Extra notes about Chapter 23 – The Serving Quadrant
in the book, The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent.
Other notes are found here.
Core Competencies
For the sex geeks and therapists among us, the Serving Quadrant reveals certain core competencies (or their lack) and at the same time develops them:
-
- Setting aside your preferences
- Noticing your limits, and valuing, trusting, and communicating them
- Eliciting information from the receiver, and valuing, trusting, and abiding by it
- Taking in information with your hands, about the person’s state and changes
- Continuing to notice while increasing your activity and intensity
- Noticing your own disappointments and seeing those as an indicator that there was something you wanted
- Being able to separate your experience from that of your receiver, that is, letting them have their own experience without thinking it means something about you
Quotes
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world, and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
– EB White
Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal,it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
Success means we go to sleep at night knowing that our talents and abilities were used in a way that served others.
– Marianne Williamson
You must do good but you must not talk about it. If you talk about it you’re taking advantage of others’ misfortunes for your own good. Do good but don’t talk about it.
– Gino Bartali, Italian underground
The one who bows into service is an artist. To see work as sacred is to bow into service to it, and thus become its instrument.
– Charles Eisenstein
The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts arise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible.
– Lewis Hyde (The Gift)
When I’m sitting down to write a poem I’m not thinking of anyone. I’m not thinking about how it will be received. I’m not thinking it will make people happy or it will inspire them. I’m in a whole other world. A world of complete solitude. But when I’m writing a song I imagine performing it. I imagine giving it. It’s a different aspect of communication. It’s for the people.
– Patti Smith, quoted in Brain Pickings
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.
– Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes’
I have a beef with the common adage to people of privilege like myself to, “be a voice for the voiceless”. No one is voiceless. The marginalized don’t need me to be their voice; they need me to pass the microphone.
My former model of service kept us in our respective roles of “the powerful” and “the needy”, but the model of solidarity blurs those lines. We are people with a mutual need for what the other can offer.
Service is more comfortable than solidarity. It feels awfully good to be needed: to be the one who appears to have their act together and be able to check “good deeds” off the box in our conscience. Solidarity demands that we take a hard look at our own weakness and failings: it requires that we confess our need for others and also admit that when you strip away the advantages some of us enjoy, we humans are all more or less the same deep down.
– Shannon Evans, http://thecatholicwoman.co/letterstowomen/living-in-solidarity-with-those-we-serve
Don’t be like those who ask for everything
Don’t be like those who ask for everything:
praise, a blurb, a free ride in my rented
limousine. They ask for everything but never
offer
anything in return.
Be like those who can see that my feet ache
from across a crowded room
that a foot rub
if I’m agreeable
never mind the staring
is the best way to smile
& say hello
to me.
– Alice Walker
For Queen Miriam (Makeba) who stood on swollen feet and sang her people to freedom
The Shadow of Serving
When I first came to Ann Arbor [Peace Neighborhood Center], I couldn’t understand why so many people who gave us money or volunteered their services would get so uptight when our clients didn’t do what the donors expected them to do with the money or help. People who give help with those kinds of expectations are more interested in serving themselves than they are in serving others. I don’t think they do it to be mean; I think they are just ignorant of the power of true, unconditional giving.
– Rose Martin, Peace Neighborhood Center, Ann Arbor MI
One of the complaints I hear a lot is – I’m always a giver. I don’t know how to receive. So I say, stop right there. You are not a giver. When I am a giver, I am grateful and I do not complain about giving. If you are complaining about giving, you are doing something else – I don’t know what it is, being a martyr maybe, or something.
– Harry Faddis, in conversation
[About Standing Rock] Unfortunately what I see is when you militarize a police force, when you give security these weapons that are really designed to kill people, mentally it creates this dynamic where we have enemies, we’re fighting a war there. It’s no longer protect and serve, it becomes how do I subjugate, how do I use all these tools I have to really put down and treat them as an enemy.
– Martin Erickson
The Shadow of Serving: The Rescue Industry
The rescue industry is an example of people who presumably think they are doing good (although some surely know they are not), by trying to ‘rescue’ sex workers who do not want to be rescued.