A Guiding Value: Selfless Community Service

If you want to have new ideas, innovate, rise up from depression or heal a wound, the most direct path you can take to your goal is to forget about yourself for a time.

I have wonderful ideas when I am washing dishes or running. I’m pretty sure the running ideas are from how fast the blood is pumping through my brain, but the dishwashing is because I am not thinking about “me” while I do it. An even better way to pause destructive or negative thinking is to get involved in a service project.

When I first arrived at Mount Madonna School as a new teacher, fresh out of a very intense job in corporate America, the idea of “selfless service” was not entirely foreign to me, but it had never been something I would adopt as a way of life. As an American, my values were closer to home; I was building a family, and that nuclear family was what I was working for. That was selfless enough for me.

I discovered, through working at the school, that the benefits of really taking on humble service in the community is like shaking up a snow globe and watching a little world come to life. It’s so simple to have kids do service projects. Let’s go volunteer! Schools everywhere participate in service. It’s different when it is a deep, abiding, underlying value of an entire community.

At the end of senior year at my private school, we were sent off into the woods for a week. Our class was handed shovels and instructed on how to rebuild a stream that had been interrupted by logging corridors. We spent a week saving a habitat for a rare sort of fish that lived there. Instead of the creek spreading out over the new tree-free scars and into sticks and mud, we made beautiful little channels and pools for the water to fall into so the fish could swim.

Unhealthy social norms we had established as a group of high school kids fell away. Everyone was sweating together. The pressures of success in a college-preparatory environment fell away. Everyone was talking and thinking as one. The fear of leaving home and each other for college fell away. We were in the moment, for the first time that year, perhaps. At some point on about day three, I looked up and realized how happy I was.

I took that forward into life, but it got lost in other things until I circled back into the world of private school. In the distant past, private schools may have had an idea about being home for the privileged, and needing those privileged students to share out their good fortune. Now, however, service is well known to equate to a deeper sort of success for all humans. Private schools are working hard to welcome and support students from any socioeconomic background, with programs like the flexible tuition offered at Mount Madonna. Service has a different goal; what we have to offer each other is not material, but rather, it is shared humanity.

My students ask why, when we work in the community, there are people with nice cars picking up free food. They are not judging, they are just adjusting their notion of who might be hungry or in need in our community. They are learning to extend their empathy and open their hands to anyone with the courage to ask for help. They are learning to drop assumptions about other humans based on what they see. They are learning to be curious before they criticize.

They are also learning to find and follow their bliss, and that self-interest is not nearly as satisfying as looking outside of themselves. It starts with a simple “that was FUN!” after we volunteer somewhere, then it naturally embeds in their hearts. I’m grateful for our private school’s requirement that students serve their community, however that notion originated, and I wish it were required absolutely everywhere. Every single one of us, every single student, has something to offer to others.

Mount Madonna School originated in the crucible of the Mount Madonna Center yoga community in the 1970s. The guru of that community, Baba Hari Dass, suggested that the yoga students name their fellowship after the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman. None of the members at that time, and to this day, consider themselves to be Hindu, in fact, many of them are Jewish. But they did enjoy many aspects of Indian culture, and certainly, dedicated their lives to the study of yoga. When I joined the school as a teacher, I was informed that Hanuman was the god of selfless service, and that’s why he was such an important icon to the founders of the school.

Selfless service in the Mount Madonna world, Hanuman’s world, went much deeper than logging community service hours or doing a volunteer task here and there. It was a daily, deep, way of life. I now work with adult children of the founders who look for ways to help others, every day, without expectation of “anything in return,” rather, the return is the opportunity to serve in and of itself. True, humble service brings joy and happiness. It’s so simple, and so profound at the same time.

After a few years of teaching at the school, I had the chance to travel to the “orphanage” in India that was also founded by Baba Hari Dass, and run by the same group of people. I refer to it in quotes, because Baba Hari Dass did not set out to create a traditional orphanage. Orphans are stigmatized in India, so he simply created a gigantic home, with a gigantic family. The proprietress on the ground was a self-proclaimed “soccer mom of 65 kids” and the children were loved unconditionally and treated like a giant family. It was so inspiring that when I came home, I finally took a step I’d been contemplating for years and began the adoption process here in Santa Cruz County. Service, and love, are the most rewarding things in this life. What was there to fear? Indeed, there is nothing to fear about giving your time, and your heart, to others, and to your community. I’m so grateful that my children, and my students, are surrounded by this sentiment, on every level, every day.