A Hidden Spiritual Pitfall: Taking on Other People’s Problems

It’s often a difficult thing to admit we’ve made a mistake. Instead of simply acknowledging the mistake, and learning from it, we often just repackage it to look like a purposeful decision and find as many ways as necessary to convince ourselves and others that we haven’t erred at all.

I have to come clean. I fucked up. And it took no less than half a dozen recurrences of the same exact mistake for me to eventually realize what was going on. This is the sometimes ingenious evasiveness of the spiritual path, on which we might think we’re doing what’s in our best interests, only to later find that there remain aspects of inner motivation still serving to expose our greatest weaknesses.

What was my blunder, you ask? I helped others. That’s it. I’m sorry, and I won’t do it again. End of story.

If only it were so easy. And I’m being dramatic. Of course I’ll help others again. But, going forward, I’ll do so with a refined focus and a much clearer understanding of what helping others really means.

There’s a massive difference between helping someone, and taking on their burden

I consciously decided to expand beyond my own inner growth process in the last year or so, and in doing so, set some goals related to this desire. Shortly after making the decision to become more helpful, real life opportunities began showing up in my experience. I’ll save the mechanics of that process for another discussion, but suffice to say that my experimentation with the ‘attract what you project’ idea has been beyond convincing so far.

I found ample opportunities to extend my own energy in many forms…sometimes with ideas, sometimes with writing, sometimes physical labor, some required financial contributions, and in one instance I even became a temporary parent for a child who is not my own. In each of these circumstances, I met really interesting people. I was introduced to new knowledge, new environments, new ways of thinking. I was also tossed into oftentimes uncomfortable emotions that I thought I’d generally dissolved or left behind in the earlier stages of meditative practice and inner healing. And in nearly every case, I saw a side of others, and even myself that I did not like…at all.

Now this is where I think we usually get into trouble, as it pertains to evaluating our life events and figuring out how we might evolve and improve our own thoughts and behaviors. Years ago, I would have simply created negative labels for all of these individuals, and projected my own inadequacies and insecurities upon them. But I’ve read too many spiritual books now to let that happen. Damn you, Eckart Tolle.

No, this time I realized that I had to do the inner work, to figure out what it was that I was doing to create the conflict, the discontent, the resistance, and the desire to leave each one of these situations. And I realized…admittedly very very slowly…that the one common theme amongst them all was that I was trying to fix or at least mitigate undesirable circumstances for other people who had never really conveyed an interest in having me solve shit for them. In some cases, their desire for real change was expressed. In others, it wasn’t. But in absolutely no case did any of these individuals or groups say that they wanted ME to solve a problem for them. And I simply could not accept, or reconcile that reality until I’d seen this pattern play out no less than a half dozen times in less than a year.

I thought I was being a good friend. A good spouse. A good brother. A good coworker. A good father. But what I was actually being was more of a passive dictator. I would project an attitude of acceptance and love to each and every person, while inside I was often frustrated and unsettled at my inability to ‘get through’ to the other person. Why wouldn’t they just listen? Why wouln’t they just follow my advice? I can see now why. Because I wasn’t trying to help them learn to become independent…I was only trying to fix the problem as I saw it. And in many cases, even that definition might not have been in any way similar to how the other person viewed their own situation.

But we don’t learn on this journey by having others just remove obstacles for us. We learn by testing (sometimes many) solutions, and eventually realizing that our inner knowledge, power, and abilities in every aspect of our lives are always capable of transcending the level of thought and action we once thought was possible. I wanted to help. But I was only serving to delay their learning, and apparently my own.

Can we help others without fully taking on their burdens? I think so. I’m assuming that will be my next phase of learning and integration. What do you think? Do you have any good life examples of how you’ve successfully navigated this often murky space? I’d love to hear them!