Read an Excerpt
The Office Sutras
Exercises for Your Soul at Work
By Marcia Menter Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
Copyright © 2003 Marcia Menter
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60925-743-9
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, if only because I know so many people who regard themselves as spiritual beings at least part of the time, who earn their livings in environments that don't seem spiritual any of the time. My friend Jennie, for example, meditates every morning, or at least thinks about it, before setting off to do battle in an office where the politics are so thick you can't even cut them with a sword, and Jennie's pretty good with a sword. She is by any definition a capable and honorable business woman. She wants to increase profits—and beat the competition—by making the best product possible and selling it honestly and aggressively. She wants to create a nurturing work environment where her staff can function at its peak. And she wants to remember the spiritual values that matter 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 any of them, let alone keep her larger goals in view. Her company, like many these days, dedicates more energy to the bottom line than to the well-being of its employees, so Jennie's department has the kind of budget that fosters an atmosphere of insufficiency. There are never quite enough resources to do the job right. Her office is stuffy; she suspects that no one ever actually dusts it. She usually has a headache by about 4 P.M. And when she gets cranky or frustrated, which happens a lot, she does not recognize herself as the spiritual being on the meditation cushion longing to be her best self. That's when she starts to wonder: Have I taken a wrong turn somewhere? Am I doing this kind of work just because I'm good at it and I need the money? How much of what I'm doing 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 balance because she spends so much of her life at work, putting in the time and effort that will, among other things, reward her with a paycheck that enables her to pay her mortgage and help feed her family. She's working for her living, in other 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 lukewarm on enlightenment, to feel alive, whole, useful, and even joyful—in an imperfect job that eats up most of your time and energy and basically requires you to do the same thing over and over? Say you're in a job you don't love, or even a job you hate. Is it possible to function primarily from your spiritual center even then?
I believe it is. But first, it's necessary to be clear in your own mind and heart about what "spirituality" is, and what it's not. Spirituality, at least as I experience it, is not about being a good person all the time, or about feeling connected to God all the time, or even about finding happiness in the sweet by and by. Spirituality is about spirit, about the force that moves in you, calls to you, shakes you awake, right here, right now. Spirituality is about waking up again and again, about being exactly who you are in the present moment—the present moment being all you have to work with at any given time. And as I'm sure you know, some moments are a whole lot more present than others. Sometimes you're awake, and sometimes you're dead asleep. Sometimes you feel connected to God—or Spirit, or your spiritual center, or whatever you call your experience of the divine—and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you live up to your best self, and sometimes you fall laughably, humiliatingly short.
There's a good reason why we speak about spiritual practice. Spiritually speaking, we're not there yet; we're still practicing. We're working on something 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 and over.
I don't know what form your spiritual practice takes, but I'm assuming you find the idea congenial if you're reading this book. So think for a moment about the things you do that connect you to your deeper self. When you sit down to pray or meditate, when you dance, climb rocks, or play the piano, when you do anything that takes you to a holy place, you expect to crash head on into your own imperfections. You know you're going to hit wrong notes, or lose track of the meditative breath and think about breakfast instead, or spew utter drivel when you're trying to write the Great American Novel, or cheat on a tough yoga posture, or harbor evil thoughts about someone you wish you could love. You know that a certain amount of failure is inevitable, that any work worth doing is a work 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 sign you've uncovered an important truth: It feels like it's been right in front of you all along and you simply haven't seen it.) So we learn to cut ourselves some slack. We hope we'll be able to haul ourselves up toward the next epiphany sooner 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 our unfinished, muddled, willful, absurdly arrogant selves. We know we're not supposed 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 alarm goes off on weekday mornings—we stop welcoming imperfection and start fighting it? How is it that we refuse to have compassion for our own work-related frustration, our anger, our boredom, our physical exhaustion? Where's that holy place now? Are we saving it for our spiritual practice? Suppose I told you that your office is a holy place, even if you feel a sinking despair every time you walk into it?
You don't have to believe me. Not yet, anyway. All I ask is that you consider the 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 your life. Maybe more spiritual, because it confronts you with all the stuff you really need to look at: Big Deep Issues of self-worth, fulfillment, and paying your 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're occupying for the duration? Is there anything beautiful about it? Is it supposed to be beautiful? Is it clean and orderly? Cluttered and random? Could you imagine 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 there enough pleasure in your work to balance out the inevitable frustrations, at least 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 a job 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 job because he's only doing it for the paycheck, and who therefore spends at least 40 hours each week deadening his mind and spirit so he can "really" live outside of work?
Are there regular conversations in your office about how the people in charge are cheap, clueless, unfair, or unfeeling? Do you see your colleagues as spiritual 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 at home?
One more question: Can you see your own divinity in the mundane tasks before you, in the pile of paperwork on your desk, in your relationships with your colleagues? Well, it's there, right in front of you.
The purpose of this book is to help you look for your divinity, in ways as practical as playing scales on the piano or counting breaths in meditation. I'm not going to tell you how to follow your own spiritual path, which after all is different from mine or anyone else's. I just hope to remind you that you're on that 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 your spiritual practice, an arena that challenges you spiritually as well as professionally. One basic premise of this book is that the things that drive you craziest at work can be doorways to growth and understanding if you approach them with an open mind and heart. In the following chapters, you'll find exercises (simple! I promise!) to help you do just that. You might find it helpful, if you're so inclined, to share this book with a friend or two, or even form 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 brought home 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 she was 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 who believes that prayers are generally answered, though the answers often seem to come out of left field.
In a recent study at Stanford University, high-level professional women were asked what factors had most contributed to their success in life. The thing they cited most frequently was love—the love and support of the people around them. Next came drive and determination—their own desire to create success for themselves. And the third most frequently cited factor was spirituality. Not financial backing, not education, not networking, but some manner of spiritual belief to guide them through good times and bad. The fact that so many respondents volunteered that spirituality was important to them came as a surprise 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 spiritual role models in the top echelons of business.
There are, however, growing numbers of business people who openly seek to express their spiritual values in their work. At this writing, more and more companies are exploring, or thinking about exploring, ways to acknowledge their employees' spiritual lives. This is a tricky proposition in a society that honors individual freedom; obviously, there's no legal or logical way to mandate spirituality as a company policy. But individual executives, even chief executives, can bring their spiritual and moral values to bear on their jobs. And individual employees at every level can change their workplace cultures for the 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 to your next appointment, can remember to tell yourself: This is my path, and there are no wrong turns on it. There is only the next step, and whatever it is, I can bring 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 it most.
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 of the big things we strive for as human beings. But work, as a literal, necessary fact of our lives, has nothing to do with happiness. It has to do with getting stuff done.
Frank Gaynor's Concise Dictionary of Science defines work as "the result of force acting against resistance to produce motion in a body." The dictionary goes on, laconically, to say, "It should be noted that the element of time does not come into consideration concerning work. If a weight of 50 pounds is raised 20 feet, 1000 foot-pounds of work have been accomplished. Whether it required a few minutes or several weeks to raise the weight makes no difference."
There you have it, folks. Work equals force acting against resistance within an infinitely expandable time frame. If I have a project to finish and I don't feel like doing it, I can put it off indefinitely, causing myself infinite agita in the process, but the work still remains to be done. So there are two parts to every task that feels like work: doing the task itself, and overcoming our own resistance 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's dictionary, work is the "sustained physical or mental effort to overcome obstacles and achieve an objective ... the labor, task, or duty that is one's accustomed means of livelihood ... an activity in which one exerts strength." Obstacles and effort and duty and exertion. Nowhere is it written that we're supposed to enjoy any of this. We all wish work could be fun, and sometimes it even is. But most of the time, work is the thing staring us in the face that we'd rather not do right now but that has to be done sooner or later: diving into the dreaded pile of papers on your desk; writing the report; having the tricky conversation with the annoying colleague or the difficult client.
Being at work involves, to some degree, being in a chronic state of resistance to some aspect of your job. Think about how you feel on Sunday nights, even if you basically like your job: It's that old school-night feeling. You're coming to the end of your free weekend time, which hasn't been long enough, and tomorrow morning you have to get up and go to the office. Do you draw a demarcation right there, between the time you dedicate to making a living and the time you get to spend on yourself and your family? Between the things you have 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 have the 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 life that chafe, are the things that need your attention, the things that help keep you awake. This is as true of your personal spiritual path as it is of your day job.
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 gurus out there who propagate what I call the Follow Your Bliss Myth, the idea that if you are truly connected to your spiritual center, you'll be able to do the thing you love for a living and be heaped with the abundance of the universe. (My personal reaction to the notion of being heaped with abundance is to duck, but maybe that's just me.) Of course, this myth has a core of truth; that's why it's so enticing. It really is true that the more you're connected to your spiritual center, the more you'll know what kinds of activities make you happy, and the more time and energy you'll devote to those activities. It's also true that as you go along on your path, you'll find ways to do more of the things that make you happy and fewer of the things that don't. And yes, you might even find that your passion for baking gingerbread men can burgeon into a vast gingerbread empire. I wish you the best, I really do. I just want to make the point that your 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 the moment the alarm goes off on Monday mornings.
Work equals force acting against resistance. And work is what we're here for. On a brute physical level, we have to tame our environment to survive—to create shelter 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 our nourishment comes from the Stop &C Shop, but we still have to find some way to pay for it all. We also have to pay for the things that nourish our souls—our music systems and yoga classes and vacations and, oh, right, whatever our kids need to nourish their bodies and souls. If you are gainfully employed, if you are making ends meet and even doing a little better than that, you're already accomplishing quite a lot, spiritually speaking. You're paying your way. Please take a good long moment to pat yourself on the back for this. It's not easy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Office Sutras by Marcia Menter. Copyright © 2003 Marcia Menter. Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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