Spiritual Practice and Career Growth | Planet Dharma

1. Awakening Speedily Through Career How can your Livelihood and your Spiritual Practice Feed each other? Imagine your livelihood being a dynamic engine of growth, and your inner spiritual work infusing depth and vision to your career. How powerful and beautiful that would be! Awakening through career is possible. Over the last 15 years I’ve been wrestling with how to create mutual support between my practice and my work. In this blog I’ll share some ideas and stories about how to do this that I hope will juice you for your own exploration, drawing on my journey as a karma yogi for Planet Dharma and Clear Sky “by night”, and an IBM executive “by day”. A House Divided Years ago I remember a lot of frustration between my desire to grow spiritually and make a positive difference, and spending 40 hrs/day at work to make money. Does that feel familiar? I carved out an arrangement where I contracted for 3-4 months, then travelled for 3 months to meet my teachers, study Dharma and do service. I felt like a house divided – the two halves of my life were utterly different! My boss and colleagues didn’t really understand my desire to take time off for retreat, and I felt like I couldn’t share powerful meditation experiences with anyone at work. I had no idea how to bridge this gap but doing service began to give me some clues. One day at the temple in Kyoto, Japan where we were based at the time, I was blissfully fixing something on my teacher’s computer. He suddenly interrupted me and asked “what’s the difference between what you are doing now, and the work contracts that you complain about?” I realized with surprise that the activity itself was the same, and that it was my view and motivation that made one blissful and the other a frustrating task I did to make money. This insight – that it was my view, not the activity itself – helped me start to bring more calm and joy into day-to-day tasks back at work. Creating a Bridge Between Career and Spiritual Growth

2. That example was an early clue for me how service or “karma yoga” – the path of applied awareness engaged in activity – acts as a bridge, integrating our inner meditative life and how we show up in the world. When we acquired Clear Sky retreat centre in 2004, the range and level of challenge in my karma yoga skyrocketed. Being on the Clear Sky Board was a fantastic combination of inner meditation work with active team work building a sustainable retreat centre. It was about learning to work well and mindfully with a diverse group of people, with guidance from our teachers Doug Duncan and Catherine Pawsarat who used every situation for spiritual learning. This rich inner and outer learning gave me all the tools to step into a manager role at work. Senior people at my workplace quickly noticed this and offered me a promotion. I was beginning to appreciate what a powerful path karma yoga offered me, so I decided to embrace the opportunity and see where it led. Read More: Source URL:https://www.planetdharma.com/awakening-speedily-career/