At Your Service

Today I am on the meditation Exchanging Self with Other. Before I began my formal practice, in addition to reading that section in The New Meditation Handbook, I read a bit of Meaningful to Behold because it's what we're studying in class and the strong language really moves my mind. In it Geshe-la says, "Considering ourself to be the servant of others, we must employ ourself in their benefit." To be even more blunt, Shantideva says, addressing himself, "You don't belong to me any more; I have sold you to others. You are working for them now, so don't be discouraged and get on with it." To make things worse, I told myself I'd been sold to the lowest bidder, to heap further humiliation on top of indignity.
I contemplated being a servant. There isn't an option to do whatever you feel like doing - you spend your day serving others.
Of course, the person I most want to serve is my Guru, because he serves all beings. (Sorry if you thought I was going to shine your shoes - that's a lower priority.) To me serving him means trying to help out my Dharma Center, as well as trying to become a better disciple through my studies and meditations.

Test-driving my loaner hearing aids, last night I watched the first episode of the PBS show Downton Abbey, which has been compared to the old show Upstairs, Downstairs, because it also features a rich English household and their servants. In meditation, I was imagining what it be like to be one of the servants. You take orders from others and have no say in the matter. They live downstairs, below; they are lowly beings.
In one scene, the servants comment on being surrounded by things that don't belong to them - belongings that are someone else's. I thought to myself, "Don't be-longing for those things that aren't yours ; )" What if I had that servant's attitude? I have to clean these material objects, and make use of them, but I don't have to think of them as mine.
Even better if you can stop longing for things that aren't going to make you happy anyway.

In the beginning of MTB we were studying the section about the Benefits of Bodhichitta, which is "the motivation to achieve full enlightenment in order to be most effective in helping others out of their suffering." One of the benefits is that all of our wishes will be fulfilled. Gen Khedrub explained that this means our Bodhisattva wishes, because our ordinary wishes cannot be fulfilled. Isn't that brilliant? They can't be fulfilled because they're endless. Worldly desires are never satiated. There's the story of the ancient king who was not satisfied with conquering the whole earth; he had to possess other realms too - and still wasn't happy. When you look at many of today's celebrities, it's easy to see that it's not just an ancient phenomenon.