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There is no better exercise for your heart
Than reaching down and helping to lift someone up. Bernard Meltzer
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One of our ultimate goals for Journey of Hearts is to help its visitors reach a point where they can recover enough from their loss, to reach out and help someone else. Giving back to others is the sign of the beginning of healing. Interviews with survivors of tragic events has shown altruism to be a common survival strategy. By putting the needs of others ahead of your own, it brings a purpose to life and allows one to keep standing when all around you may be crumbling. To quote from Victor Frankl:
National Volunteer Week
April 18-24, 1999 National
Volunteer Week
In honor of National Volunteer Week, we have created a separtate section on the Emergency Pick-Me-Up page recognizing Voluntering as a Way of Coping. The sections has quotes for motivating about volunteering, stories, lyrics and poems to inspire. There are lists of helpful suggestions from the Felice Foundation - Live Give, The Stone Soup Foundation - Easy Ways for Busy People to Volunteer, as well as a collection of resources and projects to help provide information for where to get started finding places to volunteer. There is a wide range of volunteer needs within the Internet Community, including service opportunities for the home-bound, disabled, physically-challenged, or aging which did not exist even a few years ago.
National Volunteer Week started
in 1974, when President Richard Nixon signed executive order #4228, establishing
the Week as an annual celebration of volunteerism. Since then every President
has supported this Week to celebrate volunteerism by signing a Presidential
Proclamation.
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We are prone to judge success
by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than
by the quality of our service relationship to humanity.
Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr.
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There is starting to be evidence,
some scientific and some anecdotal stories of the healing benefits of helping.
(Although I was unable to find any scientific articles in a search of the
scientific literature.) The "Helper's High" is a term coined by Allan Luks
author of, The Healing Power of Doing Good. In the mid 198o's Allan Luks,
executive director of Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City, conducted
a survey of 3,300 volunteers. He dicsovered that many volunteers experienced
feelings of euphoria while volunteering. He called this the helper's high.
The volunteers also described a good physical feeling. They compared it
to the runner's high - when a person runs and exert, but instead of feeling
more stressed, one feels more relaxed. The act of helping caused both a
physiological and an emotional effect.
The Helper's high is postulated
to function similarly to the runner's high by stimulating the release of
endorphins, natural hormones that help improve mood and also help to improve
the body's immune system. Research has shown that volunteering on a regular
basis improves self-esteem, increased your sense of well-being, and lowers
stress. So helping others can be beneficial to our health. It can also
produce a helper's calm, feelings of calm and well-being that continue
for hours after volunteering.
One of my greatest coping mechanism
during medical school and residency was looking for other people whom I
could help. Little did I realize at the time, how beneficial this was to
my overall health and well-being. The more toxic the training situation
became, the more I looked for ways of helping others. Perhaps the ultimate
example of this has been the numbers of hours spent working on this website,
creating something that I realize is helping a lot of other people.
We believe that in the New Millennium,
a person will no longer be judged by how much he/she owns or possesses,
but rather by their contribution to the community. We encourage you
to try volunteering, to give of yourself, to see the joy in someone's face,
a smile on a child's or an elder's face, the feeling of contentment in
the heart and you will begin to understand why people volunteer. We came
up with the following quote, long before I found the one by Dr. Martin
Luther King:
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a person will no longer be judged by how much he/she owns or possesses, but rather by their contribution to the community. Journey
of Hearts
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