Are you insisting on being served?

My relationship with other people is an opportunity to be of service and not an opportunity to be served. –Russell Brand

This has nothing to do with doing other people’s bidding or not having boundaries or a backbone.

It does have to do with shifting this idea that someone can make us happy. That we need someone to complete us or make us feel important, and when they don’t fulfill that, they are the ones causing the misery, and it’s time to find someone else to make us happy.

That’s a lot to put on others.

How would it be if we can see the other person as doing as best they can as we are? As feeling as logical, valid and clear in their thinking as we do about ours, as needing as much as we need, and often feeling as vulnerable as we do? Imagine that they can’t be fulfilled by fulfilling our needs or by going along with our belief systems. That would be their answer as much as it would be ours to abandon ours for theirs.

How would it be if we not elevate ourselves to be more evolved than they are, and if when our buttons are pushed, we got that it’s something we need to work on ourselves (and not for them to correct for us)? And what if in the meanwhile we serve the other person’s deeper hunger, which is the same as ours: to be seen, heard and accepted just the way we are today in all of our joys, craziness and sufferings?

Serving them doesn’t mean that we do their work for them or drop the healthy boundaries necessary to protect your own inner space and integrity, but it might mean that their space is respected by you just the same so that they can see themselves enough to do their own work rather than to stay busy defending against, or coping through, us and others crashing though their space. You might serve them by simply acknowledging the challenge of that.