The Inspiration for "Taking Spirit to Work"
I thought at this point in my life I'd be retired, contentedly pruning roses and braiding grandchildren's hair. I didn't expect to be seized by a piece of work I had to do, something that completes and undergirds the many iterations of my life's work. Here's the story.
My compelling call to career work has always been to engage people in looking for the work to which they can bring their full array of gifts. I've deeply believed that that is how we contribute to the world, by reaching to be our best within the endeavor of serving something greater than ourselves. I'm fully aware that this is a lofty aspiration and must be held in tension with the often harshly pragmatic requirements for earning a satisfactory living.
My spiritual life, which has been an active cord running through many decades of my life, was always part of my expansion into my work but in some way went unnoticed, or un-conscious.
Then earlier this year I had one of those deceptively unremarkable experiences that has changed everything. In its midst was a startling call to attention: Where am I still living small in my work? How do I shake free from limiting beliefs and personality traits? And most significantly, why have I been leaving Spirit on the sidelines? From that point, in a manner sometimes deliberate and sometimes exhilarated, I set about creating conscious practices for infusing my day-to-day work activities, as well as my long range vision, with receptivity to Guidance.
Whom I'm asking for guidance has a variety of names: Spirit, Source, Love, the Divine. You'll note the word "graceful" in several course titles. For me "grace" refers to the mystery of the sacred that is granted to our presence and our actions. But names don't much matter. How I learn to develop a relationship with the source of grace, to seek guidance, to bring a sense of the sacred into the mundane details - of managing time, for instance, or pricing products - is what matters. Sustaining that sense of the sacred at work is what I invite you to explore and develop with the help of the offerings on these pages.