Part 5: Voluntary Struggle Toward an Ideal: Serve Something Greater

Voluntary Struggle Towards an Ideal, Part 4: Align Your Environment and Identity

This is the final edition of our 5 part Always Learning series:
Voluntary Struggle Toward an Ideal
A framework for identity transformation and values-driven living.

We’ve embraced a hard, honest and ultimately deeply enriching path. I hope you’ve taken as much from it as I have in my research, reflection and writing of the series. Before we dive into the final step, the step that led me to create the Ironmind Institute, let’s take a look back on what we have covered to this point –

Clarify your core values
Embody them through discomfort
Refocus daily with awareness
Align your environment and identity

Now, the ultimate shift: Moving beyond the self.

Something to ponder:

When your efforts serve only you, you place a ceiling on your potential. When your efforts serve others, you open your potential to infinite expansion.

The final stage of a values-driven life is taking the strength you’ve forged and directing it outward, toward people, communities, causes and futures beyond your own.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the father of Flow, wrote that the most fulfilling and meaningful lives are those structured around a transcendent purpose – goals that serve something greater than the self.

“A self that is only self-contained soon becomes a burden.”

Why? Because true strength needs meaning and meaning is found when your efforts to evolve become someone else’s gain. Self mastery cannot be achieved without service to something bigger than thyself. It is this act of endeavouring wholeheartedly to create a positive change for others that paradoxically continues to help us evolve. An incredibly fulfilling feedback loop of inner work to outer impact back to inner work and outwards again to impact others.

To serve something greater doesn’t mean self-sacrifice. It means self-extension. Be wary of martyrdom or self-depletion through giving, these roads lead to disillusionment and resentment. Instead stand objective witness to what your acts of service give you – would you fight for your life, if tomorrow somebody tried to take them from you?

Are you growing through giving?
Are you contributing from wholeness (sharing your spiritual energy) because you’ve cultivated enough to offer?
Are you endeavouring to express your internal mastery into your external world?

‘A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.’

This beautiful proverb, sums up the ultimate spirit of part 5. Generative love. A love that expects nothing in return. A love expressed not in feeling, but in actions, through patience, foresight and toil.

Note to self: “Raising money for charity or volunteering are clearly good things to do with my time, energy and effort. I could be doing a lot worse with my life. However remember – if my drive to do these things is in search of fulfillment I will not find it here.”

If it doesn’t cost me something, stretch me, or draw from my values – it will not fulfill me.

Approach these worthy endeavours with this in your awareness. You might get some dopamine hits on that road, you will probably get some applause and back clapping, but this approach to doing good will not shape you.”

True service doesn’t just help the world, it expands the spirit of the one offering it. It asks for presence, sacrifice and consistency. It requires one to give something they’ve earned; wisdom, strength, compassion, love. Not just effort. It requires them to express the essence of their spirit. This is what makes the difference between doing good and being changed by doing good.

Something to practise:

Driving Visions of Service, For Service.

There are moments within the act of service that are more momentarily emotive when foreseen or imagined, than actually lived. Strange right? That imagining a scenario in your mind could have a grander affect emotionally, than when you actually experience that moment in real life.

My personal experience tells me that it is the future vision of using your time, energy and effort in a meaningful pursuit of furtherance and service that elicits the energetic response (emotion is energy). And the achievement of, what was once an aspirational image in your head, is a moment of peace, realisation and the beginning of your deep internal rewards.

If true service requires trial and toil, patience and perseverance, strength and sacrifice, then we should use these energy eliciting visions to arm ourselves for the journey ahead. Because the road to self realisation & self mastery demands it. I like to think of these as driving visions; they gift us the energy to drive past the inevitable resistance that is coming our way when we live a life of values and meaning.

To guide this visualisation technique, (ah jaysus, he’s not on about visualisation again is he!) I use a simple but profound lens, adapted from the work of philosopher Ken Wilber:

The I / YOU / THEM Framework

When considering a project, challenge or life direction – see & feel the visions these question bring up:

**I (Interior Individual) → “*What is it going to give me?”***

Where will this challenge me? (Consider the values you will have to embody to overcome the challenge)
What pain, discomfort, sacrifice will I have to endure to achieve what I want to achieve and what will this mean to me if I do endure them?
What part of me (ego) will I have to let go of to achieve what I want to achieve?

**YOU (Exterior Individual) → “*What will my efforts give those closest to me?”***

In the YOU realm we think about our loved ones, the people in our lives who matter the most to us: Husband, wife, partner, kids, parents, brother(s), sister(s), close friends, grandparents & extended family. When visualising possible moments where your efforts manifest in their experience of life, don’t dismiss the small moments of joy or pride or gratitude they might experience from a kind word of a neighbour. These moments hold more importance in the grand scheme of life than it appears. Community and connection within one, bring extraordinary meaning to us all, whether we are conscious of it or not.

How will my efforts benefit my kids?
What will the version of me that “returns” mean to them? Will they and their future benefit from who I will become from this chosen road? Will my very presence (spiritual energy) lead to a form of leadership that actually touches people?
What will it mean for my relationships? Will there be deepened trust, understanding, connection?
Will my efforts in some way help them grow? Feel seen? Inspire them?

Remember, build stories around your visions. See these moments play out. Connect with the feelings they raise in you. Build out real life scenarios (people, faces, body language, settings, colour, emotion) where your efforts have a positive impact on the lives (and/or the experience of life) of those closest to you.

THEM (Interior/Exterior Collective) → “What will my efforts give others?”

When I think of “others”, I’m talking about people I don’t know. Because you never know who is watching, be that in the real world or in the online world. Our digital world holds the amazing possibility to enter someone’s life anywhere in the world and reach many more people than we could in everyday life.

We can also think of this group as the collective consciousness. The interconnectedness of humanity and how we transfer energy between us through words and actions.

A great approach with the ‘THEM’ visualisation is to connect with a moment or experience where you were on the receiving end of energy elicited by watching the actions of another. This might have felt like admiration, respect or inspiration to you. If they can have had that effect on you, you can have that on others.

How is my energy and effort marking people positively?

What am I putting into the world that is meaningful to me?

Does it build a culture, raise a standard or plant something that lasts?

If your efforts within your service touches all three – I, YOU, and THEM – you’re not just pursuing a goal, you’re building a legacy.

Note: This framework can be used, not only to solidify your why behind your efforts and get clarity on how your efforts are of service but also, to audit possible directions in life for service. Perhaps by asking yourself questions around what your efforts will bring the I, YOU & THEM realms of your life you’ll see that certain directions might be more self-serving.

Something to pose:

“What can I build that will matter when I’m gone?”

Dandapani is someone I follow online. I admire him and what he is endeavouring to do with his time, energy and effort. He is a former Hindu monk who lived for 10 years cloistered in a monastery, turned entrepreneur. He is developing a 33 acre spiritual sanctuary in Costa Rica called Siva Ashram. Nothing of note here really, as undoubtedly if you looked hard enough you’d find tens, if not hundreds of internet personalities developing retreat spaces, but here’s where it gets very different with Dandapani –

“For our Siva Ashram project in Costa Rica we have a 50 year plan and a 300 year plan that we are working on. This forces us to make very different decisions every day. Thoughtful and wise decisions that will impact the lives of many, the many lifeforms on this planet and the planet itself. Our environment is our responsibility.”

I find the idea of working on something with a 300 year plan so incredibly inspiring. It is the profound embodiment of legacy driven service. I draw on the energy of his intention from time to time and I hope to follow in his footsteps with Ironmind Institute and create a space, culture and pathway that can endure and deeply impact people’s lives long after they have closed the coffin lid on me.

Note: You can discover more about Dandapani here – https://dandapani.org/

‘As long as you live, keep learning how to live’

~ Seneca