Kabala and Christian mysticism. The practice is given different names in each tradition but the essential act of uniting the individual self with the universal self through the major energy channels is shared. The practice creates a vibrant inner centre that energetically fuels the stream of higher awareness.

The cohesion between our individual and universal self is integral to expanding ourselves beyond our social conditioning, awakening the heart, and to our perceiving the breadth of what we really have to give.

The Ajapa Japa CD | MP3 is systematic training.

Author: Jayne Stevenson

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Becoming Heart Present in Service - Free Mp3 Lecture

By Dr Swami Shankardev Saraswati

This lecture discusses our capacity to give true service and how to manage the ego in the process. It discusses the nature of the mind and how to connect our mind to a more developed conscious state of being. It discusses how even in enlightened states the ego still exists and needs to be managed, that ego is only eradicated at the very last stage of human evolution.

Subscribe to the eMagazine to get free access to this lecture.