Service Orientation? 🙇

How do we orient toward service? Service is the spiritual path of liberation for so many saints and sages throughout history. It connects us, helps us zoom out and move beyond our self-fixations. There are better and worse ways to help, and as Relateful practitioners we’ve seen how unwanted advice can obscure truth and love.

I’d like to talk about it more as a global community/network/ecosystem. I think we do a good job allowing ourselves to value our uniqueness and recognize that our individual needs matter. Orienting ourselves to generosity will enhance this. I’m reminded of how feminist Carol Gilligan describes the ethical maturation path as one of increasing spheres of care and inclusion, from egocentric, to ethnocentric, to worldcentric, and beyond. 

I don’t know what “service” means and there’s a lot of room for interpretation, mistakes, self-negation, a.k.a learning. We’re already doing a lot that we can do more to highlight. I’m proud that our organization offers free memberships to anyone, and am delighted by how many people are taking advantage of that since we launched it a few months ago (a few hundred!). We seem to be able to do it while still being in relationship with the modern economy, both in sustainability and mainstream measures of value. I’m grateful that my team encouraged us to take this risk.

Are there other risks we can take individually, or collectively, to weave service into the fabric of our practice? To move beyond solely self-interest? What direction is the service towards? My suggestion: Unconditional love.

With love, Jordan