Volunteer to Change Your Life

You can experience someone else’s life with minimum consequences by watching a movie or a play. A great book helps you swim in the life stream of a writer and literally becoming someone else. Empathy, the ability to feel my pain in your heart, the ability to understand and relate to other people’s feelings has been severely compromised by the increasing use of digital media while reducing face to face communications. For true empathy to develop we need to walk in the other person’s shoes. Being in Rotary I have been of many volunteer programs with people from distant and different countries coming to India to administer Polio drops. They say that this helped them experience India like never before. They could travel in 5 star comforts, but being part of the interior lanes, the tiny primary health centres, meeting and holding. We too have touched the life. If in slums which we would rarely encounter otherwise, I remember volunteering in Siberia with two American trainers. Spending time in the dormitories with Russian teenagers and teaching them Yoga nidra under frigid Siberian skies is an impossible to forget experience. When you volunteer you discover your own stores of love, empathy and rediscover your quality human roots. Spending time with your old parents can help you prepare better for the years ahead, whether your want to grow old or not. So on this day devoted to volunteering by the following journey: 1. Immense yourself in the story of an accident victim you is now a paraplegic 2. Visit the local cancer hospital 3. Travel to an African country and spend a few days in an African village clinic 4. Get your children to share their toys with children in an orphanage on Diwali day. 5. Get neighbours together create a happy street link 6. Conduct a toy drive for children in a local balwadi Research shows that happier people give more: time, resources and talent to others this also lowers stress. Social relationships, what Maslow Hierarchy describes as creating emotional belonging are probably the biggest reason for happiness. Volunteering also extends empathy which increases life satisfaction creating new friendship and spending time with local people are said to be among the most powerful gains of volunteering in new communities.