How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflections on Service

Great little book, stories of context with practical wisdom

My wife and I are both first person volunteers (Red Cross and St. Vincent de Paul Society) and we both have full time jobs. I thought that we know about helping until I read this book.Basically, it starts with a focus on knowing and understanding yourself, tossing in a little mediation practice for good measure. If you are helping to feel better about yourself, you are not really helping.Along the way there are, as other reviewers have said, inspirational stories that (well) inspire. It is a great balance of discussion and insight with stories about service.When I got to the section on burn-out, I presumed that I know the answers. I have survive burnout and read several really good books on the subject. Relax, step back, etc. This book has an entirely different perspective that I think is more useful than the other books.If you want to help people, and I presume if you are reading this book that you do, then you should consider reading this book. Thanks for helping.

Most of the musts to live properly.

A Good read.

I first read Ram Dass's and Mirabai Bush's Compassion in Action. In that book, Ram Dass explored how he came into compassion, and Mirabai Bush discussed how to channel compassion into volunteerism.In How Can I Help?, Ram Dass and Paul Gorman provide a deep discussion and advice to those who are engaged in helping others who are less fortunate, but especially to people in the service professions. I myself am not in a service profession (unless you consider being a professor one), but I still found the book to be highly relevant to any of us who wish to volunteer to help those in need. The "ins" and "outs" of compassionate help, and also how to turn the "outs" (burnout, for example) back into "ins." I can see this book as being a great resource for social workers, for example, but really for anyone who wishes to help others.Highly recommended.

Excellent! A book you will revisit, get more from each time.

The book was in perfect shape and it is a must read.

This is an excellent book for anyone who does service work and frankly, if you're living right you always are in some form of service to somebody. So it's a great book for everyone. Very insightful and wise. Highly recommend this book. Gave it to a friend and he loved it as well. It's changed his approach to how he serves customers for the better for all concerned, himself included. This is a great little book.

In these turbulent times I can always rely on RD to tell me beautiful stories of human kind and remind me the most important thing- compassion. I love him so and he was ahead of his time. No one comes close to his complete love and kindness to everyone. Dread the day I run out of his books I haven’t read.

Geht direkt ans Herz und inspiriert sich selbst weiter zu entwickeln um anderen zu helfen. Danke!

A must read, as all the Ram Dass book!

Just wow! Ram Dass will just never disappoint. This is an incredibly simple, yet incredibly powerful book. This is Ram Dass’s distilled teaching for his Western devotes. Just amazing!!!