You Only Can Help You
You Can Only Help You
It’s important to be there for your friends and loved ones…but this is more important.
There is only one you. The only person who knows what’s best for you is you.
Yet if you are a caring person, you are probably a giver. As such, likely you put yourself last.
What’s more, it’s all-too-easy to believe that any other option is an act of selfishness. Of course you come last. Other people in your life, your friends and especially your loved ones, can and should come first.
But that’s not entirely true. While it’s important to be kind, generous, and helpful, when all is said and done, no matter your intention, you can only help you.
Let me be blunt here. You can and should do things to help other people. Lend a hand, hold doors, be a shoulder and an ear and even an opinion when asked for one. Do good things for people to help them. But know that when all is said and done, no matter what and how much you do for anyone – you can only help you in the end.
What does that even mean?
Inside your head, you are all alone. There is nobody but you in there thinking, feeling, and choosing how to act and not. Of course, there are times you will receive information from other resources, people, and things that will enter into your head. Even so, you’re the only one in there sorting through them.
Nobody else can make you do anything you do not choose to do. No matter what anyone says, the only person capable of thinking, feeling, and acting for you is you.
By this same logic, only you can help you. Even when you are being helpful and assisting someone else, it is still you taking action. Even when that person receives your assistance, it’s still on you.
This is particularly applicable to advice, information, opinion, knowledge, and other intangibles. When you help someone else they decide if they are going to accept what you give them or not.
No matter how much help you offer anyone else, when all is said and done they only take what you give them by their choice. Their decision. Thus, any and all assistance you gave is just a notion that someone else can make use of to help themselves with whatever the situation or matter is.
When someone else is offering you help, especially the intangible, even when you take that help, it still comes down to you being able to help you. You choose, you decide to take what you are given and apply it. Or not.
Taking this one step further – when you help someone else you also help you. How? By making yourself feel good, valuable, worthy, and otherwise content and unselfish for being a helper.
This is the power of gratitude.
Gratitude will help you and everyone
When you are grateful for the things you have it allows you to draw into your life more of the things you desire for yourself. Gratitude is incredibly powerful.
Unless it is not genuine, gratitude is pure, unadulterated positivity. It is more than an emotion, it’s almost a living entity in-and-of-itself.
Gratitude empowers two-ways. Both when given and received. It opens pathways to positivity because it expresses a depth of love that is ultra-high frequency.
Gratitude as an aspect of love is important. This is because love is the highest energetic frequency generator that there is. Not love in the romantic, soulmate notion, per se. Love, as in the abstract, all-encompassing notion.
In its most unfiltered form, love is the sun on your skin, the purring of a cat, the wagging of a dog’s tail, falling rain, your heart beating, and other life-affirming matters. Gratitude is an expression of love that is employed by thinking, feeling, and acting mindfully thankful.
To help you and anyone else it is important to take an approach of gratitude. When you are not grateful for giving or receiving you disempower yourself. You dismiss what you are expressing gratitude for as unimportant and take away its power, too.
If you are offering to help someone it should be coming from a place of abundance and gratitude. Doing so out of a sense of obligation or resentment won’t truly help them or help you.
What is the nature of help?
To help is to offer assistance. This can be done on numerous different levels, from the physical to the mental to the emotional to any combination of the above.
You can help someone to move an object, to learn a skill, to understand an emotion, or to do something on a physical, mental, and emotional level all at once.
Help, however, apart from the physical, is the providing of a notion, idea, or example for someone else to make use of. You cannot do anything FOR anyone else, just as nobody else can do anything for YOU.
Hence why only you can help you. But you can offer insight, advice, information, wisdom, warning, or what-have-you.
This doesn’t apply to the physical because in many instances a thing cannot be done without the assistance of another. For example, it frequently takes two or more people to move a couch, a bed frame, or a body.
When it comes to helping with the intangibles, you are limited by what the other person gets from what you give, and how they make use of it or not. Hence why it’s important to acknowledge that when all is said and done you can only help you in the end.
For example, no matter how much I write about my Pathwalking philosophy, or explain the technical aspects of fencing, or try to help you understand yourself better, only you can gain insight from the help I offer – if you so choose.
And that’s the crux of help. No matter how much you give, if the recipient decides not to make use of it you can’t do anything further. So when you do all you can to help your friend do something to change their life, and they don’t use it, you can’t take it personally.
Giving is not sacrificing
Finally, it’s extremely important to recognize the difference between giving and sacrificing. Some people, in order to help, sacrifice to do so. At the end that doesn’t help you or anyone.
Why? Because giving is from abundance while sacrificing is from lack and scarcity. When you help from a place of giving you are saying, “I have plenty, let me share with you!” Whereas when you help form a place of sacrifice you are saying, “There’s not enough, let me give up what I have to you.”
Sacrificing will inevitably lead to resentment. So not only do you not help whomever you were aiming to help, but you don’t help you, either.
When you sacrifice you deny abundance, and tell the Universe that you see the world as full of lack and scarcity. That, in turn, disempowers you and everyone else, too. If you are sacrificing to help someone you are likely not really helping them and most assuredly not helping you, either.
Finally, this is not a matter of selfishness. Recognizing that you can only help you just means you don’t give too much of yourself away and sacrifice to assist someone else. You not only remain empowered but make it so you can be an empowerer.
You only can help you. Yes, it’s important to be there for your friends and loved ones…but this a consideration too important to be ignored. When you do help – and you totally should – do so from a place of abundance, gratitude, and empowerment.
Can you see how you only help you when you help others, and that’s not a bad thing?
This is the four-hundred and twenty-first entry to my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly articles are ideas for – and my personal experiences with – mindfulness and walking along the path of life to consciously create reality. I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world along the way. I further desire to empower myself and my readers with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-blog and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. My additional writing, both fiction and non-fiction, are available here.
Please take a moment to subscribe to my mailing list. Fill in the info and click the submit button below and receive your free eBook. Thank you!
Follow me here!
