Volunteering
tajmahalo
One of the main things I’ve learned in the last year is: It is always better to volunteer! What I mean by this is that if there are certain experiences coming your way, you can embrace them or resist them. As many of you have no doubt discovered, resistance is painful, but embracing may be a bigger stretch than you can say “yes” to at that moment. Sometimes you can sidestep the whole ball of wax by taking some action which moves you beyond the crossroads you find yourself at, which moves you out of harms way and off in an entirely different direction. It’s as if you have entered another dimension, a parallel universe where that cross roads has become a rotary with new roads branching off in many directions. This is what I am calling volunteering – discovering a previously unseen road and high tailing it down that road without hesitation.
For example, let’s say that you’re a forty year old woman who really wants to have a baby. Your partner of ten years has been reluctant to take on parenthood, but he finally decides he’s ready for it. You’ve been trying to get pregnant for a year and it’s not happening. If you are in resistance you will be stressing out about having waited too long, angry at your partner for ignoring your biological clock, and fearful that you will never get pregnant. You may be contemplating exploring expensive and invasive medical procedures to help things along and worrying about whether they will work and how you will pay for them. You can’t make yourself let go of the whole dream of parenthood and raising a family. Meanwhile, your closest friend who is few years younger than you are accidentally gets pregnant. The father has bolted. Your girlfriend really wants the baby but is afraid of going it alone. You suggest to your partner that you invite her to hook up with the two of you and raise this child together. He agrees, she agrees, and soon you are all attending prenatal education classes and shopping for nursery furniture together. You feel threatened by the growing intimacy between them, and you ask for their support in overcoming your fears. This is volunteering.
Many people commented after I broke my leg that I needed this to slow down, perhaps because I was commenting on how awed and amazed I was by the experience of spending much of the past four months in bed. Or maybe they’d discovered how long it takes to go anywhere when you’re on crutches! But the truth is that I was already slowing down A LOT before I broke my leg. I wanted to slow down and was quite clear that it was necessary. I was voluntarily slowing down. What I was not doing voluntarily was asking for help. I didn’t have to because as long as I was able bodied I was pretty much able to get by without asking for help. Breaking my leg changed all that in a flash. I needed help and not asking for it had immediate and disastrous consequences. If asking for help when I didn’t really need it (volunteering) was hard, asking when I was desperate and didn’t think I could survive getting a “no” was nearly impossible. But I had to. I had no choice. I had to stop taking it personally if someone said no, or said yes but clearly wanted to say no, and just do it. But looking back I can see that it would have been a whole lot easier to voluntarily ask for help with things I felt overwhelmed by when I did have choice. Looking back I can see that taking it personally when someone says “no” or does something harmful to me is not useful. It’s so much simpler to have clear boundaries and not waste energy feeling victimized.
Access: Public
change
August 2008 
A beautiful and very powerful lesson!! Volunteering has a whole new look to it now! Thank you for this additional Light on the word!
Thanks! After I wrote this another meaning for “volunteer” came into my awareness - plants that grow without being officially or intentionally planted are called volunteers …
Interesting that this is not the word we use for human babies who plant themselves without being consciously invited …
Wow! I actually got goosebumps when I read your last line… how absolutely true is that… spirit volunteered through this “without being consciously invited” being! Can you just imagine the work that the being has to share with us!?!?!
It also helps with *me* sorta…. I guess, I must have volunteered, too … I was “unplanned” … hehehe!
Me too. Was unplanned I mean. But also the first baby of my generation born in my whole extended family. So I got a warm welcome even if I volunteered.
I read some years ago in the Right Use of Will books that souls who come in without being invited tend to be very willful - of course! My own experience is that conception does not take place without a subconscious invitation, so perhaps what we are really talking about is who INITIATED this new life. hmmm, initiation is another one of those words …
Volunteering ….
Gives me goose-bumps, too, but of another sort - the “being volunteered” sort.
(OK, is “being volunteered” really possible in cosmic reality?)
Talking in 3D-timeline terms, in my “pre-birth cosmic form” I must have first naivly volunteered to come and do deep (and perhaps difficult) spiritual work to do with healing the “split” between sex and spirit (ie between the denser and the less dense energies of our bodies) in some kind of ”put my hand up in the presence of the angels before I knew what I was doing“-way, only to find that I didn't want to be born (I fought for 36 hrs!) tried to get myself killed as a small kid, etc., etc. Everything was far too “wrong” and “difficult” and “humans didn't really understand..” and so on.
As a child of committed Christian church parents, I (and my sister as well as my parents) would feel obliged to volunteer for things, usually things that we really didn't want to do but felt we “should.” (In my ex-wife's catholic family they were told “offer such things up to God.”) It took me a long time to realise that God often wasn't wanting us to do things that went totally against our passion and reason and why we were here (unless there was something vital to be learnt!!!!)
[Note to any Love's Loop friends -
God = both within and without, microcosmos as macrocosmos!]
So volunteering to go into a space where we are needing to open ourselves COMPLETELY to healing everything that separates us from Oneness and Love and Peace without exceptions, brings back some horrible gut-wrenching in me …..
And yet, for peace to prevail, there is no other way.
(That's REAL polyamory!!!!)
Talk about courage.
And then, once we've taken the step, there's no going back…..
Try getting a “normal” job after the decision to volunteer for Oneness-living,
the only things that will “work” are within (you guessed it) Oneness living!
Try looking at people walking round the average N American city - rushing lunch-hours, working in places without daylight, the mad rush of malls and large shopping arcades -
Can you do this (be a part of this) any longer - No!!!!
Try living separately, not feeling the pain of your neighbour (or the stranger on the bus) - it doesn't work any more, because the “separateness”-veil has been pulled away (and is being pulled away in more and more dimensions.)
Once we volunteer, separation can't be lived any more.
And there is no current money-line for this, no social order, no “normality” that the majority know that supports this ………..
Yet, we must go forward and create the forms we “need”
Yes, volunteering has its price. But as you seem to intimate, Taj, the price of choosing to stay stuck is being moved by some “accident” so that we are “volunteered” anyway, for that is “what we signed up for.”
I can't remember who it was who said it but it went something like this ….
Everything that happens to me in life I choose to own as though I chose it.
When we choose to volunteer to take the next huge spiritual step back into experiencing oneness, then the transformation starts to choose us . WE just have to remember to let go (or to choose to remember how to swim with the tide!!!!)
John O
www.christaltemple.com
I am very moved by your deep sharing John. Much food for thought. My strongest impression from all you've said is that while it's better to volunteer than get hit with a 2 x 4, as one friend put it; it's best to to volunteer for something you LOVE. And to be total about it because as you point out, trying to go back to separation once you've seen thru the veil is very painful. In other words, if you're going to resist, better to resist at the beginnng.
I have a big aha! about swimming with the tide - many of us, myself most definitely included, swam against the tide of the mainstream culture for years and in so doing developed the habit of swimming upstream. This habit does not serve us once we've jumped off the track, voluntarily or not … we will likely drown if we keep fighting the tide.
Thanks John and Taj. Very very lucid and connects deeply with my ever growing experience.
Taj, you've hit something very powerful – asking for help, and before one “needs” it, as in, it becomes a matter of life or death. I am inspired to practice asking for help, and letting go of control so I can receive help, whether I need it or not. That's going to be hard, but I'd rather not have the 2 x4.
I volunteered for a pretty big job when I came here, and I don't think “They” expected me to do it alone.
And what job did you volunteer for Carla? Whatever it is, I hope you love it and I have this intuitive hit that others in this conversation may share it …
And what job did you volunteer for Carla? Whatever it is, I hope you love it and I have this intuitive hit that others in this conversation may share it …