Podcast: Play in new window
[vc_row type=”in_container” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/1″][vc_column_text]Are You a Do-Gooder or a Good Doer?
This is a really important concept to contemplate and to consider in your life. So many people are out there trying to do good, but they’re doing it from a consciousness of fear, of separation, or projection, instead of from the space of wholeness.
It’s like an unhealed healer or an angry activist.
This is the key here. On some level early on in their life, they’ve been wounded.
That core wound really is a core initiation, and it really is pointing them in the direction of where they are meant to get stronger and ultimately make an impact in their life or in the greater world.
For example, let’s say you were abused as a child, and you grow up having such pain around any form of violence or abuse. Your reaction to it is anger, sadness, bitterness, contempt towards those that perpetrate it, and you have very little, to no, compassion for those that are so caught in their own darkness that they would perpetrate such violence.
You’re still the wounded little child that now just perhaps inhabits an adult body. In all kinds of ways, it’s made you feel like a victim, and perhaps you’ve then put a mask on top of that, because, in many cases, the last thing an abused person wants to admit is that they’re a victim. You might put a mask on top of that to try to act independent and to be strong. You might have tried to compensate by building up these superstructures of your ego that made you actually more separate from others, more distant, more arrogant, elitist, self-righteous, any or all of these qualities.
When we embrace these parts of us that we’re projecting outside of us (the “bad capitalist”, the “bad politician”, the “bad lawyers”, the “bad perpetrators” …or even just in our own family, “the bad parents”, etc.), when we embrace those things within ourselves, now we have real wisdom. We have real power, and we are a healing agency as we move back out into the world.
If we don’t embrace those, we often are driven to try to stamp out or get rid of those things in the world, whether it’s in our family, in our business, or in the larger global culture, and we become a do-gooder. We enact movements and strategies and practices or legislature, laws, and we wonder why we’ve been doing that over and over again and it doesn’t change things.
When you look at where real change starts to happen, real evolution, real growth, it’s because someone somewhere caught this vision, and they became less focused on the problem and more focused on the vision. They stopped merely trying to save the world, and decided to start serving the emerging possibility, the emerging vision, and they worked on themselves. It’s the difference between a Malcolm X before his transition, and a Martin Luther King, Jr.
Look at that and notice where you’re fighting and resisting – being do-gooders – and where you’re actually creating more pain and more problems in your wake, if not for others, then for yourself. You want to take full responsibility for your emotions, your pain, and your projections, and recognize that real transformation is not about setting things right, but about seeing things rightly.
It is the consciousness of wholeness that heals, and when you can see through the appearance of the victims and the victimizers to the truth, to the true principle – the true vision of possibility -then both victim and victimizer are healed and become servants of this higher possibility.
[bctt tweet=”True liberation comes not by setting things right, but by seeing things rightly.” username=”derekrydall”]
That’s the work of a good-doer. A good doer is one that’s taking responsibility, that’s doing the work within themselves first and foremost, and then as they are transformed, step into that vision, bringing that power and new wisdom. They’re not going out there trying to save the poor, because if you see poor people you’re just being a do-gooder, and you are actually keeping them stuck in a box of poverty.
If you are seeing a problem and resonating with the problem, you’re a do-gooder. If you’re trying to do something good, but resonating with the problem, and you’re adding fuel to the problem. That’s why Einstein said, “You cannot solve a problem at the level of thinking that created it.” You have to rise to a higher level than the problem. You have to rise to the level of the potential. You have to not be a problem solver, but a vision holder.
Martin Luther King, Jr. certainly named the problems, but he didn’t get on the Washington Mount and say, I have a dream today everybody is terrible, and us people of color need to rise up and stop all those bad people, white people. He didn’t say, I have a big problem today. No. He said, “I have a dream. I’ve been to the mountaintop. I’ve seen the Promised Land. I know what’s possible. I know what we’re capable of.” That was where the fire was.
Whatever your endeavor, your mission, your purpose, the ways you want to make a difference in your life, your family’s, your children’s, and the world, don’t be a do-gooder. Be a good doer. Take responsibility for your feelings, your pain, your projections, and your judgments. Own them. Heal them. Integrate them.
See beyond the appearances to the truth of potential. Capture a vision and create a way of life that causes you to come into ever greater vibrational alignment with that vision, so that you can rejoice in the midst of sorrow. You can bring power in the midst of disempowerment. You can carry a consciousness of wealth and abundance and all things possible to the appearance of poverty.
In order to move from being a do-gooder to a good doer is to see people or situations where they’re truly meant to be, not where they are or less than they really are. Meet them where they are and love them where they are, but then lift them to that place of wholeness.
To support you in mastering this, listen to the in-depth podcast on the subject, where we break it down and put it into real-life practice TODAY. This will be a real game-changer.
To Your Emergence!
Stay inspired!
Derek[vc_row type=”in_container” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/1″][vc_column_text]Related quotes:[vc_row type=”in_container” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/1″][image_with_animation image_url=”5862″ alignment=”” animation=”Fade In”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row type=”in_container” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/1″][image_with_animation image_url=”5863″ alignment=”” animation=”Fade In”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row type=”in_container” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/1″][vc_column_text]Full Transcript
[The following is the full transcript of this episode of the Emergence, A Revolutionary Path for Radical Life Change, with Derek Rydall Podcast]
Welcome to Emergence. This is Derek Rydall here, the founder of the Law of Emergence and author of the bestselling book, Emergence. It’s just great to have you here again in this journey of ever expanding, never ending unfoldment of your genius potential, because life is infinite, and you can never express all of it. No matter how good it is, there’s always more to come, and no matter how bad it is, there’s always more good to come. Your potential always trumps your problems. Now, that’s not what I’m here to talk about today in general, but it’s just a good reminder. What we’re talking about today is are you a do-gooder, or a good doer? This is a really important concept to contemplate and to consider and to really look at your life. Now, in the most basic sense, I’ve said before that there’s nothing worse than an unhealed healer, or an angry activist. So many people are out there trying to do good, but they’re doing it from a consciousness of fear, of separation, of projection. This is the key here. They’ve been wounded on some level early on in their life.
By the way, that core wound really is a core initiation, and it really is pointing them in the direction of where they are meant to get stronger and ultimately make an impact in their life or in the greater world. For example, let’s say you were abused as a child, and you grow up just having such pain around any form of violence or abuse, whether it’s animals, children, women, etc. All of which are horrible, let’s be clear, but your reaction to it is anger, sadness, bitterness, contempt towards those that perpetrate it, and you have very little, to no, compassion for those that are so caught in their own darkness that they would perpetrate such violence. You’re still the wounded little child that know just perhaps inhabits an adult body. In all kinds of ways, it’s made you feel like a victim, and perhaps you’ve then put a mask on top of that, because the last thing an abused person wants to admit is that they’re a victim, in many cases. So you might put a mask on top of that to try to act independent and to be strong. You might have tried to compensate by building up these superstructures of your ego that made you actually more separate from others, more distant, more arrogant, elitist, self-righteous, all of these qualities.
Now, you could have gone the other way. You could have shrunk and become invisible, but either one of those is that you have not yet addressed the core wound and the core shadow, and you haven’t integrated it. I once knew an individual, a client that I worked with, that had been sexually abused, and didn’t even fully realize that that had gone on, but had a very hard time hearing about or watching any kind of TV program, movie, even a commercial, that had any level of violence or any kind of inhumanity to animals or children, even like starving children, any of that. She didn’t understand why. It was almost unbearable, until we uncovered the whole issue and story of abuse, and as we delved deeply into that work, what I had an inspiration to invite her to do, because the typical way is to embrace the abused child and love them and all of that, which is good and important, but what we often miss is the shadow side of it, which is the abuser.
In this case, the predator, that was the shadow that emerged for her was the predator. When I first said, you need to embrace and fall in love with the predator, of course, that sounded crazy and even dangerous and scary, but as she began to work with that I remember one day she came back, and she was so alive, so full of life, so full of light and energy and power. I said, What happened?She’s like, I’ve met the predator. I’ve embraced the predator. I love my inner predator. I was like, Tell me more.She said, As I began to really understand the predator within me and integrate it instead of rejecting and judging it, it activated a level of power. She said, Now I can see the way a predator sees, and it was not like a predator like a bad person out there that’s going to prey on other people. It was like in nature there are predators that are largely predators on the food chain, and those are more like the prey. Everybody is a predator to some level of prey, even if all you’re doing is eating the grass. That grass is your prey. We’re talking about the obvious predators, the lion, the tiger, etc. That’s not bad. It’s not bad to be a predator in the natural order of things.
So when she got that, and she embraced that, and she integrated and healed that judgment and that fear, she was able to see and access the power and the potential of the predator, and what that gave her was a level of security and safety and knowledge that she could not become the prey anymore. Now that she had embraced her inner predator she could sense where people were and what situations were. She had like that sixth sense. It was like a superpower, that we all have, but she knew now that she could no longer be the prey and that nobody in her environment would ever be able to be prey either, because she could see it. She could sense it, and she could cut it off at the pass, and she could speak to it with power. She became free, and she was able to watch things, if she wanted to. It wasn’t like she wanted to watch stuff with violence, but it didn’t make her paralyzed anymore. She had reowned this powerful part of her, and she also began to have a level of compassion and understanding for people that do that.
Victims often becomes victimizers. If they don’t victimize others, they just victimize themselves. The energy turns inward. So the wounded often end up wounding, rewounding themselves or others. That’s just the natural thing until it’s healed, until it’s embraced, but most of what we’ve learned to try to solve our problems is by looking outside of us, or by trying to deny or avoid the dark scary parts of us and just fill it with more light, cover it over with an affirmation. It doesn’t work. Just try to kill and destroy the enemy, just destroy and put behind bars all the bad people. How’s that working for us? At least in the United States, I think we have more prisoners than all the Western industrialized countries combined. Is the crime level that dramatically down? So it doesn’t work. You can’t kill the enemy, because the enemy is not outside of there. This is what Jesus meant when he said, The enemy is in your own household,and then he said, Love your enemy.
When we embrace these parts of us that we’re projecting outside of us, the bad capitalist, the bad politician, the bad lawyers, the bad terrorists, the bad perpetrators, or even just in our own family, the bad parents, etc. when we embrace those things within ourselves, now we have real wisdom. We have real power, and we are a healing agency as we move back out into the world. If we don’t embrace those, we often are driven to try to stamp out or get rid of those things in the world, whether it’s in our family, in our business, or in the larger global culture, and we become a do-gooder. We enact movements and strategies and practices or legislature, laws, and we wonder why we’ve been doing that over and over and over again and it doesn’t change things. When you look at where does real change start to change, real evolution, real growth, it’s because someone somewhere caught this vision, and they became less focused on the problem and more focused on the vision. They stepped merely trying to save the world, and they decided to start serving the emerging possibility, the emerging vision, and they worked on themselves. It’s the difference between a Malcolm X before his transition, his transformation, and a Martin Luther King, Jr.
This is what we must do. We must look at that and notice where we’re fighting and resisting and being do-gooders, and where we’re actually creating more pain and more problems in our wake, if not for others, then for ourselves. Instead, we want to take full responsibility for our emotions, for our pain, for our projections, and recognize that real transformation is not about setting things right, but about seeing things rightly. It is the consciousness of wholeness that heals, and when you can see through the appearance of the victims and the victimizers to the truth, to the true principle to the true vision of possibility, then both victim and victimizer are healed and become servants of this higher possibility.
That’s the work of a good doer. A good doer is one that’s taking responsibility, that’s doing the work within themselves first and foremost, and then as they are transformed, they are now stepping into that vision and bringing that power and that new wisdom. So they’re not going out there trying to save the poor, because if you see poor people you’re just being a do-gooder, and you are actually keeping them stuck in a box of poverty. The test they did, the study they did, where they took teachers and gave three teachers three samples of students, and all the students were from the same pool, same sampling. Just average students. They told one teacher, these are average; one teacher, these are above average; and one teacher, these are below average. At the end of a period of time, they retested everybody. The ones that the teachers believed were just average tested pretty much average, just like the sample. That was the control group. The ones that the teacher believed they were below average, they tested below the sample, below the control group, even though they were still from the same sample. The ones that they believed were above average tested some of the highest scores in the district. What was the difference? It wasn’t like one of the teachers had worse skills than the other, or one of the teachers was worse than the other, or one of the teachers had better intentions. No. It was how they saw the students, the container they held them in. The container they held them in determined whether they would rise to fill it or shrink to fit it.
The same is true when we are going out into the world, whether it’s as parents dealing with our children or trying to help our friends and our family members, or trying to help the larger collective. If we are seeing a problem and resonating with the problem, we’re a do-gooder. If we’re trying to do something good, but we’re resonating with the problem, we’re a do-gooder, and we’re adding fuel to the problem. That’s why Einstein said, You cannot solve a problem at the level of thinking that created it. You have to rise to a higher level than the problem. You have to rise to the level of the potential. You have to not be a problem solver, but a vision holder. Martin Luther King, Jr. certainly named the problems, but he didn’t get on the Washington Mount and say, I have a dream today everybody is terrible, and us people of color need to rise up and stop all those bad people, white people. He didn’t say, I have a big problem today. No. He said, I have a dream. I’ve been to the mountaintop. I’ve seen the Promised Land. I know what’s possible. I know what we’re capable of. That was where the fire was.
Again, it doesn’t mean you don’t name the problem. A problem properly diagnosed is half solved. You definitely can recognize that there’s a problem here, that there’s an issue here, but then your work, if you’re going to be a good doer and not just a do-gooder, is to do the inner work so that what you’re seeing, what you’re resonating with, what you’re valuing, what you’re standing for and working on the behalf of, is a solution, is a vision. I think it was Mother Teresa that said, when she had been asked to march in anti-war rallies, she said, No. I won’t march in an anti-war rally, but if you put on a pro-peace rally I’ll be there. We ultimately don’t want to be against anything, because what you fight, you fuel. What you resist, persists. What you are against, you give energy, and you make it more real. Again, you identify the fact that there’s poverty there or that there’s lack there, that there’s abuse there, that there’s war or a problem with your child, whatever the case may be. You don’t put your head in the sand. You see things as they are, but not worse than they are, and then you see them as they really are meant to be. That’s vision. That’s what you work on embodying. So that you are now a light in thatdarkness. If you’re merely being a do-gooder and seeing the problem and resonating with the problem, you’ve just gotten down in the ditch with the people, and you’re of no earthly good to them. You’re not a light. You’re just more of the darkness. Can you see that?
That’s my charge to you. Whatever your endeavor, your mission, your purpose, the ways you want to make a difference in your life, your family’s, your children’s, and the world, don’t be a do-gooder. Be a good doer. Take responsibility for your feelings, your pain, your projections, your judgments. Own them. Heal them. Integrate them. See beyond the appearances to the truth of potential. Capture a vision and create a way of life that causes you to come into ever greater vibrational alignment with that vision, so that you can rejoice in the midst of sorrow. You can bring power in the midst of disempowerment. You can carry a consciousness of wealth and abundance and all things possible to the appearance of poverty, and you don’t speak to people that are experiencing poverty as being poor victims. You speak to them like the teacher that believed these were the highest ranking students in the thing. You speak to them in terms of their capacity, their potential, that they are just as abundant and powerful and capable as anybody.
That doesn’t mean you don’t feed them. That doesn’t mean you don’t cloth them. That doesn’t mean you don’t meet them where they are and have compassion. I’m not saying go to people that are suffering and say, You’re not suffering; you’re perfect. No. That would be abusive. That would be mean. That would be uncompassionate. You can definitely recognize; I see that you’re suffering. How can I help alleviate your suffering? If they’re hungry, you feed them first. Then you begin to lift them up. Jesus didn’t just walk around telling everybody the truth principles. He healed them. He fed them. Then he preached. He didn’t preach to them and say, you poor things. He said, Ye are gods and greater things than these shall you do. Do you know who you are? You are the light of the world. Same with Buddha. Same with all the great masters. We do not allow ourselves to see people as less than they really are. We meet them where they are. We love them where they are, but then we lift them and see them where they’re truly meant to be. That moves us from being a do-gooder and makes you a real good doer.
I hope this has served you. Go out and do some good. Start with yourself and extend it to the world. I hope you’ve enjoyed this. If you found value in it, please share it with a friend, a loved one, a colleague. Make sure to register on iTunes for the Emergence podcast, so that you don’t miss an episode. If you want to get even more valuable training, you can go to DerekRydall.com. Go the free resource section, download the free trainings and audios. If you don’t have my book yet, my bestselling book, Emergence, please go to GetEmergenceBook.com and grab your copy, along with the bonuses. It’s just such an honor and pleasure to serve you, and until next time, remember to live authentically, love unconditionally, and follow your destiny.
