Four Themes in the Service Pillar:

1. Giving and Receiving

2. Compassion and Equanimity

3. Opening into Everything

4. Values in Action

Topics covered in this pillar:

• Why we evolved needs and desires to be generous and helpful to others.
• The general principle of benevolence. Why service to others is worth doing in its own right – and why it is also service to oneself.
• How to resource yourself so that you can feel compassionate and open to the sorrows of the world without being overwhelmed by them.
• Recognizing interdependence; seeing how you affect others – even on the other side of the world – and they affect you.
• Accepting and receiving the generosity of others.
• Ways to put your values into action. The little actions that add up over time – and some big ones. Doing what you can, and accepting what you can’t.
• How to sustain compassionate action without getting burned out.
• Engaging life, including its challenges, on the basis of an increasingly unconditional internal sense of love.