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...