Do not let me help you.
And I promise to let you know if and when I need you.
Hello my caring friend,
How have you been since last week? Is there any topic you would like us to talk about on Care.Check? I would love to let myself write about something that calls you… I would love to expand on any of my daily notes, if one of them particularly spoke to you.
In the meantime, I think I want to write about help today. What helping means and what it does not.
I get so confused sometimes… and I’m not the only one.
Maybe you struggle with that concept too?
So here are a few thoughts to explore.
I believe helping is one of the core needs of a human being.
To help… That’s the root of our humanity, what drives our heart, what fuels our soul, what gets us out of bed excited and back into bed in alignment. I believe it is our destiny, our calling, our nature, our deepest reason, our greatest gift to the world and to ourselves. I also believe we easily confuse help with codependency.
I also believe that learning how to receive help is one of the holiest lessons one can learn on Earth. I believe it is the most profound need of a human being.
To be able to receive help. That’s the embodiment of our humanness, of this extraordinary vulnerability that allows us to rely on our biggest strengths while acknowledging our soft, tender, loving and ultimately fragile nature.
Helping grounds us in our sovereignty to spark change and to share all our resources. Receiving help allows us to surrender to what is, to what we cannot change at all or what we cannot change alone, and to connect to one of the most beautiful features of Earth: how much we all need each other. To the true meaning of Love. To the true challenge of staying whole and free and authentic and unique, while honoring a world that was created from oneness, from a formless, boundaryless unity that we all long to come back to and can only reach from the inside out–ironically.
Last week I felt compelled to tell a friend to let me help them… And it dawned on me: Such a common turn of phrase, yes, and such an absurdity.
LET me help you.
What does it even mean?
If I’m helping you against your will, am I helping you out of a hole you’re exploring, or am I helping myself feel better—by not having to witness your suffering?
It’s the latter of course, and yet it’s hard to fully recognize that, because helping others against their will is glorified in our societies. We become the savior. The one that knows best. That parent we all had hoped we would have down here, and that very few of us got to grow up with.
LET me help you. How selfish it is to say those words, when we really think about it. It’s as if saying: “You’re in pain, you’re in need; but what truly matters here is that I know better than you what should happen next, and I believe you should give me the reins of YOUR story and let me lead the narrative.”
What does it mean about me when think that my help could be welcome where it has not been expected?
What does it mean about the way I see you, when I think—unconsciously, but still—that you’re not big enough, brave enough, soft enough, aware enough, to see whether or not you can or want to do this without me?
We don’t like asking ourselves those questions because they don’t feel good. Helping, on the other end, feels mostly amazing. That is as long as it makes me feel like I’m a good person though… and it stops once it gets to the point where I resent you for letting me help you—and not caring about me and my needs to be seen, valued… worthy, instead of focusing on the problem I felt compelled (and entitled) to help you with. How dare you?
It is a difficult piece to write, I’ll tell you that. It demands from me to face the depth of this void I have felt inside for as long as I can remember, and to remember how the urge to fill that void has driven me for years. It forces me to examine where I have unconsciously contracted my love, where I have asked you to be helpless so that I could feel needed or where I have begged another to be helped through me, not so much for their safety than to ensure that I was safe, that this important piece of my world (their story) had been “fixed”. It betrays where I have told myself I was helping someone else, when actually I was in it for me.
It all ties up to those two continuum I’m actively exploring right now. The spectrum from our most feared humanness to our most revered humanity. The spectrum from codependency, through hyper interdependence and to a healthy, sacred, humbling and empowering interdependence.
I don’t have a lot of answers… and that’s okay. I don’t believe in answers anymore. I believe in questions. Open ended, wordless at times, earth shattering, terrifying, awe inspiring questions that can slowly, brutally, ever so slightly or profoundly change me, change us, change you, change everything.
I believe in asking the God of my understanding what she wants me to know today, and to then let Life flow through me, and guide me into the storm I have to face in order for my rainbow to appear. Or to an enchanted meadow where I can finally lay down, ugly cry, belly laugh, rest, recharge, disappear—and realize than only by disappearing can I truly appear—and be. I let Life lead the way because Life is always leading anyway. And I’m seeing that being a willing participant makes this human experience a lot more enjoyable and meaningful that when I try to grasp for certainty or pull the winds of change, while they patiently grow stronger until I yield, until I take the step I’m meant to take, until I’m back where I was meant to be: Here. Now. In.
And now naturally I need to write about how it feels to be summoned to help by someone who feels perfectly entitled to receive it... You must help me, they say. You must stop what you’re doing. You must prioritize my needs over yours. You must forsake your needs for mine. That’s the way a lot of us live. Forbidding ourselves to have needs of our own. Only tending to the needs of others.
Some dive with their whole body into that fallacy, misguidedly sacrificing their lives to the altar of people pleasing. Others reject that idea plainly, misguidedly sacrificing their chance to learn about true love, in the name of a selfish mirage confused for liberty.
In both cases, we lose. In both cases, we miss out on this entire experience.
Because that’s the way our nervous system works, when we decide to forfeit our needs, to abandon ourselves, to only focus on the outside world. We either default to fight or flight—losing ourselves in blame, cynicism, so-called worthy pursuits that actually hurt more people than they help, bringing forward floods of negativity in the name of a future happiness that will never be reached—or to fawning, martyrdom, saviorism, niceness and unconscious forms of submission.
One of you asked me once what I meant here by “confusing coping mechanisms with life goals”. This is why I’m trying to explain this phenomenon our culture seems to be mostly unaware of:
When we put all of our attention on the outside world, our inside one falls into decay… That, to our inner system, does not feel grand and prideful! It feels like death. It is like dying after all; we cannot survive without love, nourishment or light. If we give it all out, there’s none left inside. And when we feel like we’re about to die, we brace. Our survival instincts take over and we fall into an even deeper unconscious state where all that matters is to make it out of a scary environment we must either overcome (fight), run away from (flight), seduce (fawn) or disappear from (freeze and flop).
There is no generosity in survival mode. There is no compassion in survival mode. There is no connection in survival mode. There is no curiosity or creativity in survival mode. There is only the obsession of danger and the compulsion to escape. Men have been socialized to go into fight or flight. Women had been conditioned to default to fawn and flop before the 60s and are now mostly wired to activate fawn and flight responses, on the daily. And finally so many humans have exhausted all their resources and life energy, that they are beyond all those options and forever stuck in freeze.
In fight, we go to war. In flight, we get very focused on a specific subject that we study relentlessly—or at the very least we keep very busy. In fawn, we are here to carry the world on the shoulders of a broken heart. In freeze and flop, we might confuse an addiction with a way of life we glorify, thanks to pretty labels such as anarchy.
And there is truth in all of this obviously. Some causes are worth standing up for, some problems are meant to be studied and solved, so many of us need nurturance and love and a model of how it's done, and playfulness, restfulness, productivelessness (is that a word?) must also be honored and even revered. So IF we’re doing them to honor our intimate needs and sacred dreams, there’s nothing more admirable and holy. If, however, we’re doing it out of survivalism, it doesn’t truly serve anyone, because like energy produces like energy. A law of this world we all struggle to accept and obey—as if we had a choice in how this fascinating world works, and as if we really did know better than the force who created endless universes and breathtaking beauty.
I haven’t answered much in this post, I apologize if you feel disappointed. I do not have the answer of what true help means because I’m just not there yet. Asking for help still feels life threatening to me. Helping still feeds my ego’s need to know that I matter, that I can compensate for my not enoughness, that at least I’m trying, even when I fail miserably.
Because my ego still believes in failure you see, or in right and wrong and in a glorious sense of duality. My ego still thinks that asking for help is weak and asking to be controlled or deceived. My ego still thinks that being asked for help means I’m strong and proves that I’m in control and seen.
And yet things are shifting within me. I catch myself before saying silly things such as “let me help you” and the words never leave my mouth. I still feel the urgency to rush to the danger and shield the other, but I take a pause, witness how amazing everyone else is, and that what is wonderful and helpful in me is just as alive and available in them too. I allow myself to ask for help from those who I know will help me without an agenda and from the place in their heart that the ego doesn’t know of. I welcome those hands and words that make my world brighter and allow me to see the starry night that lives right beneath my skin. I believe more and more in you, and I believe more and more in me. I still oscillate between codependent patterns and an addiction to hyper independence, and yet there are now some sparks of interdependence, uniting me with some other human beings that I unconditionally love and who unconditionally love me.
I bathe in gratitude for what my quest for humility has taught me about my limits, my blind spots, my misguided ways of enabling—which I thought were inspiring demonstrations of how well I can help others. I bask in the relief I feel realizing that I do not have to live through any of this alone anymore, that I never was alone and never will be. I celebrate the fact that I can only help you if I surrender to my needs first, and that you can only help me if I surrender to my needs wholeheartedly. I celebrate this chance to live this life from the center of who I am and then from the inside out, in order to witness the abundance of love that surrounds us, created us and that we’re here to create in return. I’m learning to wait for you to ask for my help and to focus on what is my responsibility on Earth: to fill myself up so well and with so much goodness that when you do ask, I can share with you all and more than you ask for, without having to lose anything. To see that we do not have to become less to make others more! We need to be whole—to help others protect their wholeness and to allow others to help us protect our own.
Care.Check: What does help mean to you? What does helping mean to you? What does receiving help mean to you?
Are you happy with how you answer those questions? Are you feeling called to reinvent your relationship to Help in any way?
Let me know… and if I CAN help, just tell me how.
With kindness, love and light—because I truly believe they’re our most sacred offering to this world.
Always,
leo