There is a tragic misunderstanding of what it is to be kind and helping others in our society. More often than not, it involves us feeling “bad” and trying hard to do things for them thinking that by alleviating all their burdens we are relieving them and helping them get better. Unfortunately, the opposite is often true. What we are doing instead is adding the weight of our own negative feelings to their own inner negativity about themselves. Our taking concrete actions to help them, subconsciously sends the message they are unable to do it themselves and only serves to temporarily alleviate our own guilty feelings towards them. In the end, the opposite result is achieved for them and for ourselves.
Have you noticed how people we try to help often become more and more dependent and less and less autonomous? Often it is not until we are completely drained and weakened ourselves that we realize we have done them and ourselves no service at all. In a society and culture that values the doing more than the being, our actions are often the first thing we resort to in lending a hand to others in need; when in fact, it is imperative to attend to our own negative feelings before attempting any action whatsoever.
Come from your heart.
Coming from the heart does not mean jumping into action, it means turning to our own inner feelings, acknowledging them, allowing them to be felt, accepting their existence, and then releasing them by surrendering and letting go. When we feel “bad” – meaning sad, hurt, fearful, anxious, etc — we need to first stop and surrender all such negative emotions towards them and the situation they are in. We cannot be of help to others if we have not cleared our own emotional plate, our own energy, where they are concerned. It is only when we feel detached enough — yes, you read it right, detached and unaffected — from their pain (and of course ours too) and can see their light and grace and perfection that we can actually be of help to them. The image we have of them in our inner eye is what is affecting their disposition. Our pity will not heal them.
This requires us to first and foremost recognize that we -- like everything else -- are energy beings. Our thoughts and feelings are energy. We are all ONE energy field and we all share and tap into that one universal energy continually. Harboring negativity within ourselves will trickle down to the rest of the field and affect it in a harmful way. The reverse is also true. Feeling love and gratitude and perfection within us — beingthat love energy — will also seep through and affect everything and everyone around us and far away from us. Energy knows neither distance nor time. That’s the gift of true healers, from Jesus Christ to Mother Teresa.
A Personal Story
A few years ago, when my mother began feeling down and slowly lost her appetite for life, my sister and I immediately went on a war path to make her feel better. We did everything we could think of to help her feel loved and taken care of. As we took on more and more of the tasks she used to do herself, she became increasingly lethargic and asked for even more from us, wavering between feeling guilty for asking for our assistance and complaining we were not doing enough. The more we treated her as an invalid the more she became one. The more she told us she needed the more we did and the more her initial gratitude turned into dissatisfaction and endless complaining. Have you noticed how sick people can turn into selfish tyrants over time?
We on the other hand wavered between fatigue, guilt, anger and frustration but always resorted to taking more action: more doctors’ visits, more pleading and moralizing, more pills, more therapies, more reading and internet searching, more assistance from third parties. We even took her back to Morocco so she could have an attendant around the clock, thinking we would get some respite.
Instead, she felt we abandoned her and got even sicker, with a deteriorating immune system and symptoms that nothing and no one could alleviate. We in turn, plagued with incomprehension and helplessness, left everything behind and moved to Morocco to be with her and help her get her health back. We literally turned our lives upside down taking the most drastic actions imaginable, and in the end, within a few months, she died at 65, freeing herself from the torture her life had become. And we fell apart. It took us years to finally make peace with that terrible episode in our past and build ourselves back into conscious beings. All along we had been responding to our negativity because we had no clue we were creating the very opposite of what we were yearning for.
It took us a long time to understand that our resistance and struggle were in no way helping her but making her worse and worse. Our empathy and devotion was as destructive as if we had been giving her poison pills. Our definition of love was so twisted that we kept looking at the frail, sick woman we loved with fear and pity and helped bring more pain to her.
Unconditional Love
When we look at someone we seek to help and only see their sickness, their need, their lack, and their pain, in truth we do not help them. To help them we must love them and love is unconditional… Meaning their condition should not affect the way we look at them or at the very least not the only thing we see in them. When we are looking at their diminished selves and not their light and perfection, we are making them less not more. We are not healing them. We reduce them in our inner eye to that image and their vision of themselves gets detrimentally reinforced as well. Their mental and physical abilities will continue to harden until they’re only shadows of their old selves. This is a downward spiral witnessed over and over again by families and friends.
We all know that a positive attitude helps patients heal faster and that is true for the entourage of the patient as well. If the loved ones are feeling awful and pessimistic, they are not helping. They need to clear their own negativity before even paying a visit or making a call to someone who is not well. Do not show your love by taking away the things they used to do for themselves. Do not treat them like invalids. Instead keep seeing them able and strong. Your lighter energy will help speed their healing. That’s what true love is, that’s what unconditional love is.
That which we focus on – good or bad - will always strengthen. So choose to look at what it is you wish to see instead; even if you have to pretend at first. Your beliefs and feelings will make it so.
That is because the Universe holds no judgment. And neither should we.
That is because the Universe holds no judgment. And neither should we.
