CHAPTER 1
Work as a Spiritual Practice
KEYWORDS
spirit * practice
Look, I believe there's a real need for a book about spirituality and work, ifonly because I know so many people who regard themselves as spiritual beings atleast part of the time, who earn their livings in environments that don't seemspiritual any of the time. My friend Jennie, for example, meditates everymorning, or at least thinks about it, before setting off to do battle in anoffice where the politics are so thick you can't even cut them with a sword, andJennie's pretty good with a sword. She is by any definition a capable andhonorable business woman. She wants to increase profits—and beat thecompetition—by making the best product possible and selling it honestly andaggressively. She wants to create a nurturing work environment where her staffcan function at its peak. And she wants to remember the spiritual values thatmatter most to her and keep them close to her heart. She wants, in other words,to bring her whole self to the office—competitiveness, heart, soul, and all.
Most days, though, she's happy if she can just get through the pile on her desk.There are so many tasks clamoring for her attention she can barely focus on anyof them, let alone keep her larger goals in view. Her company, like many thesedays, dedicates more energy to the bottom line than to the well-being of itsemployees, so Jennie's department has the kind of budget that fosters anatmosphere of insufficiency. There are never quite enough resources to do thejob right. Her office is stuffy; she suspects that no one ever actually dustsit. She usually has a headache by about 4 P.M. And when she gets cranky orfrustrated, which happens a lot, she does not recognize herself as the spiritualbeing on the meditation cushion longing to be her best self. That's when shestarts to wonder: Have I taken a wrong turn somewhere? Am I doing this kind ofwork just because I'm good at it and I need the money? How much of what I'mdoing is really meaningful? Am I making a difference? Am I wasting my life?Jennie claims to like her job, and I believe her. But she feels out of balancebecause she spends so much of her life at work, putting in the time and effortthat will, among other things, reward her with a paycheck that enables her topay her mortgage and help feed her family. She's working for her living, inother words, and the more she works, the less she feels like she's living.
Here's my question: Is it possible to seek enlightenment—or, if you're lukewarmon enlightenment, to feel alive, whole, useful, and even joyful—in an imperfectjob that eats up most of your time and energy and basically requires you to dothe same thing over and over? Say you're in a job you don't love, or even a jobyou hate. Is it possible to function primarily from your spiritual center eventhen?
I believe it is. But first, it's necessary to be clear in your own mind andheart about what "spirituality" is, and what it's not. Spirituality, at least asI experience it, is not about being a good person all the time, or about feelingconnected to God all the time, or even about finding happiness in the sweet byand by. Spirituality is about spirit, about the force that moves in you, callsto you, shakes you awake, right here, right now. Spirituality is about waking upagain and again, about being exactly who you are in the present moment—thepresent moment being all you have to work with at any given time. And as I'msure you know, some moments are a whole lot more present than others. Sometimesyou're awake, and sometimes you're dead asleep. Sometimes you feel connected toGod—or Spirit, or your spiritual center, or whatever you call your experience ofthe divine—and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you live up to your best self, andsometimes you fall laughably, humiliatingly short.
There's a good reason why we speak about spiritual practice. Spirituallyspeaking, we're not there yet; we're still practicing. We're working onsomething we haven't mastered and don't fully understand—seeking the divine,learning compassion, being a good person—and giving it our best shot, over andover.
I don't know what form your spiritual practice takes, but I'm assuming you findthe idea congenial if you're reading this book. So think for a moment about thethings you do that connect you to your deeper self. When you sit down to pray ormeditate, when you dance, climb rocks, or play the piano, when you do anythingthat takes you to a holy place, you expect to crash head on into your ownimperfections. You know you're going to hit wrong notes, or lose track of themeditative breath and think about breakfast instead, or spew utter drivel whenyou're trying to write the Great American Novel, or cheat on a tough yogaposture, or harbor evil thoughts about someone you wish you could love. You knowthat a certain amount of failure is inevitable, that any work worth doing is awork in progress.
We all know this. In any endeavor that can remotely be classified as spiritual,we expect to struggle with feelings of unworthiness, despair, terror, or anger,and with our own infuriating slowness to comprehend the obvious. (A sure signyou've uncovered an important truth: It feels like it's been right in front ofyou all along and you simply haven't seen it.) So we learn to cut ourselves someslack. We hope we'll be able to haul ourselves up toward the next epiphanysooner or later. We believe that some kind of comfort will come, if not now,eventually.
Our spiritual practice is the arena to which we bring every bit of ourunfinished, muddled, willful, absurdly arrogant selves. We know we're notsupposed to be perfect; imperfection, after all, is what we're here for.Imperfection is the raw material for compassion, transformation, joy.Imperfection is what practice makes perfect.
Right? So how is it that the minute we get to the office—the minute the alarmgoes off on weekday mornings—we stop welcoming imperfection and start fightingit? How is it that we refuse to have compassion for our own work-relatedfrustration, our anger, our boredom, our physical exhaustion? Where's that holyplace now? Are we saving it for our spiritual practice? Suppose I told you thatyour office is a holy place, even if you feel a sinking despair every time youwalk into it?
You don't have to believe me. Not yet, anyway. All I ask is that you considerthe possibility that the job you have right now, for all its imperfections—no,because of its imperfections—is just as spiritual as any other part of yourlife. Maybe more spiritual, because it confronts you with all the stuff youreally need to look at: Big Deep Issues of self-worth, fulfillment, and payingyour way in the world.
Think for a moment about your workspace. Is there enough light, enough privacy?Does it feel like your personal space? Or like an impersonal territory you'reoccupying for the duration? Is there anything beautiful about it? Is it supposedto be beautiful? Is it clean and orderly? Cluttered and random? Could youimagine bringing your mother there? Or praying there?
Now think about your salary. Is it enough? If not, how much is enough?
Now think about the job itself, the tasks you're faced with every day. Is thereenough pleasure in your work to balance out the inevitable frustrations, atleast some of the time?
Express in one word the feeling you get in your gut when you picture your boss.
Think about your friends and colleagues. Do you know someone who's stuck in ajob she hates, or who works hours that are too long, takes too few vacations,pushes herself too hard? Someone who merely goes through the motions of his jobbecause he's only doing it for the paycheck, and who therefore spends at least40 hours each week deadening his mind and spirit so he can "really" live outsideof work?
Are there regular conversations in your office about how the people in chargeare cheap, clueless, unfair, or unfeeling? Do you see your colleagues asspiritual beings? Do you think they see you that way?
Do you bring your whole self to the office? If not, which parts do you leave athome?
One more question: Can you see your own divinity in the mundane tasks beforeyou, in the pile of paperwork on your desk, in your relationships with yourcolleagues? Well, it's there, right in front of you.
The purpose of this book is to help you look for your divinity, in ways aspractical as playing scales on the piano or counting breaths in meditation. I'mnot going to tell you how to follow your own spiritual path, which after all isdifferent from mine or anyone else's. I just hope to remind you that you're onthat path every moment of your working life and that your colleagues are, too,whether you ever openly acknowledge it or not.
I also hope to encourage you to think about your job as an active part of yourspiritual practice, an arena that challenges you spiritually as well asprofessionally. One basic premise of this book is that the things that drive youcraziest at work can be doorways to growth and understanding if you approachthem with an open mind and heart. In the following chapters, you'll findexercises (simple! I promise!) to help you do just that. You might find ithelpful, if you're so inclined, to share this book with a friend or two, or evenform a study group, so you can explore some of these issues together.
Who am I to be talking to you about spirituality and work? Someone who's broughthome a lot of paychecks of varying size, who's worked for bad bosses and good,who's sat in endless meetings in windowless offices wondering what the hell shewas supposed to be doing with her life. Someone who has enjoyed her job,sometimes. Someone who has loved and been loved by her colleagues, sometimes(but not always). Someone who once programmed her office screensaver to read,"What does not kill me makes me stronger." Someone who prays a lot, and whobelieves that prayers are generally answered, though the answers often seem tocome out of left field.
In a recent study at Stanford University, high-level professional women wereasked what factors had most contributed to their success in life. The thing theycited most frequently was love—the love and support of the people around them.Next came drive and determination—their own desire to create success forthemselves. And the third most frequently cited factor was spirituality. Notfinancial backing, not education, not networking, but some manner of spiritualbelief to guide them through good times and bad. The fact that so manyrespondents volunteered that spirituality was important to them came as asurprise to the psychologist, Laraine Zappert, Ph.D., who conducted the study.After all, as Dr. Zappert pointed out to me, there aren't many obvious spiritualrole models in the top echelons of business.
There are, however, growing numbers of business people who openly seek toexpress their spiritual values in their work. At this writing, more and morecompanies are exploring, or thinking about exploring, ways to acknowledge theiremployees' spiritual lives. This is a tricky proposition in a society thathonors individual freedom; obviously, there's no legal or logical way to mandatespirituality as a company policy. But individual executives, even chiefexecutives, can bring their spiritual and moral values to bear on their jobs.And individual employees at every level can change their workplace cultures forthe better by the simple, sacred act of remembering that they are, in fact,spiritual beings.
And you, sitting at your desk, or standing behind your counter, or traveling toyour next appointment, can remember to tell yourself: This is my path, and thereare no wrong turns on it. There is only the next step, and whatever it is, I canbring a blessing to it.
Mantra for the Bad Days:
I might as well bring my whole soul to work. After all, that's where I need itmost.
CHAPTER 2
What Feels Like Work
KEYWORDS
work * resistance
I don't know about you, but I've always wanted to find work I could love.Happiness in work, after all, is right up there with happiness in love as one ofthe big things we strive for as human beings. But work, as a literal, necessaryfact of our lives, has nothing to do with happiness. It has to do with gettingstuff done.
Frank Gaynor's Concise Dictionary of Science defines work as "the result offorce acting against resistance to produce motion in a body." The dictionarygoes on, laconically, to say, "It should be noted that the element of time doesnot come into consideration concerning work. If a weight of 50 pounds is raised20 feet, 1000 foot-pounds of work have been accomplished. Whether it required afew minutes or several weeks to raise the weight makes no difference."
There you have it, folks. Work equals force acting against resistance within aninfinitely expandable time frame. If I have a project to finish and I don't feellike doing it, I can put it off indefinitely, causing myself infinite agita inthe process, but the work still remains to be done. So there are two parts toevery task that feels like work: doing the task itself, and overcoming our ownresistance to it. The greater the resistance, the more enormous the task.
No matter where you look it up, "work" is not a fun word. According to Webster'sdictionary, work is the "sustained physical or mental effort to overcomeobstacles and achieve an objective ... the labor, task, or duty that is one'saccustomed means of livelihood ... an activity in which one exerts strength."Obstacles and effort and duty and exertion. Nowhere is it written that we'resupposed to enjoy any of this. We all wish work could be fun, and sometimes iteven is. But most of the time, work is the thing staring us in the face thatwe'd rather not do right now but that has to be done sooner or later: divinginto the dreaded pile of papers on your desk; writing the report; having thetricky conversation with the annoying colleague or the difficult client.
Being at work involves, to some degree, being in a chronic state of resistanceto some aspect of your job. Think about how you feel on Sunday nights, even ifyou basically like your job: It's that old school-night feeling. You're comingto the end of your free weekend time, which hasn't been long enough, andtomorrow morning you have to get up and go to the office. Do you draw ademarcation right there, between the time you dedicate to making a living andthe time you get to spend on yourself and your family? Between the things youhave to do and the things you want to do?
Work is the stuff you have to do whether you want to or not. Even if you havethe ideal job, you're going to resent having to do parts of it sometimes.Believe it or not, this is a good thing. The resentments, the parts of your lifethat chafe, are the things that need your attention, the things that help keepyou awake. This is as true of your personal spiritual path as it is of your dayjob.
That's why I'm not going to tell you that the more spiritually evolved you are,the more you're going to love your job. There are any number of self-help gurusout there who propagate what I call the Follow Your Bliss Myth, the idea that ifyou are truly connected to your spiritual center, you'll be able to do the thingyou love for a living and be heaped with the abundance of the universe. (Mypersonal reaction to the notion of being heaped with abundance is to duck, butmaybe that's just me.) Of course, this myth has a core of truth; that's why it'sso enticing. It really is true that the more you're connected to your spiritualcenter, the more you'll know what kinds of activities make you happy, and themore time and energy you'll devote to those activities. It's also true that asyou go along on your path, you'll find ways to do more of the things that makeyou happy and fewer of the things that don't. And yes, you might even find thatyour passion for baking gingerbread men can burgeon into a vast gingerbreadempire. I wish you the best, I really do. I just want to make the point thatyour degree of job satisfaction is not a measure of your spirituality.
You can be a deeply spiritual person and hate your job. You can be on the"right" path and hate your job. You can be evolved as all get out and curse themoment the alarm goes off on Monday mornings.
Work equals force acting against resistance. And work is what we're here for. Ona brute physical level, we have to tame our environment to survive—to createshelter for our furless bodies, to coax nourishment from the recalcitrant earth,to find water we can drink and wash in. In the modern world, in a place like,say, Passaic, New Jersey, our bodily raiment comes from The Gap and ournourishment comes from the Stop &C Shop, but we still have to find some way topay for it all. We also have to pay for the things that nourish our souls—ourmusic systems and yoga classes and vacations and, oh, right, whatever our kidsneed to nourish their bodies and souls. If you are gainfully employed, if youare making ends meet and even doing a little better than that, you're alreadyaccomplishing quite a lot, spiritually speaking. You're paying your way. Pleasetake a good long moment to pat yourself on the back for this. It's not easy.
