ARTICLE

Why You Shouldn't Try to "Help" Others

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Spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl explains how "helping" others creates more separation between us while "responding" allows us to cocreate our future as equal partners.

By Thomas Hübl


If we don’t want to be part of the current dynamic of fear and polarization in our culture, we need to see how we are part of it on the inside. When we’re polarized inside ourselves, we are contributing to it. We need to be aware when we’re transferring things onto the culture and hosting them inside us. There’s a game of transference and projection being played out right now, and that can be our call to action.

A call to action is a natural response, but when we respond, we’re not acting to “help” anyone. If I help you, I'm not seeing you as an equal partner in life. When we do our work we are not doing it to help others, we are doing it because it's our vocation, it's our passion. We love what we do every day because we love to do it, not because we help anybody. We are all grown up people and grown ups don't "help" each other—we relate to each other and we respond to each other.

When there is something in the world that calls me to action, then it's the natural response in me to be part of something. I'm just expressing the energy that is my contract with God. The intelligence in us expresses through our vocation. This is important because then we see everybody in the world on the same level.

This is where many people get hooked: You hear many people say, “The world is in pain; it needs me.” No, the world doesn't need you. The world doesn't need more “conscious people.” That is just an entanglement in the process. What is true is that we are being called to respond to the current situation. When people respond by helping, they recreate their family system in the world. We don't need this.

What we do need is a moment-to-moment responsiveness, and then the pain in the world doesn’t overwhelm us. Being overwhelmed by the pain of the world is a regressive function. When you are overwhelmed, you’re not contributing anything; you are just stuck in this younger, underdeveloped part of yourself.

Where is your calling right now? Can you answer it and do the work wherever you are called to do it without getting overwhelmed by the pain of the world? You of course will feel the pain, but you won’t lose yourself to it. In this world I may play the violin and you play the piano. We are called to different things. But together we are an orchestra.

I can trust where your call to action is, but it’s a responding, not a helping. We need to check our motivation and be clear about this. We want our spiritual practice to make us more grounded, more present, more here, and more responsive. When I own my stuff and am conscious of my own interior, then I am a partner of the world, not a helper of the world. I am a partner in a cocreative process. Then we will have cultural systems that are real partnerships and collaborations. That’s what we need.