Seva

Seva is a sanskrit word meaning "service". Being of service, serving other people is a core principle in the Hare Krishna movement. When I started being introduced to this spiritual path, I linked this word with words like volunteering, work and tasks, essentially doing something, with the focus of helping others. "Help thy neighbour", ran through my mind. Being honest, this sounded like a drag, "why do I need to help others?", "why can't they help themselves?", "who's going to help me?" These questions ran through my mind and they still do. I sometimes still think to myself, "Why am I the one who seems to be the one helping others, why does no one help me? and even more commonly I think to myself, "How do I benefit from this situation/interaction/agreement? What do I get out of it?"

Then I learnt that male individuals in this movement are refered to as Prabhu, which means Master. They are referred to in this way so that the speaker remembers that the person they are addressing is the Master and therefore the speaker is the servant. Prabhu can me used like Sir or Mister. I heard the word Prabhu used often and sometimes even Prabhuji, the suffix -ji is added as a term of endearment. Someone calling me Prabhu made me feel a little uncomfortable, I didn't want to be thought of as someone's Master and I didn't want them to serve me. I preferred us to be equals.

At the start of this year I began volunteering for H.H. S.B. Keshava Swami on his books team. When I joined the books team, I thought that this would be fun, I could do what I wanted and distribute books when I felt like it and manage my own time. Alas, that was not the case. I was invited into group calls on the weekend, I was tasked to research things and manage accounts that I knew little about, I was asked to think of ideas for book distribution. My name got out somehow and I was asked to do some simple work for the Social Media team and I was asked to arrange the collection of books. As the tasks came in I thought to myself, this is not what I signed up for. This is a lot of work, is this fun? Maybe I should quit. But then I thought about this analogy of the Master and the Servant. When a servant serves the Master, the servant does not get to choose what they get to do, he simply carries on and does it. So I thought, okay, I'll carry on. I commit to one full year of service on this team.

This simple reflection between the one who serves and the one who instructs really made me think about how sometimes we can't always do what we like even when we give up our own time and volunteer. We will go through our own challenges. We will have to overcome our own hurdles. We will have to learn to negotiate with our minds to travel through the passages that are blocking us. None of this might be very fun, nor will we want to do it in some cases. However, we might learn something along the way, make a new friend or achieve something as part of a team that is great and the sum of ourselves.

Your Humble Servant,

Timothy